Approved by the Energy, Environment, and Water Policy Committee on March 18, 2024 
Approved by the Public Policy and Practice Committee on May 1, 2024
Adopted by the Board of Direction on July 18, 2024

Policy

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) encourages Congress to reauthorize the Clean Water Act (CWA) to protect our nation’s waters and the beneficial use of those waters. ASCE supports full appropriation of federal and state authorized funding for clean water programs.

Furthermore, ASCE recommends the CWA should be revised, amended, and reauthorized to:

  • More aggressively address non-point sources of pollution from agriculture, urban stormwater runoff, mining, and other land disturbing activities.
  • Include advances in scientific and engineering knowledge about non-point source and point source pollution prevention and new treatment approaches.
  • Include the regulation of flow and water quantity where such concerns constitute an impairment.
  • Recognize that groundwater and surface water are often one water body and afford protections to groundwater as a source water.
  • Allow alternative compliance and enforcement strategies and innovation to achieve healthy and robust ecosystems, including greater focus on narrative standards, especially where compliance with numeric water quality standards has not resulted in improvements to water quality or attainment of designated uses.
  • Better define both qualitative and quantitative standards to minimize differing interpretations of acceptable water flows and wastewater discharges. 

    ASCE further recommends that federal agencies tasked with establishing regulations and policies to implement provisions of the CWA:
  • Develop nationwide regulatory and best-practices guidance to ensure sustainable, comprehensive, and consistent approaches to the protection of the nation’s waters, mindful of the need to minimize regulatory processing times and costs.
  • Recognize that protection of our nation’s navigable waters through Section 404 of the CWA requires a watershed approach that takes the hydrologic connectivity of all sources into account.
  • Provide meaningful information to the public about the water quality and ecosystem health of the water in their communities.

Issue

The Clean Water Act (P.L. 92-500) has not been reauthorized since 1987. Initially identified as the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, the Act was significantly amended in 1977, 1981 and 1987. Funding authorizations for a number of provisions expired in 1990 and 1991; authorizations for wastewater treatment assistance expired in 1994. Reauthorization would provide a basis for annual appropriations for Clean Water Programs that previously expired, rather than the current ad hoc funding that competes with other national programs.

Additionally, new advances in watershed science should be explicitly included in the language of the Act. Three examples of scientific advances include: the interaction between subsurface and surface waters; the cumulative nature of discharge impacts on the receiving waters; and the recognition that flow quantity is an important aspect in watershed health. 

Rationale

Civil engineers are involved in water quality protection through the planning design, construction, and operation of wastewater collection, treatment, and disposal systems and facilities to protect and enhance the physical, biological, and chemical integrity of all the nation’s waters. Considerable progress continues to be made in controlling all sources of point source pollution (e.g. treated wastewater effluent, combined sewer overflows, sanitary sewer overflows, and stormwater discharges). However, a more concerted and effort is needed to control non-point sources of pollution, which have become the major source of water quality impairments across the U.S. Quantifying the effects of nutrients, and other pollutants on water quality and ecosystems, in addition to measures to control and mitigate those pollutants, requires ongoing research. That research also should address the longevity and sustainability of those measures. It is appropriate that the latest analytical tools, including data-driven interrelated watershed and groundwater modeling be employed. Watershed approaches to water quality and ecosystem management offer the best way to integrate management and mitigation of a wide range of water pollution sources.

ASCE Policy Statement 420
First Approved in 1994