The PFAS Clock Is Ticking & Washington Just Hit Snooze.

The EPA Handed Industry A Massive Win & Are Hawking It As Progress.

Photo by Mishaal Zahed (Meschael Zahède) on Unsplash

I’ve been doing this work long enough to know what a con looks like.

It doesn’t announce itself. It comes dressed in words like “gold-standard science,” “legally defensible,” and “practical implementation.”

It arrives with press releases and officials standing at podiums. It sounds almost reasonable, if you don’t know what to look for.

They Call It “Making America Healthy Again.”

This week, the Trump EPA announced what it called a “comprehensive strategy” to address PFAS, the forever chemicals that have contaminated the blood of virtually every person in the U.S. today, even newborn babies. The announcement came with $1 billion in grant funding, talk of cutting-edge destruction technologies, and solemn promises to follow the science.

If you need a PFAS primer, go here.

Buried in the careful language of a press release was the gutting of protections for 4 of the 6 chemicals that the previous administration had finally, FINALLY, after decades of industry obstruction, brought under enforceable limits. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, you can catch up on the 2024 ruling here.

The EPA is now proposing to withdraw regulations for PFNA, PFHxS, GenX and PFBS, chemicals its own scientists have documented as serious health threats, on the grounds that the previous administration made a procedural error. And for PFOA and PFOS, the two most studied forever chemicals, water systems can now apply for a two-year delay, pushing compliance to 2031.

Delay. Delay. Delay.

Communities across this country have been drinking PFAS-contaminated water since the 1950s and 1960s, when companies like 3M and DuPont began releasing these chemicals into the environment while hiding what they knew about the consequences. They kept their own science hidden from the public and paid legal fees instead of pulling harmful products from the market.

By consequences, I mean cancer, immune suppression, and other health issues.

PFAS are toxic even at low levels of exposure and can build up in the body.

Very low doses of PFAS have been linked to suppression of the immune system. Studies show exposure to PFAS can also increase the risk of cancer, harm fetal development, and cause other serious health problems.

In my 2024 New York Times op-ed leading up to the last election, I wrote about Amara Strande, who grew up near a 150-square-mile plume of contaminated groundwater in Minnesota’s Twin Cities metro, the direct legacy of 3M’s decades of dumping. She testified before Minnesota lawmakers in support of legislation she believed could save people like her from the rare liver cancer she was facing. She died at 20, weeks before that law passed bearing her name.

There are more people like Amara, who are sick and dying because of these chemicals. A 2025 study found that PFAS in drinking water was responsible for up to 6,800 cancer cases a year in the U.S.

How can we afford to delay regulations and enforcement while contamination continues? What about all the people who don’t even know if their tap water contains PFAS yet?

A 2-Sided Agency

Now let me tell you what else I know, because the press release doesn’t tell you this part. The people currently running the EPA’s chemical safety operations are not neutral public servants.

Nancy Beck, now a senior EPA adviser, came directly from the American Chemistry Council, the most powerful lobbying force in the country fighting to keep PFAS in consumer products and out of federal regulation.

Lynn Dekleva, who spent decades at DuPont before joining the ACC, was placed in charge of approving new chemicals for market, and federal reports documented retaliation against employees who raised concerns.

Steven Cook, who built a career representing PFAS polluters, is now working to dismantle the very rules that would make those polluters pay for cleanup as a principal deputy within the EPA.

The revolving door between the chemical industry and the agency that is supposed to regulate it isn’t spinning anymore, it has been left open.

The money behind this effort is staggering. Since 2023, the coalition against PFAS regulation anchored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent nearly $273 million on lobbying. In the first half of 2025 alone, industry groups spent tens of millions lobbying the EPA and the White House specifically on PFAS.

When the EPA subsequently asked a federal appeals court to throw out four of the Biden-era PFAS water regulations, internal documents leaked to the press revealed the agency had changed its position after meeting with industry representatives.

Connect those dots yourself.

The Project 2025 Connection

None of this should surprise anyone who read Project 2025 carefully. Most people glazed over it or assumed it was too extreme to take seriously. But it was a blueprint, and we are now living inside it.

The Project 2025 chapter on the EPA mentions PFAS twice. The first mention sounds almost reasonable, it calls for revising groundwater cleanup regulations to better reflect the challenges posed by persistent contaminants. Fine.

But the second mention is where the ideology reveals itself: it calls for revisiting the designation of PFAS chemicals as hazardous substances under Superfund law. That designation is not a bureaucratic label; it’s a legal mechanism that makes polluters pay.

Without that designation of PFAS chemicals as “hazardous substances” under CERCLA, suddenly taxpayers, ratepayers, families who had nothing to do with creating the contamination become financially responsible for cleanup.

Stripping it away doesn’t just weaken regulation. It transfers the entire financial burden of decades of corporate malfeasance onto the communities that were already victimized by it.

When I read that, I thought about Amara Strande. I thought about the families in Minnesota’s eastern Twin Cities metro who spent years not knowing why their water was making them sick. I thought about the 3M executives who knew what their chemicals were doing and kept dumping anyway.

Project 2025 looked at that history and decided the problem was that the polluters were being held too accountable.

