BREAKING NEWS: Supreme Court Sides with San Francisco and Curbs EPA Power

On 4 March 2025, the Supreme Court sided with the city of San Francisco in a challenge against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) attempts to regulate sewage discharge into the Pacific Ocean. The ruling restricts the EPA’s ability to regulate offshore pollution and could impact water pollution controls nationwide.

The original lawsuit, City and County of San Francisco, California v. Environmental Protection Agency, created a unique alliance between San Francisco, a city known for its progressive environmental policies, and oil and mining groups in California. The plaintiffs argued that the EPA’s water pollution standards were vague and unenforceable. San Francisco officials contended that the agency’s imprecise standards made it impossible for them to know when they were in compliance with their wastewater permit. In a separate but similar case concerning wastewater discharge into San Francisco Bay, the city is already facing $313 million in fines and an estimated $10.6 billion in upgrades to meet regulatory requirements.

The EPA argued that the Clean Water Act (CWA) authorizes the agency to impose generic prohibitions because the EPA lacked the information necessary to develop more specific guidelines. Representing the EPA in front of the Supreme Court, Assistant Solicitor General Frederick Liu said, “I want to be clear about the sort of information that we’re missing that made it impossible for us to impose anything other than these generic limitations … That’s the information that we’ve been lacking for the past 10 years and that we asked San Francisco to provide as part of the long-term control update. Without that information, we’re basically flying blind as to how we’re going to tell exactly what San Francisco should do to protect water quality.” However, the city disputed Liu’s claim.