In two recent letters to Congress, St. Johns Riverkeeper joined other environmental organizations in their opposition to potentially harmful legislation. The ramifications of these bills, if passed, are outlined below.
Attack on the Endangered Species Act
The Whitehouse-Heinrich permitting deal includes sweeping attacks on the Endangered Species Act (ESA), including provisions that would cede authority to states to take over the Section 7 consultations, weaken the Act’s best available science standard, fundamentally alter judicial review of Section 7 challenges, and potentially condemn critically endangered North Atlantic right whales to extinction. The Whitehouse-Heinrich deal would direct every Section 7 challenge to the D.C. Circuit, forcing judges to absorb and prioritize a massive influx of fact-intensive cases while pushing other matters further back in the queue. This is not only wholly inequitable, it will also result in a more severe backlog, strained judicial capacity, and make meaningful review far more difficult.
Watering Down the Clean Water Act in Florida
The “Restore Florida Water Independence Act of 2026“ would undermine a 2024 decision by a federal judge who sided with the St. Johns Riverkeeper and our co-plaintiffs, stating that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) breached federal law by delegating the Clean Water Act wetlands permitting program to the state of Florida.
In 2020, the EPA approved Florida DEP’s request to administer the program, but a federal court invalidated that approval as unlawful, and a federal court of appeals then upheld that decision. The courts ruled that the Florida program was unlawful because EPA’s approval did not comply with the Endangered Species Act and federal agencies failed to ensure that the state program itself would adequately protect threatened and endangered species in one of the most biodiverse states in the country.
Congress should not codify violations of the ESA by establishing a less-protective state-wide permit program that will increase environmental harm and exacerbate flood risk.
You can find the full letter texts here:
Oppose: H.R. 9017, titled the “Restore Florida Water Independence Act of 2026”