We are about to say goodbye to some basic water protections as the Trump Administration looks to undo decades of science-based work focused on keeping toxic chemicals out of our water supplies.
Right now on the Defender, Amy talks with Clean Wisconsin attorney Evan Feinauer about how bedrock protections like the Clean Water Act are at risk as the new administration targets regulations, research, and expert staff at the EPA. Find out what’s at stake and how Wisconsin can fight back.
Host:
Amy Barrilleaux
Guest:
Evan Feinauer
Resources for You:
Under the Lens: What we know about PFAS in Wisconsin’s Water
Nitrate pollution’s impact on Wisconsn’s health and economy
Neonicotinoid pesticides and their impact
More episodes with Evan:
When Judges Rule the Environment: How bad are the new Supreme Court rulings?
What Trump 2.0 means for our environment
Where to Listen:
Transcript:
Amy Welcome to the Defender podcast. I’m Amy Barrilleaux. The Defender is powered by Clean Wisconsin, your environmental voice since 1970. So it’s pretty clear there aren’t a lot of things Americans can all agree on right now. But one thing is for sure, we do all need water to survive. Which makes it pretty concerning that we’re about to say goodbye to some basic drinking water protections, like brand new standards and funding to help cities remove lead water pipes. The standards were meant to protect families, especially children, from exposure to toxic lead.
Evan It’s this investment that’s going to pay off many times over. We know what lead does to developing minds in terms of IQs and all kinds of developmental stuff. This is a no -brainer in terms of, over the next couple of generations, what this is going to do to protect our minds of our young people who we need.
Amy But those new rules are expected to be rolled back under the Trump administration. My guest in this episode is Clean Wisconsin attorney Evan Feinauer, who breaks down how even bedrock protections, like the Clean Water Act, could be rendered useless. Because this new federal government isn’t just going after regulations, it’s going after people at the EPA. A look at how Wisconsin can fight back to protect our water. That’s right now on The Defender. Just one day after taking office, President Trump quietly withdrew a Biden administration plan to limit the amount of toxic PFAS allowed in wastewater that flows from chemical and manufacturing plants. It’s one of what will likely be many actions to strip safeguards from our water supplies. In his first term, Trump removed protections from more than half of America’s wetlands, rolled back Obama -era rules to protect the Great Lakes, scrapped a rule that would have prevented coal companies from dumping waste into local streams, weakened limits on toxic effluent from power plants into public waterways. I mean, I could go on and on, but I’m going to stop there because I do have a guest. Evan Feinauer is an attorney with Clean Wisconsin who works on state water issues. Evan, thank you for being here.
Evan It’s great to be here.
Amy There is a lot happening, so much going on with the Trump administration. There’s news out every day. You’ve been looking specifically into what we might see as water impacts here in Wisconsin. So let’s start with the big ones, the regulations, the things that keep pollution out of our water supplies. What are we seeing happening on that front?
Evan Yeah, so starting with the regulations is good because it kind of allows you to understand the options, for lack of a better word, that the Trump Administration has to roll things back. So there’s something called the Congressional Review Act, which allows a new administration to get rid of regulations that were put in place pretty close to the election. So the idea here was like, well, if an administration rushes up some regulations and then there’s an election, those can get taken a second look at by Congress. So the one that we need to be particularly concerned about here are the lead and copper rule improvements. So these were the Biden administration’s efforts to safeguard folks from lead in their drinking water. And the main way it did that was requiring water systems to get rid of their lead service lines within a decade of the implementation of that rule. That rule was promulgated late enough in the game that Congress could use the Congressional Review Act to rescind it. It hasn’t happened yet, but somebody has put in a proposal to do it, and we’re just going to have to watch that space to see if it’s enough of a priority for this new Congress to do that. But even if they don’t, there was a lawsuit that’s in the D .C. Court of Appeals there challenging this, the American Water Works Association challenged this rule. That’s in mid -process, so we don’t know how that litigation is going to play out. And also the Trump administration could just do a repeal rule. They could put out a rule that says we’re hereby repealing the lead and copper rule improvements and we’re going back to the way things were before, which was kind of just not a whole lot happening to protect folks from lead by getting these lead service lines out. So that kind of shows you they have different ways of rolling back these regulations. And we just need to see for which of these rules they’re going to use which tool to try to go after them.
