Must-read recap: The New Lede's top stories

A new bid to safeguard the Mississippi River; For a second time, US court bans dicamba weed killers, finds EPA violated law.

A new bid to safeguard Mississippi River amid growing environmental concerns

A proposal to create a federal funding program to protect the Mississippi River is back in front of Congress.

Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin announced last week that she plans to introduce the Mississippi River Restoration and Resilience Initiative in the Senate. Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota will bring the same bill forward in the House.

The proposal is nearly the same as one introduced by McCollum in 2021. It’s modeled after programs that protect other major bodies of waters across the US, like the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and the Chesapeake Bay Program.

Advocates for the Mississippi River argue that the river is long overdue to have its own such program. Millions of Americans rely on it for drinking water, commerce and recreation, and its floodplains provide food and habitat for hundreds of fish and wildlife species. But it’s facing a multitude of challenges, from extreme weather to habitat loss to persistent agricultural and industrial pollution. That pollution contributes to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which last year was almost as big as Yellowstone Park. (Read the rest of the story.)

For a second time, US court bans dicamba weed killers, finds EPA violated law

Dealing a blow to three of the world’s biggest agrochemical companies, a US court last week banned three weed killers widely used in American agriculture, finding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law in allowing them to be on the market.

The ruling is specific to three dicamba-based weed killers manufactured by Bayer, BASF and Syngenta, which have been blamed for millions of acres of crop damage and harm to endangered species and natural areas across the Midwest and South.

This is the second time a federal court has banned these weed killers since they were introduced for the 2017 growing season. In 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued its own ban, but months later the Trump administration re-approved the weed killing products, just one week before the presidential election at a press conference in the swing state of Georgia. 

But a federal judge in Arizona ruled late Monday that the EPA made a crucial error in re-approving dicamba, finding the agency did not post it for public notice and comment as required by law. US District Judge David Bury wrote in a 47-page ruling that it is a “very serious” violation and that if EPA did do a full analysis, it likely would not have made the same decision. (Read the rest of the story.)