At the end of August 2021, a federal district court in Arizona ordered the Navigable Waters Protection Rule (NWPR) to be remanded and vacated. As a result, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) have halted implementation of the NWPR and are interpreting "waters of the United States" (WOTUS) consistent with the pre-2015 regulatory regime until further notice. The court did not place a jurisdictional limitation on its ruling, and the Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether the adopted rule applies nationwide or only within the jurisdiction of the court. In Florida, permitting is largely controlled at the state level, On December 22, 2020 the EPA published their approval of Florida's State 404 Program in the Federal Register, and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) began administering the State 404 Program on that date. The USACE retains Section 404 permitting jurisdiction in Rivers and Harbors Act waters and their adjacent wetlands, while FDEP implements the permitting program in all other WOTUS in the state. FDEP has recently stated it will continue to implement the NWPR in Florida for now while it works on rulemaking addressing jurisdictional delineations of WOTUS.
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