November, 18 2015, 11:30am EDT
New Report: Water Quality Trading Schemes Quietly Upending Clean Water Act in More Than 20 U.S. States
One scheme in Ohio allowed for a 600 percent increase in wastewater discharge beyond Clean Water Act limits
WASHINGTON
oday Food & Water Watch released a report outlining how overly complex programs of water pollution trading (also known as water quality trading, or nutrient trading) are being quietly implemented across the country with the active endorsement and funding of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The report, which looks closely at the implementation of water pollution trading in Pennsylvania and Ohio, is based on over 1,000 documents obtained by Food & Water Watch through the states' Right to Know Law and Freedom of Information Act, respectively. The analysis reveals a broken system of inherently unaccountable and highly questionable practices, through which agricultural operations such as confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs, or factory farms) will only continue to pollute our waterways, while power plants and other pollution sources that purchase credits will get to discharge more.
"Water pollution trading proponents trumpet successes, but scrutiny of these programs tells a different story," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. "Pollution trading destroys accountability and the rights of citizens to protect their waterways -- cornerstones of the Clean Water Act -- yet some, astonishingly, continue to hold up the practice as the future of pollution control."
Some of the findings of the report, Water Quality Trading: Polluting Public Waterways for Private Gain, include:
- In Pennsylvania, all of the authority, verification and trading of water pollution credits has been placed in the hands of for-profit companies like Red Barn. A significant number of pollution credits in the state is being generated through what can only be described as a shell game, whereby piles of manure move from place to place to pollute local waterways while middlemen brokers skim profits from sales of highly questionable credits.
- Water pollution trading has put an end to accountable Clean Water Act permitting at Brunner Island, the 59th most polluting power plant in the United States. Brunner Island now operates under a fictitious "net zero" nutrient discharge permit, whereby the facility is free to discharge as much nutrient pollution as it can purchase credits for. It was the third largest buyer of nitrogen credits in Pennsylvania in both 2013 and 2014, purchasing 87,000 credits in 2013 and 78,000 in 2014 -- amounting to almost 10 percent of all credits purchased statewide in those years.
- Under its expansion and subsequent participation in the Ohio River Basin trading program, Alpine Cheese Company was permitted to increase its phosphorous discharge levels to 36.4 million gallons per year -- a 600 percent increase in wastewater discharge over what should have been allowed to protect local water quality. Between 1999 and 2014, the company had 1,251 permit violations -- the bulk of them occurring between 2005 and 2011, while the nutrient trading pilot program was being developed and later implemented.
According to the report, with the use of water pollution trading, our transparent, accountable Clean Water Act system of point source regulation is being replaced with one that makes it virtually impossible for anyone to ever properly track point source compliance. The credits that these facilities rely on are not the product of any measured decrease in pollutant loads from credit-generating agricultural sources like factory farms, but from complex models filled with variables and from questionable manure transport programs that simply move pollutants from one impaired waterway to another.
"I've spent many years confronting factory farms and their irresponsible waste disposal practices that are poisoning waterways and communities, including Toledo, Ohio, where 500,000 people lost their drinking water in the summer of 2014 because of unchecked agricultural pollution," said Lynn Henning, regional associate for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project and recipient of the 2010 Goldman Environmental Prize. "To clean up these facilities, we need mandatory reductions, not another voluntary scheme like pollution trading where factory farms can profit from the sale of unverified pollution credits."
Regional water pollution trading programs are taking off in the watersheds of the Chesapeake Bay and the Ohio River Basin, currently covering nine states: Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. Trading programs are also active in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Oregon and Wisconsin, and are under consideration in several other states.
"I work every day with communities across the Bay states, including Pennsylvania, who struggle to get access to clean water," said Maria Payan, regional consultant for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project. "Now, with pollution trading, one of our most important tools in that struggle -- the Clean Water Act -- is being taken away. We can no longer hold polluters accountable, when they simply buy their way out of permit compliance."
