July 21, 2025
Dear Representative,
On behalf of our millions of members and supporters nationwide, the undersigned hunting, fishing, and conservation groups urge you to oppose H.R. 3898, the “Promoting Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure Today Act,” (PERMIT Act). This package contains provisions that would weaken commonsense Clean Water Act safeguards and threaten the rivers, streams, wetlands, and lakes that fish, wildlife and our members rely on to hunt, fish and recreate. These waters are not only essential to fish and wildlife, they are also essential for healthy communities more broadly – these waters supply our drinking water, provide water for farms and ranches, save taxpayer dollars on water treatment costs, and keep communities safer in the face of flooding, wildfire, and drought.
Congress passed the bipartisan Clean Water Act to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters,” with a goal to make all waters in the United States “swimmable and fishable” by 1983. While this goal has yet to be achieved, the law’s safeguards and cooperative federal-state approach to protecting our waters has improved the health of many waters nationwide and prevented deterioration or destruction in many more.
This legislation abandons those safeguards and undermines key Clean Water Act tools to protect our waters – an ability that is already weakened in light of a 2023 Supreme Court decision. Our groups are particularly concerned about a number of provisions in the bill, including:
- Section 3: Slows down EPA’s process for updating water quality criteria, which are pollutant-specific criteria used to determine whether surface water quality is healthy for people, fish, wildlife, and recreational uses.
- Section 5: Undermines the longstanding authority of states and Tribes to protect local waters under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, which provides a regulatory framework for states and tribes to work cooperatively with the federal government to ensure that their aquatic resources are protected from potential impacts related to federally issued permits and licenses. This authority allows states and Tribes to protect the water quality of waterbodies that communities and wildlife rely on for drinking water, recreation, cultural practices, and habitat.
- Section 8: Makes it easier for industrial operations to dump “forever chemicals” like PFAS and other contaminants into our waters without accountability by shielding dischargers from Clean Water Act liability. The concentration of PFAS chemicals in some areas has gotten so high that Do Not Eat advisories have been applied to game and fish species, limiting hunting and fishing opportunities.
- Section 11: Eliminates protections for people and wildlife from harmful pesticide discharges into our waters, upending the existing system in place to allow pesticide use while minimizing harm caused by pesticides entering our surface waters.
- Section 12: Drastically restricts the EPA’s authority to stop highly damaging projects like Pebble Mine from destroying fisheries and wetlands. During the entire history of the Clean Water Act, EPA has only used Section 404(c) 14 times as a last resort to protect aquatic resources, wildlife, and communities, with the vast majority issued by Republican administrations.
- Section 13: Weakens the Army Corps of Engineers’ nationwide permitting program, including by restricting the Corps from considering harms caused by activities as a whole, and forces them to look only at narrow footprint where fill activity takes place, as well as exempting the permit program from the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act.
- Section 15: This section would prevent effective judicial review of projects that fill in and destroy wetlands and other waters.
- Section 18: Reduces the scope of waters federally protected by the Clean Water Act by granting authority to the Army Corps of Engineers to create new exclusions for any kind of waterbody from being afforded Clean Water Act protections.
This is only a snapshot of the harmful provisions in H.R. 3898. Clean Water Act protections safeguard the health and safety of all Americans and ensure that fish and wildlife – and the economies and outdoor passions that rely on them – have the water resources needed to thrive. The public overwhelmingly wants the clean, fishable, and swimmable waters promised by the bipartisan Clean Water Act. At a time when agency budget and staffing cuts, along with aging water infrastructure and changing precipitation patterns, threaten to worsen water quality challenges, Congress should support protections for our public lands and waters and reject proposals that would weaken safeguards in place to protect them. We strongly urge you to vote NO on H.R. 3898. Thank you for your consideration of our views.
Sincerely,
American Fisheries Society
American Fly Fishing Trade Association
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers
National Wildlife Federation
Trout Unlimited