Amy Yeah, because when this came out, the new lead and copper rule, I want to say maybe it was November of last year, relatively recently, there was kind of a lot of finally feeling, people were celebrating this because it was kind of saying you need to get lead pipes out. And then there was some funding along with that, I think, through the BIL that was going to, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. How does it feel to now be thinking, well, this is all going to go away, this finally trying to do something about lead in our water supply?
Evan Yeah, it’s disappointing. I think we knew that depending on how the election played out that the lead and copper rule improvements could be vulnerable to a new policy change. I think what’s so frustrating about this situation in particular is that people have been clamoring for decades for proactive mandatory lead service line replacement. And then the Biden administration did what it needed to do, which is it married the mandate to get rid of these service lines, which are poisoning our water, with money to do it. So it wasn’t just this here’s a big requirement, you figure out how to pay for it or tax your customers. It was we’re going to cost share this. We’re going to socialize the cost of these toxic metals in our water. And we’re going to do it to protect public health. And it’s this investment that’s going to pay off many times over. We know what lead does to developing minds in terms of IQs and all kinds of developmental stuff. Like this is a no brainer in terms of over the next couple of generations, what this is going to do to protect our minds of our young people who we need. And we finally got it after people knew that this was the policy solution all along. And so just sort of just kind of ignorantly go back to where we were before is really a triumph of just sort of people not wanting to spend the money over reason. And it’s unfortunately, I think, a theme we’re going to see in a lot of these environmental regulatory areas.
Amy I think, you know, Wisconsin had already been allocated, set to receive money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to replace lead service lines in communities across the state. And now, as far as we know, a lot of that funding has been put on hold by the Trump Administration.
Evan Yeah. So this is complicated, right? There was the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IAJA. And then there was the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which allocated money for this kind of work to get lead service lines out. Wisconsin, along with a bunch of other states, is now part of a lawsuit. They’ve gone to federal court to challenge the Trump Administration’s funding freeze because there’s genuine ambiguity about what’s going to happen with the funds that haven’t already sort of been spent, that aren’t already out the door under what are called these revolving funds. There’s one under the Clean Water Act and one under the Safe Drinking Water Act, which is the relevant one here. And Wisconsin is a part of that lawsuit because we need to know, is that money coming or not? Congress allocated it for this purpose. The president really doesn’t have authority just to say, I’d rather not. But that seems to be where we’re at. And there’s a lot of genuine ambiguity. I mean, I know that’s causing a lot of problems for agencies across these states, like our DNR here in Wisconsin, because right now you’ve got to replace these service lines, and this money was for those purposes. Do we have the money or not? And it’s a good example of the kind of chaos that’s really unsettling water systems and other folks’ ability to plan for the future and to know what they’re going to be required to do and if they’re going to have money to pay for it.
Amy So let’s talk about another high -profile water contaminant. That’s PFAS, known as the Forever Chemicals. You know, we in Wisconsin just passed our own, maybe not just passed, but relatively recently, standards for drinking water systems. And then the EPA came in with an even tougher standard for drinking water. How do you see those standards playing out? This has been kind of a long time coming. These have been a concern for probably about a decade now. And then finally, again, finally we got some kind of standards, health -based standards for these things in the United States. What do you see happening?
Evan Yeah, I mean, this is another area where you’re going to have an opportunity for both litigation to knock out the rule and also for the administration to do a repeal rule. And they could do that a couple different ways. They could do a regulation that says we just don’t need a PFAS drinking water standard. Or they could do one that says we don’t need one or maybe we do, but we need more time. So that would be a little bit of a do -nothing rule. You know, we’ll convene a group of people who are invested in this and then we’ll spend 24 months figuring out what the number should be. Or they could just settle on a higher number, a less health protective number. So any of those things could be the way that plays out. There’ll be an opportunity, though, whatever they do for environmental groups and public health groups to challenge Trump Administration’s actions in court because they still have to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. And so there is a chance that if they do this poorly that it could get blocked by the courts, which would be good. But at the end of the day, it’s a very vulnerable standard, which just like the Lead and Copper Rule improvements, which we talked about, we’re very celebrated because, you know, after years of advocacy we had finally gotten a thing that the science was telling us we needed. And it’s now on the chopping block as well.
