New Water Bill Prioritizes Cost Over Cleanliness: States Must Now Factor Treatment Expense into Water Standards

The “Water Quality Standards Attainability Act” is a short but significant piece of legislation that changes the rulebook for how states and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set and review water quality standards. Essentially, this bill injects a big new variable into the environmental protection equation: cost.

The New Math of Clean Water

Under current law, states review their water quality standards every few years. This bill mandates that these reviews now specifically consider whether pollution controls for combined sewer overflows (CSOs)—where storm runoff and sanitary sewage mix—are “cost-effective.” After this review, the state must hand the results over to the EPA Administrator. If you live in an older city where heavy rain means sewage backups or overflows into local rivers, this review is about your infrastructure. The bill requires officials to analyze whether the expense of upgrading those systems is worth the environmental return.

When Cost Trumps Cleanliness

This bill makes two major changes that could affect the quality of your drinking water. First, when states set or review water quality standards for public water supplies, they must now factor in the cost and commercial availability of the treatment technologies needed for factories or treatment plants (called point sources) to meet those standards. Second, the EPA itself must also start considering the cost and commercial availability of these technologies when developing federal water quality criteria (Section 304(a)).

Think about it this way: Right now, the standard is often set based on what’s needed to protect human health and the environment. Under this bill, if a state decides that the technology needed to remove a certain pollutant is too expensive or not widely available, they might be able to set a lower, less protective standard. For the general public, this is where the concern lies. While it sounds reasonable to ensure standards are “achievable,” introducing cost as a primary constraint potentially means prioritizing the financial burden on industries and municipalities over the goal of cleaner water and public health protection.

The Real-World Impact on Your Tap

For industries and municipalities, this bill is a potential win. It offers a clear path to argue against costly infrastructure upgrades, like advanced filtration systems, by citing their expense or limited availability. For example, if a small town’s water treatment plant needs a $20 million upgrade to remove emerging contaminants, they can now lean on this bill to argue that the cost is too high, potentially delaying or scrapping the project altogether. This could slow down the attainment of cleaner water goals for communities near polluted waterways, impacting everyone who relies on that water for drinking, fishing, or recreation. The vagueness of terms like “cost-effective” and “commercially available” (Section 2) leaves a lot of room for interpretation by state governors and the EPA, which could lead to inconsistent standards across the country.