It’s not just New York City pools that are drowning in poop. According to a new report by Environment America’s Research & Policy Center, over 60 percent of U.S. beaches tested in 2024 were contaminated with unsafe levels of fecal bacteria at least once.

That’s right. There’s a good chance that during that wonderful 2024 family beach trip, you and your loved ones might have been sloshing around in a soup of feces.

The report, covered by The Hill, analyzed 3,187 beach sites using data from the National Water Quality Monitoring Council. They found 1,930 of them exceeded the EPA’s Beach Action Value—a kind of benchmark used to determine whether water is too gross for swimming.

They didn’t just test these beaches once before moving on to the next. Each was tested for multiple days. Nearly 1 in 7 beaches were deemed potentially unsafe a quarter of the time they were tested. That’s a total of 453 beaches that were brimming with unsafe levels of poop for 25 percent of the days tested.

America’s Beaches Are Full of Poop—and Congress Might Be About to Make It Worse

The most poop-laden beaches could be found along the Gulf Coast. Or to be more precise about it, the newly minted Gulf of America is choked with poop. 84 percent of the Gulf America’s beaches had at least one day that it was absolutely choked with poop.

Next up was the West Coast, with 79 percent of its beaches being too fecal for human wading. Surprisingly, the Great Lakes were in third-place with 71 percent of its no-longer-freshwater filled with poop.

Of all major bodies of water connected to the continental United States, only the beaches on the East Coast even approached a near 50 percent split between fecal-free and fecally abundant, coming in at 54 percent.

The states that came out looking the best were the ones that have nothing to do with the continental United States: Alaska and Hawaii, each of which had only 10 percent of its beaches showing concerning levels of fecal contamination.

Healthwise, this is more than just icky and gross. This is dangerous. Swimming in contaminated water can lead to a bouquet of illnesses, from explosive diarrhea to ear infections. The report estimates that around 57 million cases of waterborne illness occur in the U.S. annually, most of which never get diagnosed at a doctor’s office, let alone a splashy headline.

This study lands just days after the July 4 weekend, when at least six beaches across the United States had to shut down due to excessive levels of harmful, mostly fecal, bacteria.

All that sounds bad, and it may only get worse from here: the EPA says we’ll need $630 billion over the next 20 years to update our water systems, and yet the one federal program aimed at cleaning up our wastewater and stormwater infrastructure, the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, may be on the chopping block.

The 2026 federal budget proposal, however, suggests we may instead cut funding, because the modern Republican politician’s definition of public service is ensuring that our shared public waters are fetid disease cesspools that give us violent diarrhea. Republicans are once again proving that good governance is when you look problems square in the eye and then run screaming in the other direction.