WASHINGTON— The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s failure to ensure pesticides sprayed directly into water bodies and streams to control weeds and mosquitoes, and for other purposes, aren’t harming protected plants and animals.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, takes aim at the numerous deficiencies of the EPA’s “pesticide general permit” under the Clean Water Act. The permit’s shortcomings are so substantial they prompted both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service to conclude it would jeopardize the existence of hundreds of threatened and endangered plants and animals.

“The EPA’s pesticide general permit creates a virtual free-for-all where most pesticide users aren’t even required to identify the pesticide being used or where it’s being sprayed directly into lakes and streams,” said Allison LaPlante, a senior environmental health attorney at the Center. “The agency is allowing nearly all pesticide applicators to continue spraying chemicals made to kill with no measures to ensure wildlife and water quality will be protected.”

In their reviews of the pesticide general permit, the two expert wildlife agencies concluded that the permit would push all affected species toward extinction, including Pacific salmon, Atlantic sturgeon, northern bog turtles and whooping cranes.

The two agencies reached these conclusions because the permit does so little to limit the harm of pesticide spraying in waterways. For example, it allows roughly 97% of pesticide applicators to avoid even basic application procedures such as conducting meaningful reporting and monitoring or agreeing to use less harmful pesticides whenever possible. As the Fish and Wildlife Service noted, “this makes it impossible for EPA to fully understand the scope and effects of those discharges, or whether these discharges are complying with” the permit.

“The Trump administration is telling us it wants to make America healthy again by reining in dangerous pesticides, and this is its chance,” said LaPlante. “This profoundly inadequate permit allowing unchecked spraying of harmful poisons into waterways is indefensible. The Trump team should go back to the drawing board and craft a new plan that prevents pesticide users from routinely polluting the waterways Americans depend on for clean drinking water, safe recreation and healthy food.”

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.