Environmental Justice and the Clean Water Act: Implications for Economic Analyses of Clean Water Regulations

Since President Clinton’s Executive Order 12898, federal agencies have been required to conduct environmental justice analyses of federal rules and regulations. More recently, the Biden administration instituted several efforts to reform regulatory review and promote a more equitable distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. This paper seeks to understand how prior guidelines have been implemented in federal regulatory reviews related to the Clean Water Act and provide a baseline for future studies of the distributional effects of clean water regulations. We reviewed 18 regulatory impact assessments relating to the Clean Water Act conducted since 1992. Only five of these studies conducted a quantitative analysis of distributional impacts, and none of the 18 assessments found disproportionately adverse effects on low-income or minority communities. Anticipating that future regulatory review will require more comprehensive distributional analyses, we combine national data on the location of regulated point sources with demographic characteristics to determine the baseline distribution of water pollution facilities. Overall, we find that discharge locations tend to be located in areas with higher poverty rates, higher White population shares, and less education. We find that rurality partly explains this pattern. We conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of these analyses.