When Clean Becomes Too Clean
Judge Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute, makes a provocative case in Works in Progress: the federal government's water regulations have overshot their target so dramatically that they now cause more harm than the pollution they aim to prevent. The argument is not that clean water is bad. Rather, it is that the pursuit of ever-more-marginal purity has imposed staggering costs on cities and ratepayers while delivering negligible health benefits.
The article opens with a striking irony. San Francisco, one of the most environmentally progressive cities in America, found itself ordered by the EPA to spend nearly eleven billion dollars upgrading its sewage systems. That works out to roughly thirteen thousand dollars per resident. The city was not dumping raw sewage into the ocean. It was simply failing to meet standards that had been ratcheted ever higher by federal regulators operating far from the local consequences of their mandates.
A History Worth Celebrating
Glock's strongest move is grounding the argument in history. The development of municipal water systems in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was genuinely heroic. Cities like Chicago raised their entire downtown by a full story to install sewers. Poughkeepsie pioneered slow sand filtration in 1872. Chlorination, introduced in the early twentieth century, was one of the most cost-effective public health interventions in human history.
Researchers concluded that half the overall mortality, two thirds of the child mortality, and three quarters of the infant mortality reduction in the early twentieth century were down to clean water.
These improvements were driven by local governments, state boards of health, and civic engineers who understood their own systems intimately. The key point is not merely historical nostalgia. It is that local accountability produced extraordinary results because the people paying for improvements were the same people benefiting from them.
The Federal Takeover
The turning point came in the 1970s. The Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, though it was extinguished in thirty minutes and was hardly unusual for that era, became a national symbol. Two Senate staffers, one Republican and one Democrat, drafted legislation that would centralize water policy in Washington. As Glock notes, the staffers and their activist allies had a particular disdain for the local officials who had actually been making progress.
The staff members who worked on the bill generally scorned state water pollution control officials.
The Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 shifted authority from local governments to federal regulators. President Gerald Ford himself worried about the "extensive Federal involvement in what has traditionally been state and local regulatory matters," but signed the bill anyway. What followed was a half century of escalating mandates.
The Cost-Benefit Problem
The numbers Glock marshals are striking. The United States has spent approximately five trillion dollars fighting water pollution since 1970, roughly 0.8 percent of annual GDP over that period. This makes clean water "arguably the most expensive environmental investment in US history," exceeding even air pollution regulations. Yet the EPA's own analyses show that surface water regulations are the one category where estimated costs exceed estimated benefits.
The case studies are damning. New York City, famous for its pristine tap water, was forced to build a filtration plant for its Croton aqueduct to address two minor parasites. The plant took a decade longer than planned, cost 3.2 billion dollars (more than double the original estimate), and infections from the targeted parasites actually increased after it opened. Jefferson County, Alabama, was pushed into the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history after EPA-mandated sewer upgrades ballooned its debt from 300 million to over 3 billion dollars.
The city's Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection noted that although the investments were massive, to the public the water would basically be 'the same'.
Even the EPA's recent PFAS rule, finalized in 2024, estimated benefits of 1,549.4 million dollars against costs of 1,548.6 million dollars -- a margin so thin it strains credulity. The American Water Works Association puts the actual costs at double the EPA's estimate.
The Counterpoint: Why Federal Oversight Exists
Glock's argument, however, has some notable gaps. The reason the federal government intervened in the first place was not arbitrary. Many local governments were, in fact, derelict. The Cuyahoga River had caught fire repeatedly for decades before the famous 1969 incident. Industrial polluters captured local regulators. Communities downstream from polluters had no recourse against upstream cities and factories operating under friendly state rules. The externality argument for federal intervention was and remains real: rivers do not respect municipal boundaries.
The article acknowledges this only in passing, noting that interstate issues like the Ohio River were handled by interstate compacts. But those compacts were notoriously weak and poorly enforced. The very reason activists pushed for federal legislation was that decades of local control had left many waterways in appalling condition. Cleveland voters may have approved a cleanup bond in 1968, but the river had been catching fire since 1868.
There is also a selection bias in the examples. New York's Croton filtration plant and Jefferson County's bankruptcy are genuine horror stories of regulatory overreach and mismanagement. But they are also outliers. Many EPA mandates have forced genuine improvements in water quality that local politics would not have delivered, particularly in lower-income communities with less political clout to resist industrial polluters.
The article also draws a parallel to nuclear regulation that deserves scrutiny. Nuclear power involves catastrophic tail risks and long-lived radioactive waste. Water treatment involves parasites that cause stomach cramps. Lumping them together under the umbrella of "safetyism" obscures important distinctions about when precaution is warranted.
Growth and Water: The Hidden Connection
Perhaps the most underappreciated section of the piece concerns how water regulations have become de facto growth controls. The EPA's authority to impose sewer moratoria means that communities can be legally barred from issuing building permits. Towns like Dunn, North Carolina and Epping, New Hampshire remain under such moratoria today, unable to grow until they spend tens of millions on upgrades.
This creates a perverse dynamic. Blocking sewer hookups does not eliminate the demand for housing. It pushes development to areas served by wells and septic tanks, which are typically more polluting per household than municipal systems. The regulations designed to protect water quality end up degrading it by encouraging sprawl.
Unlike most services or companies, which see their job as meeting consumer demand, utilities see their job as limiting it.
Glock's observation about the mentality of water utilities is sharp. Federal pricing mandates have created a system where utilities are actively discouraged from expanding service, even though the marginal cost of delivering additional water is low. Seventy percent of costs are fixed infrastructure, but seventy percent of revenue depends on consumption that the utility is simultaneously trying to reduce.
The Real Solution Hiding in Plain Sight
The article gestures toward market-based solutions -- cap-and-trade for water pollution, redirecting regulatory focus from urban point sources to agricultural nonpoint sources, and allowing water trades from low-value irrigation to high-value urban uses. These suggestions are sensible but underdeveloped. The politics of western water rights, agricultural subsidies, and rural-urban tensions make such reforms extraordinarily difficult regardless of what the EPA does.
The most compelling reform Glock identifies is also the simplest: stop regulating urban water systems as if they were the primary problem. By the EPA's own admission, nonpoint source pollution from agriculture is now the leading cause of water quality problems. Preventing a pound of pollutants from agricultural runoff costs less than a tenth of what it costs to squeeze it out of already-treated municipal water. The regulatory apparatus is fighting the last war.
Bottom Line
Glock makes a strong case that American water regulation has entered a zone of sharply diminishing returns. The great municipal water systems of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were genuine triumphs. But the federal regulatory apparatus built since the 1970s increasingly forces cities to spend billions chasing marginal improvements that their own residents would not choose to pay for. The argument is weakened by its insufficient engagement with the real failures of local governance that motivated federal intervention, and by its selective use of worst-case examples. Still, the core insight holds: when regulators are insulated from the costs they impose, they will always find one more part per billion to chase. American water is extraordinarily clean by historical and global standards. The question Glock raises -- whether making it infinitesimally cleaner justifies the enormous expense -- deserves a more honest answer than it has received.