By Jan Wolfe
March 9 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a bid by President Donald Trump’s administration to dismiss a challenge by environmentalists to the U.S. Air Force’s practice of detonating hazardous waste explosives on a beach in Guam.
The justices agreed to hear the Justice Department’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling allowing a lawsuit pursued by the environmental groups Prutehi Guahan and Earthjustice accusing the Air Force of ignoring a requirement under federal law to assess the environmental impact of a practice like this one.
Since 1982, the Air Force has disposed of hazardous munitions such as tear gas and propellants on Tarague Beach, a restricted-access location in Guam, a U.S. territory roughly 3,800 miles (6,100 km) from Hawaii that acts as an anchor for military operations in the Western Pacific.
Tarague Beach serves as a nesting habitat for the endangered turtles and sits above an aquifer that provides more than 80% of the island’s population with drinking water.
The U.S. government, under both Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden, has sought to have the lawsuit thrown out. After a federal trial judge dismissed the lawsuit, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it last year.
The government has said that the arguments made by the plaintiffs would burden the U.S. military and federal agencies with unnecessary environmental permitting requirements that Congress never contemplated when it passed the mandates at issue.
The Air Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Now that the Supreme Court has decided to hear the case, we will continue to defend Guam residents’ ability to protect their health, their land and their resources,” Earthjustice lawyer David Henkin said.
The dispute concerns the National Environmental Policy Act, a law from 1970 requiring federal agencies to produce “environmental impact statements” – documents that assess the environmental consequences of proposed major federal actions.
In 2021, the Air Force asked Guam regulators to renew a permit to conduct open burning and open detonation of hazardous waste at Tarague Beach, located near Andersen Air Force Base. Prutehi Guahan, an environmental protection nonprofit in Guam, challenged the legality of the move in court. It is represented in the case by lawyers at Earthjustice.
Prutehi Guahan argued that, before seeking the permit renewal, the Air Force was legally required to assess the environmental impact of its waste disposal practices and propose alternatives. The suit seeks a court order requiring the Air Force to produce an environmental impact statement.
A federal judge in Guam dismissed the case, saying Prutehi Guahan lacked standing to sue. But a 9th Circuit three-judge panel ruled 2-1 to revive the case, agreeing with Prutehi Guahan that the Air Force needed to conduct an environmental impact assessment before submitting a permit-renewal application.
In appealing to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department argued that the Air Force did not need to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act because it had followed steps mandated under a different law, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, which regulates the disposal of hazardous waste.
The 9th Circuit’s decision threatens to “inflict significant burdens on both federal courts and federal agencies in the form of premature and duplicative judicial and administrative proceedings, and to impede state and federal agencies’ performance of their permitting responsibilities,” the Justice Department wrote.
The Supreme Court is due to hear the case during its next term, which begins in October.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