Amy You know, you talk about that the courts could be making these decisions, but it feels like we’re kind of in a lawless time now. Does the Trump administration have to listen to what the courts say?
Evan Well, of course it does.
Amy Does it?
Evan It does.
Amy It feels like maybe… I don’t know what’s going on.
Evan It does. You know, we need to be thoughtful in distinguishing different kinds of cases. If the federal court hearing this Lead and Copper Rule improvements lawsuit, for example, says the Lead and Copper Rule improvements are illegal because they exceeded EPA’s authority, for example, you know, the Trump Administration might actually like that ruling or not want to appeal it to the U .S. Supreme Court or whatever. But when the court does that, that’s supposed to be kind of the end of the story. And usually what agencies do then and administrations do if they don’t like it is they try to do something like a workaround. They’ll do a new rule that maybe superficially complies with the court’s order, but is substantively not as protective or is in other ways, you know, kind of I guess complying with the letter of the ruling, but not maybe the spirit of it, to put it a different way. And I think that that’s just what we’re going to see. I don’t think we should anticipate in advance that, you know, Trump will try to do a repeal rule of one of these regulations we like and the court will say you didn’t do this correctly. Your repeal rule is illegal. The old good standard stays in place. And he just says, oh, no, it doesn’t. I don’t think we should just assume that’s going to be what happens. I understand people are fearful of that. And there have been comments made by folks in the administration that all will just ignore the courts. But I don’t think we should just assume we’re going to go to that craziness until it actually happens, in part because I think talking about it like it’s oh, that’s what’s going to happen does sort of anticipatorily normalize that. And it’s such an insane thing to do that’s at such odds with the history of this country that I think we need to like kind of call their bluff and actually have them refuse to comply with a court order in a more substantive way. We’ve seen some instances already. We were talking about the funding freeze where it’s not clear that they were complying with court orders from the federal district court. But there’s also a plausible explanation that that’s just due to sheer incompetence, that they didn’t comply because they don’t know how to because they don’t know what they’re doing and because they’re basically chaotically ransacking through the federal government rather than having a plan. But we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. And we have to be prepared for that eventuality. But I want to assume it’s going to be what happens.
Amy OK, you’re looking on the bright side of just the Trump Administration, you know, promulgating rules that are just toothless.
Evan Well, I think that they’re more prepared now than they were the first time to act in ways that comply with the Administrative Procedure Act, which I mentioned before, and that’s the that’s this big federal statute that controls what a lot of agencies do. And it’s kind of like, you know, this is what tells you how to dot your I’s and cross your T’s, get all your paperwork correct to provide the right kinds of reasons for the right kind of actions. So you don’t get bounced by a judge who says you didn’t comply with the APA. And they’re clearly more prepared to do that. They lost in court a ton the first time around because they were just incompetently acting because they just they weren’t prepared to govern. And they were kind of disinterested in how to govern. I still think that they’re just interested in how to govern, but they clearly have hired more seasoned people. And at the EPA, at least a lot of the same people have come back. So they’ve, I think, learned the hard way that they actually have to follow the law to get their policy outcomes.
Amy But you think they will they could successfully target the lead and copper rule and the newer PFAS standards.
Evan Absolutely. And one of the things that we should keep in mind, and this is dynamic to your question about the court says, you know, they only have to defy a court order if they don’t like it. And what we’ve seen from the U .S. Supreme Court is a real enthusiasm for rulings that reduce federal agency authority, namely EPA. And so I could see them saying, oh, this lead and copper rule improvements, it’s so expensive because replacing lead service lines are expensive, even though there’s nothing in the statute that says anything about that. And it’s completely non -textual, non -historical interpretation what the Safe Drinking Water Act requires. It’s a major question then. It must be a major question because it’s expensive. And then there’s nothing there’s no ruling for Trump to defy. Right. I mean, if the court lays down and agrees with them on these legal issues, then we won’t come to that. And I think that that’s the thing that is the first order question we should be worried about is are the federal courts going to going to say no? These requirements and these statutes mean something and you have to meet them versus just the executive branch gets to do what it wants to do. So we’ll see. And there’ll be a number of rules like that. Talk about the PFAS drinking water standards, lead and copper rule improvements. There’ll probably be another round of regulations on WOTUS or Waters of the United States defining which waters are protected by the Clean Water Act and which ones aren’t. That’s going to be a big deal. There’s a lot of stuff like that.
