As farm communities across the country contend with contamination, the agency gives utilities more years to limit dangerous chemicals in drinking water.
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As farm communities across the country contend with contamination, the agency gives utilities more years to limit dangerous chemicals in drinking water.
May 14, 2025
May 14, 2025 – The Trump administration is rescinding several key protections meant to keep dangerous “forever chemicals” out of drinking water.
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The decision could have health implications in many farming and rural communities, where the hazardous chemicals have contaminated farm soils and water systems due to the use of sewage-sludge fertilizers. Chemicals in the same family are also increasingly used in pesticides.
In an announcement Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says it is stepping away from protections announced in April 2024 that established hazard limits on the amount of these chemicals, known collectively as PFAS, which accumulate in the human body.
PFAS, officially called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, have wide-ranging health impacts on humans, according to the Centers For Disease Control. Exposure at certain levels can increase cholesterol, reduce birth weights, and cause preeclampsia and kidney and testicular cancer, among many other risks.
Drinking water contamination from these “forever chemicals,” so called because they do not break down easily, is widespread across the United States, according to research from the Environmental Working Group. EWG President Ken Cook called Wednesday’s announcement “a betrayal of public health at the highest level.”
The EPA says it will keep just two limits in place, on perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), though it is extending a deadline for compliance. That means that water utilities now have until 2031 to reduce these chemicals in drinking water.
The EPA says it will not keep limits in place for four other chemicals: PFNA, PFHxS, GenX, and PFBS.
The dangers of PFAS have received increasing public attention in recent years, and Biden’s EPA took several steps to begin to address them, including setting the first-ever limits in drinking water. During recent hearings, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has talked about how her mother, a Texas state legislator, is focused on the issue. “She was so stunned by what had happened to these farmers, specifically through PFAS contamination. It destroyed their lives,” Rollins told Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) last week. The USDA, she said, is committed to supporting research on addressing PFAS contamination. (Link to this post.)
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