President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that puts an end to a 17-year-old Chesapeake Bay mandate. Federal Cabinet departments, under the order, are to shift support to projects that demonstrate the ability to reduce runoff.
Dated Sept. 16, the order cancels Executive Order 13508 from May 12, 2009, which the White House says told states and cities to help restore the bay but without providing details on how to do so. Local governments used that order as a basis for levying stormwater fees, often called rain taxes, that the new order says can run to hundreds of dollars a year for households and small businesses.
Nothing in the 2009 text required those fees, according to Wednesday’s order. States nevertheless used them to pay for stormwater systems, “whether or not it contributes to the environmental health of the Chesapeake Bay.”
The Chesapeake is the country’s largest estuary, according to the order, and it also carries real economic weight for the communities located around it and those farther upstream.
Federal, state, and local environmental work since 2009 has already moved the numbers in a positive direction, according to the order. As of 2025, the watershed jurisdictions had met 100 percent of their sediment-reduction goal, 90 percent of the phosphorus goal, and 57 percent of the nitrogen goal. These jurisdictions include New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Delaware, and West Virginia.
The order says that work has restored thousands of acres of reefs and lines up with the 2025 revised Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, which the federal government and the agencies named in the new directive.
Scientists from the College of William & Mary, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, FlowWest, and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science reported in 2026 that the bay’s annual dead zone is projected to be among the smallest since 1985, about 31 percent below the long-term average.
Given that record, the White House said it made sense to pull the old order.
Cabinet secretaries at War, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and Homeland Security, plus the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, must review what their departments now spend on the bay. Fiscal and staff resources are to go to “more direct, on-the-ground projects, in areas of highest need.”
Any agency still directing funds toward the bay has to peel money off work that can’t show progress and direct it toward projects that reduce nutrient and sediment runoff into the bay and the rivers that feed it.
The EPA gets a separate assignment under the executive order: sit down with Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. That means assessing what stormwater fees cost residents, looking for ways to protect the bay without raising household bills, and taking steps to encourage states and localities to repeal those fees.
What follows from the order is designed to rely on verifiable numbers—sediment, phosphorus, and nitrogen content, and water quality improvement.
The White House fact sheet that went out with the order states that the EPA, in fiscal 2026, streamlined the Chesapeake Bay Program, folded assistance agreements together, and shaved nearly $1 million off yearly administrative spending. Those reforms enabled the EPA to award the six watershed states and the District of Columbia $2.7 million more than in fiscal 2025.
The order does not create a private right to sue for violations. It runs subject to existing law and available appropriations. The EPA covers the cost of its publication.
The Chesapeake order is one of a number of water-related actions recently taken by the government. In May 2026, the EPA said it was sending almost $2.9 billion to states to replace lead service lines, using maps of roughly 4 million lines. “An investment in removing lead pipes is an investment in America’s children and families,” EPA Assistant Administrator for Water Jess Kramer said.
In January 2026, the agency proposed narrowing how states and tribes use Clean Water Act Section 401 reviews of major projects, confining them to direct discharges into federally covered waters. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the proposal “restores the Clean Water Act to its intended purpose, protecting America’s water quality and ending the weaponization of the law that has been obstructing infrastructure and energy projects vital to our nation’s economy.”
In November 2025, the EPA put forth a revised Waters of the United States rule that would shrink federal reach over non-navigable waters, saying states and tribes “know their local land and water resources best.”
On June 25, 2024, EPA said it was sending $22.4 million in grants toward Chesapeake restoration, noting that the Innovative Nutrient & Sediment Reduction program had spent more than $200 million on 250 projects since 2006. Those projects cut 36 million pounds of nitrogen, 9 million pounds of phosphorus, and nearly 800,000 tons of sediment discharge.
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said at the time that while the dead zone was shrinking, urban and suburban runoff into the bay was still climbing and oyster crops were “still not even close to their historic levels.”
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