Amy So I guess there are a number of different scenarios that things could play out. But are you thinking that we’re going to see the dismantling of some of these protections at the federal level?
Evan Yeah. And that gets into that there’s there’s ways of dismantling protections without having Congress pass a law that says the Clean Water Act doesn’t exist. Because even under a less full throated position of like what Trump can get away with unilaterally, the executive branch clearly has discretion over how to administer and enforce the law. And then often can just mean not doing that. So a really simple example of this is just enforcement actions. EPA has an Office of Enforcement. They’ll work with the U .S. DOJ when there’s environmental crimes. And I would expect to see very low levels of enforcement. So the Clean Water Act is on the books. They don’t roll back any standards, but they kind of just don’t enforce it very fully. And that’s a way in which communities aren’t protected from water pollution because polluters are kind of being given the signal, now’s your chance. If they get that signal, that’s how these businesses are going to act because it increases their bottom lines. And so I think low levels of enforcement up and down the line could really leave communities vulnerable to increase water pollution.
Amy And it’s not just they’re getting signals. I mean, I think there’s been actual words spoken like, OK, if you’re a company that has this much value, then we want to get rid of any kind of regulation that might impede your.
Evan Well, there’s been reporting there’s been reporting that the Department of Justice’s environmental section, those lawyers were basically told we’re going to reassign you to doing immigration enforcement cases and you can either do that or you can quit. So it’s not, you know, and they’re just moving folks around in the department, which they have some level of authority to do. But if you don’t have any lawyers at DOJ working on environmental enforcement, then nobody’s enforcing the law. And so that’s a way you can do something without the courts or Congress having to bless it or say it’s OK or it’s constitutional. But the result is, in some cases, going to be similar to just we roll back the underlying standards themselves, at least in the short term.
Amy So we think of ourselves as, you know, three branches of government, right? But when you have this system, these agencies that are basically under the control of the executive branch in terms of how they’re staffed and what they’re doing and all that, you start to kind of see the vulnerabilities in this system because we have so much that we rely on from these agencies, EPA, FCC, FDA, USDA, you know, all those important big federal agencies. So when we look at the EPA, I think we’re all aware that the way it works is going to be targeted. What are we kind of seeing that could happen?
Evan Well, there’s a lot of stuff that’s happening that is going to be kind of business as usual in terms of this is what happens when you go from maybe a more environmentally minded Democratic administration to a less environmentally minded Republican administration. And that that’s kind of stuff isn’t shocking or really that new, right? We saw similar things when George W. Bush was elected. We’re going to emphasize this or deemphasize that. And so we need to be careful about distinguishing those kind of things where it’s just the prerogative of the administration. This is normal. They care more about this than they do about that. And that’s their job. That’s their role. They got elected, so they get to do that. In contrast to that is situations where it’s really undermining the nuts and bolts of how an agency works in a way that is really contrary to the mission and purpose of the agency as Congress designed and as the courts have interpreted their role to be. And so what that looks like is, you know, this stuff about, oh, we’re just going to move you over here and we’re going to pay you not to work because, you know, we don’t want you to look for environmental justice problems. You’re basically laid off or, you know, we’re going to put out a memo that interprets the statute in a completely bad faith way in order to basically dare somebody to sue us. And that’s what we’re seeing now is like going after the employment and the labor situation at EPA, going after the staff, creating an atmosphere of fear, frankly, an anti -science mentality that is obviously completely unworkable at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is supposed to run on science. And all of that is so clearly contrary to what EPA is that it’s not just overshifting our priorities. It’s we’re trying intentionally to make it so that this agency can’t function so that the employees in it feel as though there’s no point in trying and therefore they quit and then we just won’t hire new people to replace them. It would be like if you bought a business and then intentionally tried to run into the ground. And that’s what we’re seeing that’s going to be different than previous administrations that just had less of a policy emphasis on environmental protection. It’s going to be a bunch of bad faith attacks on these folks as corrupt. And, you know, they’ll do all this insane stuff trying to say that this is somehow what people want. The reality is that these are people who have jobs that are often kind of the boring stuff we take for granted that the government does. You know, looking at monitoring reports, did this chemical plant near your house blow through the limits in its permit for horrifying chemicals in the water? Well, if nobody’s looking now, we just don’t know. And the idea that that’s somehow vindicating people’s freedom or something or, you know, take that on elected bureaucrats is just a bizarre attempt to claim that what you’re doing is supported by the people when there’s no mandate for that. Nobody asked for that. But is it going to be what we’re going to see?
