A total of eighteen interest groups including oil and housing interests filed a 42-page lawsuit asking the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Texas in Galveston to vacate the final WOTUS rule.  The lawsuits were filed even though the new WOTUS rule does not officially become law until sometime around March 1.

The lawsuit asks the court to find the WOTUS rule to be "arbitrary, capricious, and abuse of discretion" and allege that much of the language used in the final rule is "vague" and left wide open to interpretation.

Agriculture interests supported the previous Navigable Waters Protection Rule because it allowed landowners to more easily decipher whether their properties contained WOTUS.

The new rule requires landowners to "assess not only their own land, but also vast expanses of land beyond their own holdings, using multiple vaguely defined connections to potentially remote features, in an effort to determine if their land is regulated under the CWA."