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During the middle of the 20th century, the goals of federal water regulation began to shift away from an exclusive focus on protecting navigability and toward a concern for preventing environmental degradation. Kalen, 69 N. D. L. Rev., at 877-879, and n. 30. This awakening of interest in the use of federal power to protect the aquatic environment was helped along by efforts to reinterpret § 13 of the RHA in order to apply its permit requirement to industrial discharges into navigable waters, even when such discharges did nothing to impede navigability. See, e. g., United States v. Republic Steel Corp., 362 U. S. 482, 490-491 (1960) (noting that the term "refuse" in § 13 was broad enough to include industrial waste).4 Seeds of this nascent concern with pollution control can also be found in the FWPCA, which was first enacted in 1948 and then incrementally expanded in the following years.5
4 In 1970, the House Committee on Government Operations followed the Court's lead and advocated the use of § 13 as a pollution control provision. H. R. Rep. No. 91-917, pp. 14-18 (1970). President Nixon responded by issuing Executive Order No. 11574, 35 Fed. Reg. 19627 (1970) (revoked by Exec. Order No. 12553, 51 Fed. Reg. 7237 (1986)), which created the Refuse Act Permit Program. Power, The Fox in the Chicken Coop: The Regulatory Program of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, 63 Va. L. Rev. 503, 512 (1977) (hereinafter Power). The program ended soon after it started, however, when a District Court, reading the language of § 13 literally, held the permit program invalid. Ibid.; see Kalur v. Resor, 335 F. Supp. 1, 9 (DC 1971).
5 The FWPCA of 1948 applied only to "interstate waters." § 10(e), 62 Stat. 1161. Subsequently, it was harmonized with the Rivers and Harbors Act such that—like the earlier statute—the FWPCA defined its jurisdiction with reference to "navigable waters." Pub. L. 89-753, § 211, 80 Stat. 1252. None of these early versions of the FWPCA could fairly be described as establishing a comprehensive approach to the problem, but they did contain within themselves several of the elements that would later be employed in the CWA. Milwaukee v. Illinois, 451 U. S. 304, 318, n. 10 (1981) (Rehnquist, J.) (Congress intended to do something "quite different" in the 1972 Act); 2 W. Rodgers, Environmental Law: Air and Water § 4.1, pp. 10-11 (1986) (describing the early versions of the FWPCA).
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