Weaker regulations from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are putting millions at risk of higher exposure to deadly air pollutants, hundreds of former EPA scientists said in a new report. Published on February 27, “Terrible Toxics” found that under President Donald Trump, the EPA has abandoned safeguards necessary to protect communities’ health.
The Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit made up of over 700 former EPA officials, studied how a dozen toxic pollutants are poised to wreak even greater havoc due to recent EPA rollbacks. This includes air pollutants that have been linked to respiratory diseases, reproductive health harms, and early deaths: particulate matter, ozone, benzene, formaldehyde, and vinyl chloride. Human Rights Watch has documented how air pollution often directly harms front line communities, which frequently includes low-income communities of color.
According to the report, the EPA is worsening exposure to these air pollutants by repealing emissions standards for power plants, delaying requirements for the oil and gas industry to cut pollution, and ending its longstanding policy of considering health costs when determining pollutant limits. These pollutants, most of which are also known carcinogens, are emitted at dangerous levels by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry.
In 2024, Human Rights Watch found that communities at the front lines of these industry operations in Louisiana face elevated risks of cancer, respiratory ailments, and reproductive and newborn health harm. That 85-mile corridor known as “Cancer Alley” was singled out in the EPN report as being especially threatened by the Trump EPA’s sweeping reversal of regulations.
“When EPA weakens standards on all five pollutants at once, [Cancer Alley] residents don’t face five separate health burdens,” the report said. “They face a multiplied, cumulative health burden. Children breathe a chemical cocktail daily.”
The former EPA scientists also chided the agency for dismantling protections for communities of color, who are among those who will suffer most from higher pollution. One of the earliest attacks on human rights under Trump’s EPA was the shuttering of environmental justice offices that invested in preventing and addressing environmental harm disproportionately concentrated within Black and minority communities.
The EPA under Trump should stop its assault on regulations essential to protect the health of millions of US residents. By providing the fossil fuel industry with greater leeway to contaminate the air, the rights of communities at the front lines are being needlessly sacrificed.
