The Clean Water Act was amended in 1977 and again in 1987 to extend the deadlines for promulgation of and compliance with the standards. In addition, in 1987 the EPA was ordered to promulgate effluent guidelines for additional point source categories. The Clean Water Act was in the vanguard of a major change in the federal government’s regulation of economic activity. Up until the late 1960s, federal regulation tended to be economic, concerned with such matters as regulating the prices of goods or services produced by industries thought to be natural monopolies and whose activities crossed state.