Amy I mean, let’s talk about what life was like in this country before the EPA, before the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, all these acts that we think of as, oh, of course they’re here, like almost as though they’ve always been here. What were things like when polluters did have free reign?
Evan Well, what you had often was a patchwork of local and sometimes state laws that tried to get a handle on this and a hope more than an expectation, I think, that the market would incentivize business actors to reduce their pollution. And it created kind of a patchwork of places where pollution wasn’t so bad, other places where it was really bad, industry by industry differences. But on the whole, it just didn’t allow for the outcome which you need, which is water that’s safe to drink, water that you can actually eat the fish that come out of those kinds of outcomes. And the reason for that’s the reason that you needed federal action. It’s a solution to a collective action problem, which is if everybody has to meet the same standards, then we don’t have some problem of, oh, well, this business over here, it’s at a disadvantage versus this other one. We have clear rules of the road. We know how the rules will change. If you want to update a standard, you have to go through this process. And it created massive benefits, not just for public health and the environment, but also for certainty for everybody else involved. And, you know, going backwards isn’t just going to mean that the waters get dirtier. It’s going to mean that, but it’s also going to mean it’s not totally clear what the legal obligations for businesses are to avoid water pollution. It’s going to vary from state to state and it’s going to be chaotic and not efficient really for anybody, which is why I think you’re seeing across some of these issues, folks saying, you know, we’re actually fine if some of these standards to stay in place as opposed to, yeah, burning all down to the ground. You know, it’s sort of a myth that everybody wants no regulation. They just want regulations that are feasible and that they can work with. So it’s kind of this bizarre situation where they’re in some cases doing more than I think even what the regulated community would want in terms of rolling back these standards.
Amy So one thing that I didn’t understand about how the EPA relates to folks here in Wisconsin is that the EPA, or the federal government actually, funds some positions in Wisconsin at the DNR to carry out those federal programs like the Safe Drinking Water Act. So the folks on the ground here in Wisconsin who are working with water utilities in towns and governments to make sure the drinking water is safe, make sure that they are complying, that they are testing correctly. When there was that sort of brief freeze on everything, those folks found out that their funding was frozen. I don’t know if it’s all been released. I think we’re still in the gray area, but what’s at risk if all of a sudden those positions, which are DNR positions but funded through federal EPA dollars, start to be lost?
Evan Well, then all of a sudden you’re going to have an agency, DNR, that already is resource constrained and has a hard time implementing all of the laws it’s required to implement be even more limited in what it can do. And the only way to address that is going to be we’re going to have to spend more money at the state level or we’re going to have to live with a situation where we can’t really guarantee that our air is clean to breathe and our water is clean to drink. And that’s going to be going back to those bad old days that you referenced earlier. There’s really no other way around it. I mean, we need a certain number of people to be doing this. And just to put a finer point on it, what I’ve heard is that for some departments in DNR, a majority of the positions are funded through federal grants. And so you’re looking at potentially losing over half the staff in a particular area where they, for example, monitor water systems in the state to ensure that they’re complying with these drinking water standards. Well, I mean, if you work for a private for -profit business and you laid off over half the people in a division, do you think performance is just going to stay exactly the same? You don’t hire anybody new? I mean, that’s crazy. And that’s potentially what we’re looking at. Now you’re right that it’s ambiguous about this funding. Is it permanently frozen? How much of it was ever actually supposed to be? And that gets back to the incompetence of the Trump Administration and those memos that they’ve put out. We’re going to find out over the long term what’s really going to be there or not. But right now it’s creating a lot of concern that DNR might not really be able to do its job over the next four years. Like it’s legally required to by statute because of funding constraints, which shows yet another way that you can, without changing the law, functionally change the law, which is you starve the agency of the resources it needs to implement it. And then the agency can do its best. But if you’ve got less than half the staff, I mean, it’s just not going to happen at the same level.
