Key takeaways AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom. From the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education to the Internal Revenue Service and the State Department, the Trump administration has not been shy in letting entrenched bureaucrats — whose numbers it is scaling back — know that the old ways of doing things are over.
Through a combination of U.S. Supreme Court decisions and White House-led deregulatory actions, the once-all-powerful administrative state is seeing its wings clipped. But one federal agency has yet to get the message and is throwing its weight around as if Joe Biden were still occupying the Oval Office.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has declared an Idaho couple’s 4.7-acre rural property a federally regulated wetland, claiming a small, sometimes soggy depression in their otherwise flat, dry land is “part of” a “navigable” waterway and thus subject to federal regulation under the 1972 Clean Water Act.
Yet the small parcel owned by Caleb and Rebecca Linck in northern Idaho’s Bonner County does not meet the statutory requirements as a wetland that can be regulated by the Corps or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Decades of confusion over what Washington could and could not regulate as a wetland were finally settled in the Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 ruling in Sackett v. EPA. Under that decision, the Clean Water Act applies only to wetlands that are indistinguishable from, and have a “continuous surface water connection to,” a navigable water, such as a lake, river, stream, or bay.
The Lincks’ property has no such “continuous surface water connection” to any navigable waterway. According to the Corps’ Rube Goldberg-inspired argument, parts of the Lincks’ property are somehow connected to an alleged wetland (nothing more than a swale) across a 35-foot-wide county gravel road, even though the road is elevated above both pieces of land and contains no culverts through which water could pass. The swale touches an unnamed stream, which is connected to a named stream, which is then connected to a navigable water, Lake Pend Oreille. The lake is two miles from the Lincks’ land, with no continuous surface water connection between the two.
“The Corps is thumbing their nose at the rule of law by ignoring clear Supreme Court precedent and asserting authority over land that obviously does not meet the clear requirements for federal wetlands regulation,” said Charles Yates, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, in a press release. “The Clean Water Act does not give the federal government a blank check to regulate every puddle, swale, or ditch.” The foundation is representing the Lincks pro bono in their effort to challenge the Corps’ action.
The brazenness of the Corps’ move against the Lincks starts with the location of their land. It is in the same county as the property owned by Michael and Chantell Sackett, the Idaho couple whose decade-long fight to protect their property from a bogus wetlands designation culminated in the Supreme Court’s far-reaching Sackett v. EPA ruling. That decision greatly restricted the federal government’s authority to regulate wetlands.
Like the Lincks’ land, the Sacketts’ property is located a considerable distance from a navigable water, Priest Lake, with no continuous surface water connection between their land and the lake. And like the Sacketts before the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, the Lincks are facing strict restriction on the use of their property if the wetlands designation is allowed to stand. Furthermore, both properties are separated from a navigable water by a road. In the Sackett case, the Court held that “a barrier separating a wetland from a water of the United States would ordinarily remove that wetland from federal jurisdiction.”
Instead of heeding the court’s clear message and leaving the Lincks alone, bureaucrats at the Corps decided to go after them anyway. And they will subject other property owners to the same ordeal unless they are held in check by much-needed adult supervision.
That may be in the works.
The Corps’ wetlands mischief in Idaho predates the arrival earlier this month of the agency’s new boss, Adam Telle, a former long-serving congressional staffer. Selected by Trump to be assistant secretary of the Army for Civil Works, which includes heading the Army Corps of Engineers, Telle can put a swift end to his agency’s regulatory overreach.
Though under siege from the new powers that be in Washington, the administrative state is not about to go gently into that good night. By scuttling his agency’s plans to infringe on the rights of landowners, in Idaho and elsewhere, Telle can let the Corps’ career underlings know that such practices will not be tolerated.
This article originally appeared at Idaho Statesman