Montana’s Water Quality Integrated Report remains under federal review as politics override science
On Wednesday, July 15, 2026, Upper Missouri Waterkeeper filed a 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its failure to take action on Montana’s 2022-2024 Water Quality Integrated Report. The EPA has a nondiscretionary duty under the Clean Water Act (CWA) Section 303(c)(3), 33 U.S.C. § 1313(c)(3) to act on the submission of an impaired waters list within thirty days. The State of Montana submitted the report to EPA for approval on June 12, 2026, and as of today, the EPA has yet to take action.
“It’s a sad reality that it takes a lawsuit to make the government do its job. Agencies cannot simply choose not to act, disregard best available science, and let politics determine whether Montana’s waters receive the protections they deserve and the law requires,” said Guy Alsentzer, Executive Director of Upper Missouri Waterkeeper. “Montana’s rivers can’t afford unnecessary delays. When the government drags its feet and politics usurps science, river management stalls and pollution problems get worse, not better.”
The Integrated Report is the State’s biannual assessment of water quality and impaired waterways, required under the federal Clean Water Act. The Report compiles available scientific data to identify impaired waterways that are not attaining their designated uses, such as protecting aquatic life or public water supply. Over the past dozen years, Integrated Reports have consistently identified nutrient pollution as the cause of nearly 20% of impairments on Montana’s assessed waters.
The 2022-2024 Integrated Report is riddled with problems.
From a timeline perspective, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) delayed issuing a timely 2022 Integrated Report during FY 2022 in light of EPA’s May 20, 2022 Action Letter striking down Senate Bill 358, which attempted to eliminate numeric nutrient standards and expand new nutrient pollution exemptions for sprawl development. During FY23-24, DEQ unsuccessfully attempted to craft an equally protective, science-based approach to narrative nutrient regulation, an effort that failed in the face of widespread public and scientific opposition. Simultaneously, DEQ refused to issue or renew the vast majority of surface water discharge permits in the State, as doing so would require the application of numeric nutrient criteria. To avoid conflict with EPA and another legal reckoning, one of the few options left to DEQ was, at the behest of the polluter-friendly Montana Legislative majority, to delay. And that’s exactly what the agency did by refusing to compile and submit the primary – and wildly successful – river restoration tool established over fifty years ago: the biannual impaired waters list, an action that triggers the mandatory development of Total Maximum Daily Loads (aka, pollution cleanup plans).
More than twenty-five years ago in the landmark case of Friends of the Wild Swan et al v. US EPA et al, EPA and the State of Montana were sued for their failure to take action on degraded waterways that require pollution clean up plans. That case resulted in a national precedent reaffirming the nondiscretionary duty of state regulators to develop science-based clean-up plans for waters determined impaired. Yet now, in 2026, DEQ appears poised to make strikingly similar legal errors as those declared unlawful by the federal courts: instead of refusing to develop river pollution clean-up plans (the issue in Friends of the Wild Swan), now our regulators believe they can simply not identify pollution or impairments despite best available science demonstrating otherwise.
Making the past years of DEQ’s regulatory delay more absurd, and egregious, is the scientific community’s – including the EPA and DEQ – recognition that numeric nutrient criteria and numeric dissolved oxygen criteria are essential for making defensible, science-based decisions that prevent pollution before it occurs, and guides important restoration efforts for impaired waterways.
Coming full circle as we all now know, Montana, for the third time, abandoned those proactive and protective numeric standards under House Bill 664 of the 2025 Legislative Session, and Waterkeeper, for the third time, is challenging that decision in federal court. DEQ claims that numeric criteria are unnecessary because the replacement narrative standards are sufficient. Meanwhile, DEQ has never established a clear, scientifically-defensible framework for implementing narrative standards.
Now in its 2022-24 Combined Integrated Report, DEQ is telling the EPA that it cannot make impairment determinations on nutrients and dissolved oxygen because it lacks the very criteria it previously argued were unnecessary or, in other circumstances, already existed. DEQ has thrown the precautionary approach – which entails reliance on the best-available scientific approach, numeric nutrient criteria – out the window without putting an effective replacement in place.
The only clear result of these government actions is regulatory paralysis. DEQ is saying it cannot make decisions using the numeric standards because they have been eliminated, yet it also cannot make decisions under a narrative approach because it has never developed the framework needed to implement it. In the meantime, water quality decisions are delayed, impairments go unrecognized, and pollution problems worsen while the state of Montana continues to lack a durable, science-based framework for fulfilling its duties under the Clean Water Act.
Yesterday’s 60 Day Notice of Intent to Sue sends a clear message that EPA must follow the law and exercise its authority to take formal action on Montana’s 2022-2024 Combined Integrated Report. If the agency fails to act within 30 days, Waterkeeper will take the issue to court.