The report includes the following recommendations:
- Congress needs to reaffirm that the Clean Water Act does not allow for point source pollution trading.
- Federal agencies, particularly the U.S. Department of Agriculture, need to stop spending taxpayers' dollars to promote these pay-to-pollute schemes across the country.
- State and federal governments need to replace voluntary pollution control approaches with mandatory measures in the nonpoint source sector.
- Federal agencies must fund agricultural Best Management Practices without compromising current point source controls.
- The environmental community needs to wake up to the dangers of water pollution trading.
- Advocacy groups need to legally challenge water pollution trading programs.
"We cannot leave the fate of our waterways to the vagaries of the market," said Hauter. "Handing over pollution management to the same industry that brought us the mortgage crisis will spell the end of environmental protections that have helped keep our drinking water safe."
The report will is available at https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/insight/water-quality-trading-polluting-public-waterways-private-gain.
Food & Water Watch mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people's health, communities, and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
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A Secretive Program Has Let Cops Spend Hundreds of Millions on Weapons of War, Report Shows
“Our tax dollars are being weaponized against us,” said the head of the Center for International Policy.
Oct 31, 2025
State and local governments have spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars helping cops wage “war” against their own residents under a secretive and opaque program that allows the police to purchase discounted military-style equipment from the federal government.
Over the past three decades, the obscure 1122 Program has let states and cities equip local cops with everything from armored vehicles to military grade rifles to video surveillance tech, according to a report published Thursday by Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, part of the Center for International Policy.
Using open records requests, which were necessary due to the lack of any standardized auditing or record-keeping system for the program, the group obtained over $126 million worth of purchasing data across 13 states, four cities, and two counties since the program's creation in 1994. Based on these figures, they projected the total spending across all 50 states was likely in the "upper hundreds of millions of dollars."
“The 1122 Program diverts public money from essential community needs and public goods into military-style equipment for local police,” said Rosie Khan, the co-founder of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency. “The $126.87 million spent on militarized police equipment and surveillance technology could have instead provided housing support for 10,000+ people for a year, supplied 43 million school meals, or repaired roads and bridges in dozens of communities.”
Congress created the 1122 Program at the height of the War on Drugs, authorizing it under the 1994 National Defense Authorization Act to provide police departments with equipment to carry out counter-drug operations. It was not the first program of its kind, but followed in the footsteps of the more widely known 1033 Program, which has funneled over $7 billion of excess military equipment to police departments.
But there are a few critical differences: 1033 is subject to rigorous federal record-keeping, while 1122 has no such requirement. And unlike 1033, which transfers equipment that was already purchased but not needed, 1122 allows states and cities to spend money to purchase new equipment.
The program's scope ballooned dramatically in 2009 after another NDAA added "homeland security" and "emergency response" missions to its purview. As the report explains, "no regulatory mechanisms are ensuring that equipment is used for counter-drug, homeland security, or emergency response purposes. In fact, the scope of these missions was never defined."
Increasingly, it has been used to provide police with equipment that has often been deployed against protesters, including $6.2 million for weapons, weapons training, and riot gear. Among the equipment purchased in this category was pepper spray, batons, gas masks, and riot shields.
By far, the largest expenditures under the program have been the more than $85 million spent on various armored trucks, vans, and sedans.
Police departments have spent an additional $6 million to purchase at least 16 Lenco BearCats, which cost around $300,000 apiece. These were among the military vehicles used by police to suppress the racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020.
As recently as October 3, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were documented aboard a Bearcat in full military garb and menacing protesters with sniper rifles outside the notorious immigrant detention facility in Broadview, Illinois.
In July, Los Angeles ICE agents were filmed using a vehicle to run over multiple protesters who attempted to block their path.
Another $9.6 million was spent on surveillance equipment, including license plate readers, video and audio recording devices, and subscriptions to spying software that uses sophisticated facial recognition and social media monitoring technology to track people's movements and associations.