Now we see that blueprint being executed, agency appointment by agency appointment, proposed rule by proposed rule. These personnel decisions are not coincidences or accidents of a chaotic transition. They are the deliberate installation of industry operatives into the positions with the most power to dismantle the regulatory architecture that Project 2025 identified as the obstacle.

The press release talks about science and legal defensibility. The appointments tell you whose science and whose legal interests are being served.

The Water Crisis On Top Of It All

What makes this moment particularly ruthless is the financial trap it exploits.

America’s water infrastructure is in crisis that has nothing to do with PFAS. The American Water Works Association estimates that drinking water utilities need up to $2.4 trillion dollars in infrastructure upgrades through 2050.

Without massive new investment, water rates will more than double, pushing affordability beyond the reach of millions of households. Water systems are not imagining their financial distress. It is real, and it’s enormous.

So, when the EPA offers a 2-year compliance extension, many utilities will take it, not out of bad faith, but out of genuine desperation. And the industry knows it.

The financial pressure on water systems is the mechanism by which delay becomes acceptable, even welcomed.

It’s business as usual for the manufacturers and the lobbyists of these chemicals. It’s how the PFAS industry has delayed, weakened, and killed protective legislation across the country, state by state, year by year.

Listen, environmental failure is bipartisan, and I will say so as long as I have a voice. But what is happening right now, with these specific people in these specific positions doing these specific things, is not a failure of competence or resources. It is a policy choice. It is a decision made by people who know exactly what they are doing and who wrote down what they intended to do before they ever took office, to subordinate public health to industry profit.

The Data Center Connection & Playbook

Meanwhile, in Farmington, Minnesota, 30 minutes south of the Twin Cities, a group of families organized themselves into a coalition to fight a proposed hyperscale data center that would sit on property bounded by a trout stream. They have raised and spent a $100,000. They have filed lawsuits, organized rallies, worked with lobbyists, and shown up.

They are fighting not just for their neighborhood but for the 20+ other proposed sites across Minnesota, and for every community in this country that is about to discover what it means to have industrial infrastructure imposed on them without transparency, without consent, and without any honest accounting of what it will cost the water, the land, and the people.

Their fight and the PFAS fight are similar. They both show who gets to decide what goes into the water. They highlight whether the people who live somewhere have any real power against the industries and governments that want to use that somewhere for profit. They are about whether the law means anything when the people enforcing it came from the industry being regulated.

Plus, more research is showing that data centers are contributing to PFAS pollution.

I get emails every day from people who want someone to fight for them. They think I am a lawyer. I am not. What I am is someone who has spent decades watching the same con run by different actors, and I am not willing to pretend the new costumes make it a different show.

The EPA’s announcement calls its approach a “comprehensive, lifecycle-based strategy.” I see it more as a decision to let 176 million people in the U.S. continue drinking contaminated water, while the people responsible for that contamination write the rules about how long they get to keep doing it.

How do we know it’s 176 million people? That’s thanks to the EPA’s own tests of the nation’s drinking water supply conducted as part of the Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, or UCMR 5, which requires U.S. water utilities to test drinking water for PFAS compounds.

Project 2025 told us this “reframe” was coming. The appointments confirmed it. The proposed rules are just the paperwork.

We deserve better. We have always deserved better. The first step is refusing to be fooled by the language of people who are counting on our exhaustion and our confusion to keep us quiet.

The EPA press release said, “When a Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) is rushed, it minimizes the opportunity for meaningful public comment.” We’ve been dragging our feet on this issue for decades. This is not a rush job. It’s a hit job.

What You Can Do Right Now

I know how overwhelming this information feels. People write to me every day feeling helpless, and I understand why. The money is enormous, the machinery is entrenched, and the people running the agency that is supposed to protect us came from the industries poisoning us.

Protect your own water first. Don’t wait for the EPA to act. Reverse osmosis and activated carbon filtration systems are the most effective methods for removing PFAS from your tap water. If you can install one, do it.

Make noise where it counts. Contact your elected representatives. Your senators, your House member, and your state legislators. Demand they investigate the legality of what the EPA just did. The anti-backsliding provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act explicitly prohibits reducing health protections. What the EPA is proposing may violate federal law. Your representatives need to hear that their constituents know that, and are watching.

Follow the money in your own state. Ask your city council, your water utility, or your school board who their lobbyists are and what other clients those lobbyists represent. The Bad Chemistry report documented 132 local governments share lobbying firms with PFAS industry clients. Your community may be one of them. Demand disclosure. Demand that your institutions adopt policies prohibiting contracts with firms that lobby for PFAS polluters.

Support the people on the front lines. In Farmington, Minnesota, a coalition of families has spent $100,000 of their own money fighting a proposed hyperscale data center near a trout stream, with a court date looming and $150,000 more in legal fees ahead of them. Groups like theirs exist in communities across this country. Find them. Fund them. Show up for them. The Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development is one place to start.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of loud. You don’t have to be a lawyer or a scientist or an advocate with 30 years of experience. You have to be a person who is unwilling to be quiet to these issues. That is enough.

I am not quiet. And I don’t think you should be either.

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Keep the conversation going in the comments below. Do you see the same playbook being run in your backyard, whether it's PFAS, data centers, or something else entirely?