Amy So back in those bad old days before the EPA, before the Safe Drinking Water Act, Wisconsin I think was one of those places, one of those states that did try to have protections that really kind of started along a good path to protect our natural environment, to protect our waterways. What do you see happening this time around if the EPA is kind of brought to its knees the way we’re talking about here in Wisconsin?
Evan Yeah, and this is the dynamic again that we’ve seen some version of in the past. I think this will be a stronger version of it. But when that federal backstop essentially gives way, what that does, that has a couple of different effects. One is it puts more responsibility on DNR to make sure standards are being met, which as we just discussed with the resource constraints is hard because they rely on those federal resources to do things. The other thing is that the way a lot of our environmental standards are set up, if they’re not purely state law issues, oftentimes DNR as the state’s environmental agency has to go to EPA and get approval in one form or another for changing something or implementing something in a certain way. And when they go to Region 5 of the EPA down in Chicago the next four years, they might just not answer. They may not allow us to do things that are protective of the environment. I mean, think about it this way. If you’re somebody who doesn’t want to have to meet environmental standards in Wisconsin, you don’t have to go convince DNR now or convince the state legislature to change the law or the governor to change the law. You can just tell a bureaucrat in Chicago, just deny Wisconsin’s request to change their program with regard to large animal farms, for example. And it doesn’t have to be correct legally. They can just say no. And those kinds of things have happened and I would expect them to happen over more of the next four years. So it isn’t just that they’re doing nothing. They can do active harm to undermine our state standards for these programs that are joint federal state, what they call cooperative federalism programs, which is your Clean Water Act, your Clean Air Act, those kinds of things. The good news is that there are some state level protections that EPA doesn’t have its hand in.
Amy That’s what I was just going to ask about.
Evan So that’s, you know, the Clean Water Act federally doesn’t cover most groundwater, and so we have a groundwater protection law in Wisconsin. We have a state wetlands law that protects more wetlands than federal law does. And so those are pretty robust protections and we just need to be particularly kind of protective of those now because there’s nothing behind them. You know, it used to be the case that, well, a lot of wetlands are joint federal and state jurisdictional. So if the state doesn’t do a good job with this permit, the feds might anyway. We can’t depend on that. And so we need to be particularly suspicious of any effort now to weaken state laws in areas where there’s nothing behind it federally. We always needed to be, but now it’s clearly an attempt not just to align state and federal law, but it’s an attempt to deregulate the area entirely.
Amy So let’s get back to these kind of Biden Administration laws that were passed, bipartisan infrastructure law and others that are helping clean up legacy pollution in the Great Lakes and our waterways and our rivers. A lot of that funding has been paused. Do you expect it to stay that way or?
Evan I don’t know. That’s one of these issues where one would hope that, you know, there’s always been a little bit less political opposition to clean up efforts. Yes, they’re expensive, but they’re not preventing any business actor from doing anything today because they’re cleaning up legacy pollution. So what it is is we’re basically socializing the costs of cleaning up one private entity’s pollution. So who’s going to be opposed to that? Other than the fact that we, the taxpayers, end up paying for somebody else’s mess, right? So, you know, things like cleaning up the Great Lakes and doing things like that, you would hope that when the dust settles on these pauses, that continues to come through as something that has bipartisan support. And a lot of these cleanups do affect more than one state, so they often cut across Democratic and Republican districts. But, you know, there’s been something about the kind of blunderbuss approach to this that does make you wonder if they’re just more interested in just creating chaos than actually stopping projects that they have policy objections to. And so we’ll have to see. I mean, an example of this just the other day, there was reporting that the governor of Illinois is pausing moving forward with the invasive carp project to keep the carp out of the Great Lakes. Well, that, you know, keeping carp out of the Great Lakes, that affects people all over. It shouldn’t be this partisan thing that gets paused because, you know, they’re worried about runaway spending or something. It’s a project that’s already been approved. It makes sense. It’s important to do. There’s already a plan in place. And now we’re at the 11th hour just pausing it because why? So I hope that reason prevails on something like that. But, you know, sitting where we are, it’s hard to assume that that rational outcome is going to be what happens.