The report highlights the increasing use of this technology by college police departments, like Northern Virginia Community College, which spent over $2.7 million on surveillance tech through 1122. College police departments have used this sort of technology to go after student protesters and activists, especially amid last year's nationwide explosion of pro-Palestine demonstrations across campuses.
At Yale, which has made "surveillance cameras, drones, and social media tracking... standard tools in the police department's arsenal," one student was apprehended last year and charged with a felony for removing an American flag from its pole using the school's surveillance system.
The report's authors call for Congress to sunset the 1122 Program and direct its funding toward "a version of public safety that prioritizes care, accountability, and community well-being rather than militarized force."
“Lawmakers, including federal and state legislators and city council representatives," it says, "must act with the urgency that this moment requires to prevent a catastrophically violent takeover of civil society by police, federal agents, and corporations profiting from exponentially increasing surveillance, criminalization, and brute force.”
They note the increasing urgency to end the program under President Donald Trump, who—on the first day of his second term—reversed an executive order from former President Joe Biden that restricted the sale of some of the most aggressive weaponry to local police forces.
“Local police have been given more avenues to arm themselves with military-style equipment during an era of heightened arrests, forced removals, and crackdowns on free speech. These disturbing political shifts have undermined the crucial work of coalitions for police accountability," the report says.
Nancy Okail, president and CEO of the Center for International Policy said: "Our tax dollars are being weaponized against us under the guise of ‘domestic terrorism.'”
"As talk of a ‘war from within’ grows louder," she says, the new report "exposes how this rhetoric fuels real assaults on democracy and civil rights.”
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"From the grocery aisles to the doctor’s office, Trump’s economic circus keeps jacking up costs and squeezing household budgets."
Oct 31, 2025
President Donald Trump's economic policies have put a damper on this year's Halloween festivities, as his tariffs on imported chocolate in particular have helped jack up the price of candy.
CNBC reported on Friday that data from research firm Circana and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show that chocolate prices in the US have jumped by 30% over the last year since Trump began slapping hefty tariffs on foreign goods, including staple products such as cocoa, coffee, and bananas that cannot be grown at sufficient scale in the US.
The increased cost of chocolate has now been passed on to consumers in the form of higher candy prices, according to a joint study released this week by The Century Foundation and Groundwork Collaborative.
According to the organizations' analysis, candy prices as a whole have gone up by just under 11% over the last year, which is more than triple the current overall rate of inflation.
Unsurprisingly, the analysis showed that these increases were particularly severe in candies that had significant chocolate inputs, as it found that "variety packs from Hershey’s (maker of KitKats, Twizzlers, Reeses, and Heath bars) are up 22%, while variety packs from Mars (maker of Milky Way, M&Ms, Three Musketeers, and Skittles) are up 12%."
The analysis also cited recent quotes from the CEOs of retail giants Target and Walmart indicating the president's tariffs were having a major impact on US consumers. Target CEO Brian Cornell, for instance, said on a recent earnings call that the tariffs had created a "challenging and highly uncertain" environment, while Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said that "costs increase each week" thanks to Trump's trade wars.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) used the organizations' study to rip the president for raising the price of Halloween candy in a video posted on social media.
"Do you remember when Donald Trump told American families to cut back on buying kids' dolls?" she asked, in reference to Trump earlier this year suggesting parents buy fewer toys for their children after his tariffs on imports raised their costs. "Well now he's making candy more expensive too, just in time for Halloween."
Donald Trump's jacked up candy prices — just in time for Halloween. pic.twitter.com/f3glomQbUK
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) October 31, 2025
The American Federation of Teachers, whose members have likely experienced the increased cost candy first hand, also took a shot at Trump's economic policies while posting a graph illustrating The Century Foundation and Groundwork Collaborative's study.
"The only thing scarier than Halloween costumes? The rising price of candy from Trump's tariffs," the union wrote on X.
Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, said that the increase in Halloween candy prices was just one source of pressure facing US families as a result of Trump's economic policies.
