How Trump slowed the fight against ‘forever chemicals’

In 2016, US President Barack Obama signed a major overhaul of the nation’s chemicals law, the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act. The 2016 amendments marked a change in how the agency handled new chemicals — which would need to be proven innocent to enter the market, rather than proven guilty to be eliminated.

Previously, certain chemicals “would go out onto the market” unregulated if Environmental Protection Agency toxicologists couldn’t come up with data as to why they shouldn’t, said Maria Doa, who directed the EPA’s Chemical Control Division in 2016.

Thanks to the 2016 updates, the agency at least now had a better suite of tools to deal with new chemicals. But this upswing in regulation was relatively short lived, as the first Donald Trump administration came to power in 2017.

“January came and then we were still kind of going along,” Doa said, “until the new folks came on board — the new political folks — and then things got more complicated.”

When Trump took office, the EPA had just seen a resurgence of attention on PFAS, a group of toxic and pervasive compounds that have been used in a wide range of everyday products to make them nonstick, waterproof and stain resistant. In 2018, the agency put forward a four-step plan:

1. Evaluate whether it should set a drinking water limit for PFOA and PFOS, two particularly toxic types of “forever chemicals.”
2. Take steps toward proposing to designate PFOA and PFOS as “hazardous substances” — a move that could obligate historic polluters to clean them up.
3. Develop groundwater cleanup recommendations for these two chemicals.
4. Assess the toxicity of GenX, which was used as a replacement for PFOA, and another PFAS, called PFBS, which was used as a replacement for PFOS.

In practice, however, activists, Democratic politicians, and many career EPA staffers raised concerns about how the Trump administration went about tackling the chemicals. Critics complained that the administration took years to evaluate whether to set drinking water limits — instead of actually doing so — and thereby delayed the rollout long-term.

Officials alleged that the Trump administration took a similar approach to cleanup. Jim Woolford, a former EPA official, said that in April 2019, his office was charged with urgently writing a rule that would designate PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances. While his staff wrote the rule in a matter of a few months and he was told the administrator’s office received it that autumn, he lamented that it was like “waiting for Godot, because it just sat there.”

By the time Woolford retired in April 2020, the rule still hadn’t come out. And the version that the agency did ultimately publish in January 2021 had a key difference. Instead of issuing a proposed rule, as had been drafted by Woolford’s staff, the EPA released an alert about its future intentions to do so — meaning, rather than moving one step forward, it effectively started the entire process over again. Those delays in regulation, Woolford contended, had the potential to cause further harm to communities struggling with the impacts of PFAS contamination.

Steven Cook, a Trump EPA appointee, said that career staffers were the ones hesitant to move forward because such action “hadn’t been done before.”

He contended that the EPA ultimately landed on issuing a notice that it could propose a rule — rather than actually proposing one — because the agency had not yet publicly laid out all of the pros and cons of pursuing a hazardous substance designation. The very creation of the advance notice could “create that record,” while floating some ideas and getting feedback from members of the public, according to Cook.

In terms of timing, Cook attributed the holdup to the 2020 election. He also described an agency that was trying to solve a problem but also maintain its corporate-friendly and “deregulatory” political stance.

Whatever the reason for the delay, sites around the country were anxiously awaiting the “hazardous” designation.

When it came to determining whether and how severely newer PFAS were toxic, Trump-appointed officials have been accused of straight-up changing the science — particularly when it came to assessing the risks of substances like PFBS, which replaced the now-phased out PFOS in products like firefighting foam. Instead of following career staff recommendations to assign PFBS with just one number to reflect a toxicity-related value, Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, whose 40-year EPA career included directing the agency’s National Exposure Research Lab and holding a leadership role in its Office of Research and Development, said that political officials offered a range of numbers — leaving room for interpretation about how toxic the substance actually was.

“That’s a pretty unfounded approach,” she stated, noting that such a range could allow bad-faith actors to cherry-pick the most favorable number and leave often good-faith actors like states with less precise information about the substance’s degree of toxicity.

In response, David Dunlap, an EPA official during the first Trump administration, has argued that this was not a science-integrity issue, but instead was a “compromise.” (The Biden administration later rescinded the Trump-era assessment.)

Under Trump, political appointees tried to repeat this behavior with an evaluation for GenX, recalled Betsy Behl, who worked on risk assessments at the agency.

“We were facing exactly the same issues… rewriting of things and the push to provide a range of numbers, not a single number,” she said.

Not only was the Trump administration’s EPA interfering with scientific endeavors and failing to limit exposure to existing PFAS chemicals, the agency was also approving new ones.

While the original Toxic Substances Control Act requires new chemicals to undergo safety reviews, a loophole called the Low Volume Exemption allows chemicals produced in small amounts to undergo a less rigorous review. EPA career officials said the Trump administration was able to use this escape clause to approve additional — and potentially dangerous — PFAS.

In 2018, the EPA used this exemption to approve a type of PFAS for use in ski wax — despite “uncertainty” as to whether the substance could waterproof a person’s lungs, making the organ’s air sacs unable to put oxygen into the blood.

In total, more than 600 different PFAS were approved under the exemption over the course of several decades Twenty-nine of those took place under Trump. And while most of these exemptions occurred in decades past, to some officials, recent advancements in the science and understanding of this family of chemicals made the new approvals particularly egregious.

Former EPA lawyer Mark Garvey said that when the agency was approving new PFAS, he was “just screaming bloody murder about ’how can we approve new chemicals to go out on the market while we’re saying that every time we turn around everything’s worse and worse? That we’re finding it in more places. That it’s more toxic than we thought. That it’s reacting differently.”