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For a president who supposedly likes building infrastructure, President Joe Biden has a funny way of showing it. In a New Year’s Eve news dump, the Environmental Protection Agency issued new Clean Water Act regulations that will make it more expensive for people to build roads, bridges, and homes.

At issue is the definition of the term “waters of the United States,” which for decades meant interstate waters that were “navigable in fact,” such as a river, canal, or lake. But in a blatant power grab, the EPA expanded that definition to include not only “intrastate lakes, rivers, streams” but also all “mudflats, sandflats, wetlands, sloughs, prairie potholes, wet meadows, playa lakes, or natural ponds.”

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If there is a puddle somewhere, Biden wants authority over it. Under his administration’s new definition, if your property has a dirt road that occasionally gets muddy after a hard rain, it was now part of the “waters of the United States.” Under the Clean Water Act, this meant that if you wanted to pave the road, put a building on it, or run a power line over, you would need to get not only state and local permits but also a federal permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Getting a permit to build even adjacent to “waters of the United States” takes an average of 788 days and $271,596 in costs. Almost $2 billion is spent on federal water permits each year by people trying to improve infrastructure and housing stock. No wonder infrastructure and housing are so expensive.

The Trump administration issued a regulation in 2020 that narrowed the definition of waters of the U.S. to navigable bodies such as lakes and rivers, tributaries flowing directly into them, and wetlands next to them.

Environmental activists, who have turned the National Environmental Policy Act into an infrastructure killing machine, objected to former President Donald Trump’s rule and fought it in federal court. They found a sympathetic Obama-appointed judge to throw the new regulation out, and then the Biden administration did not appeal that decision.

Instead, Biden issued a new rule last week that restores the permitting process to its pre-Trump absurdity. This means there will be hundreds of days of delay and hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for virtually every infrastructure project in the country.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court is set to deliver a decision that might overturn the Biden water rule. In 2004, an Idaho couple began to build a house across the street from a lake after obtaining state and local permits. Then EPA officials showed up and threatened them with thousands of dollars in fines per day unless they immediately stopped construction and got a federal Clean Water Act permit as well.

The couple sued, and their case was argued before the Supreme Court last October. A decision is expected this spring.

We hope the Supreme Court will restore sanity to federal permitting under the Clean Water Act. Either way, the Biden administration’s decision to issue its harmful regulation last Friday shows the direction Democrats want to go. No wonder Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) modest permitting reforms died. Infrastructure and housing will get more expensive as long as a Democrat is in the White House.

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