Amy So here we are sitting in Clean Wisconsin’s offices. You’re an attorney. You work on water issues every day. What is on your plate, I guess? What’s next for you to try to work to keep what protections we have in place?
Evan Yeah. So we’ve talked about that there’s good state laws in many areas and that can help us be a little bit insulated from stuff at the federal level. So I mentioned groundwater law and wetland law. There’s some other laws like that that are good. We need to fight to protect and to have the department implement fully and correctly at the federal levels for stuff that is interactive with what these federal changes are going to be. We can still pursue things like federal litigation. You can still go to court and get the court to toss out a bad federal action. And I understand that some people will say, well, are the courts going to really stand up to the Trump Administration or not? But we have to try. And I think in many cases they will. The other thing to keep in mind is, you know, some of these things are just not, you know, candidly, I don’t think Trump cares about. And so I don’t know how much political capital would be spent on, you know, we’re going to defy this court order on this niche environmental issue that we care deeply about. But, you know, if he’s busy trying to have a trade war with China or something, he may not care so much about. And I think it’s important to not view everything through, you know, Trump is doing this and we need to fight back. You know, it’s there is a longstanding contest in this country between folks who want more health and environmental protective standards and folks who think that business shouldn’t have to pay for the pollution they cause, which obviously we don’t agree with. And some of these are these fights are going to be more in that boring register than this like ideological fight for democracy stuff. And in that vein, we need to keep going to things like the federal courts and being like, stop this. This is illegal, you know, that’s not going to stop happening. But we also need to be prepared for weird eventualities. Like, what if they defy an order? What if, you know, that’s this kind of stuff that that’s what feels kind of new is that we’re in a position where the traditional tools to advocate, difficult to use as they were , they were at least there. And now we’re wondering about their durability in a way that’s scary, but also legitimate.
Amy So if somebody is listening to this and they’re feeling kind of like we’re at a unique moment in American history where things might get unraveled pretty quickly, what what can they do or what should they pay attention to?
Evan Well, I would I would pay attention to what’s actually happening versus what people are saying is happening. That’s a little tricky. It is tricky. But I mean, what I’d say about that is there is going to there’s a clear public record in all of these instances if they’re going to do or if they’re going to try to repeal rules, they have to go on the record and writing with all this stuff. And that’s not always going to be what they’re saying publicly. And I think by us focusing on, you know, Clean Wisconsin and other folks focusing on what they’re actually saying, it will reveal the hollowness of a lot of their actions and their explanations for their actions. Because at the end of the day, what this is about is allowing public health to be weakened, the environment to be weakened, to allow corporations and rich people to keep more of their money. You know that at the end of the day, that’s what a lot of this is. The reason that folks don’t want to comply with these regulations that make them internalize the costs of their, you know, pollution they cause is because they want to keep their money. And, you know, we just need to kind of keep our eyes on the prize in that regard and understand the reality of what’s happening and then speak truthfully about that. So people can understand that this isn’t something that should and doesn’t have public support to basically funnel more of our limited resources and to trade my health for your money. There’s no mandate for that. And I think the best thing that we can do is be aware of that and talk to one another about that and make sure that that’s breaking through, which is really hard because we have these ideological lanes that people get in. There’s so much misinformation out there now, but that’s the reality of what’s going to be happening over the next four years. And we just need to keep saying it so that people know that’s what’s happening. And the next time there’s an opportunity to folks get involved, the next election or whatever, that’s what’s front of mind to them versus a bunch of distractions.
Amy Clean Wisconsin attorney Evan Feinauer, thank you so much for providing your perspective on all this. I appreciate it.
Evan Thank you.
Amy For more information on water protections in Wisconsin, log onto our website, CleanWisconsin.org. And if you have something you want to ask, show ideas, or just a comment, feel free to send me an email. Podcast@CleanWisconsin .org. I’m Amy Barrilleaux and thank you for listening to The Defender.