In particular, Jacquez pointed to the cuts to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid in the Republican Party's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as well as the GOP's inaction on extending tax credits for buying health insurance, as major pain points.
"While inflation eats through paychecks and House Republicans hide in plain sight, working families are slammed by soaring healthcare premiums, frozen food assistance, and rising bills," he said. "From the grocery aisles to the doctor’s office, Trump’s economic circus keeps jacking up costs and squeezing household budgets."
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The long backlog and a reporting protocol developed especially for Israel are likely to keep Israeli forces from being held accountable, said officials.
Oct 31, 2025
Progressive lawmakers and rights groups have long warned that by arming the Israel Defense Forces and providing the IDF with more than $21 billion, the US has violated its own laws barring the government from sending military aid to countries accused of human rights abuses and of blocking humanitarian relief.
On Thursday, a classified report by the US State Department detailed for the first time the federal government's own acknowledgment of the scale of alleged human rights abuses that the IDF has committed in Gaza since it began bombarding the exclave in October 2023.
The Office of the Inspector General's document, reported on by the Washington Post, which spoke to US officials about it, also detailed how allegations of human rights abuses against the Israeli military are made harder to prove by a vetting process that is only afforded to Israel—not other countries accused of violations.
The US officials said the long backlog of "many hundreds" of possible violations of the Leahy Laws, which bar US military assistance from going to units credibly accused of human rights abuses, would likely take years to review—calling into question whether the IDF will ever be held accountable for them.
"The lesson here is that if you commit genocide and war crimes, do as much as possible because then it becomes difficult to investigate everything," said journalist and Northwestern University professor Marc Owen Jones grimly in response to the Post's report.
The government report was described by the Post days after the State Department dismantled a website used to report human rights violations by foreign militaries that receive US aid, which was established in 2022 to ensure the US was in compliance with the Leahy Laws.
The Biden administration flagged at least two 2024 attacks by Israeli forces—one that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers and one known as the "flour massacre," in which more than 100 Palestinians were killed and nearly 800 were injured as they tried to get flour from aid trucks—as ones that may have used US weapons, signaling that continuing US aid to Israel would break the Leahy Laws.
“To date, the US has not withheld any assistance to any Israeli unit despite clear evidence."
A report by Amnesty International last year focused on several IDF attacks on civilian infrastructure—which killed nearly 100 people including 42 children—in which Israel used bombs and other weapons made by US companies such as Boeing.But just a week after the Amnesty analysis, the Biden administration told Congress in a mandated report that it was "not able to reach definitive conclusions" on whether Israel had used US-supplied weapons in attacks such as the one on the World Central Kitchen workers.
After the report of the new analysis, said University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, former President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken "cannot hide from responsibility" after they persistently defended and funded Israel's attacks on Gaza.
But along with the long backlog of potential human rights abuses, the so-called Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, which dates back to 2020, is likely to prevent the State Department from reviewing the allegations against the IDF.
The government's protocol for reviewing allegations against Israel differs from that of other countries; a US working group is required to “come to a consensus on whether a gross violation of human rights has occurred," with representatives of the US Embassy in Jerusalem among those who participate in the working group.
“To date, the US has not withheld any assistance to any Israeli unit despite clear evidence,” Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in the early weeks of Israel's war on Gaza over the Biden administration's military support, told the Post.
Shahed Ghoreishi, a former State Department communications official who was fired earlier this year after pushing for the agency to condemn ethnic cleansing and other abuses in Gaza, said it was "predictable" that the State Department declined to answer questions from the Post about the inspector general's report.
"There may be nothing that can excuse the brushing of crimes under the rug," said Ghoreishi, "but ducking questions and hoping it goes away (including no more State Department press briefings) is an abdication of responsibility to the American people."
The inspector general's report was compiled days before Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire agreement earlier this month; the deal is still formally in place, but Israel has continued carrying out strikes, killing more than 800 Palestinians since it was signed.
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