Who Are The Pro-PFAS Groups Pushing To Weaken Laws That Would Protect Our Health?
Let's Take A Closer Look At The Lobbying Firms Playing Both Sides Of The Forever Chemicals Crisis
Ever wonder why good bills pass but nothing really changes? You might have an industry lobbyist to thank for that.
For decades, cigarette companies employed lobbyists who also worked for hospitals, medical associations, and cancer research groups. The arrangement wasn’t accidental. Tobacco lobbyists played both sides enjoying access to health-focused legislators who might otherwise have shown them the door.
The deal was transactional and corrupt. Ease off on the smoking bans, and they would help get funding for that hospital in your district.
That same dynamic is playing out today with PFAS, the “forever chemicals,” that have contaminated our water, our food, and our blood. PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. This family of manmade chemicals are known for their stamina, stain resistance, and more. They persist in the environment and in our bodies for decades or longer, accumulating over time, raising long-term concerns for ecosystems and public health.
A new report by the watchdog organizations F Minus and Mothers Out Front, titled Bad Chemistry, has mapped the web of lobbying conflicts at the heart of the PFAS crisis in extraordinary detail. What they found should make us all furious.
The report looks across states and in Congress at lobbying firms representing the industries fighting to keep PFAS in our consumer products and working with the hospitals, water agencies, local governments, school districts, cancer organizations, and wildlife groups that are paying the price for that contamination.
Sounds like a double standard, right?
Take a look at the lobbying firm Holland & Knight, which in 2025 collected $520,000 from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), one of the most powerful forces in the country fighting to keep PFAS in consumer products and out of federal regulation.
That same year, Holland & Knight collected $80,000 from the City of Philadelphia.
Those two clients were not working toward the same goal. The Philadelphia Water Department had a $2 billion plan in place to comply with Biden-era drinking water standards for PFAS, standards that the ACC was simultaneously lobbying the Trump administration to roll back. The ACC won. The EPA weakened those standards in May 2025.
Philadelphia’s residents, who had been promised cleaner water, are now on the hook for whatever contamination costs follow.
Holland & Knight never had to choose sides. The firm didn’t have to, as no law requires it. It simply cashed checks from both sides of the issue.
This arrangement is a business model, and it is the central mechanism by which the PFAS industry has successfully delayed, weakened, and killed legislation that would protect public health across the country.
The new report documents the full scope of it, and the picture it paints is a direct echo of one of the darkest chapters in American lobbying history.
The Firms Playing Both Sides
The numbers are stark.
132 local governments and government agencies, including the cities of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, share lobbying firms with PFAS industry lobbyists, even as those local governments face staggering future clean-up costs that could be passed on to residents through higher taxes and utility bills.
11 public school systems in areas with PFAS-contaminated water are in the same boat.
26 hospitals and healthcare systems share lobbying firms with the trade associations fighting PFAS regulation, as do major cancer organizations including the American Cancer Society, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.
Don’t forget that a 2025 study found that PFAS in drinking water was responsible for up to 6,800 cancer cases a year in the U.S.
Even 15 wildlife conservation groups are unwittingly entangled, sharing lobbyists with the industry coalitions that are letting PFAS leach into the ecosystems these groups are trying to protect.
As mentioned above, Holland & Knight lobbies for the ACC but also the City of Philadelphia, Atlanta Public Schools, the American Cancer Society, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Brandeis University, Case Western Reserve University, the Black Women’s Health Imperative, and the National Parks Conservation Association.
And that’s just one firm.
The American Chemistry Council’s Web of Denial
The American Chemistry Council has long served as the command center for PFAS denialism. Emboldened by the Trump administration, which has appointed multiple former senior ACC staffers to key positions at the EPA, ACC now openly supports federal preemption of all state PFAS laws and regulations.
The revolving door is not subtle. Nancy Beck, a current senior EPA adviser on chemical safety, is a former ACC director and lobbyist. In a prior EPA stint, she worked to weaken regulations that track PFAS health consequences.
“Nancy Beck, E.P.A.’s ‘toxics czar’ during the first Trump Administration, is back to fulfill the chemical industry’s wish list,” Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told New Edge Times in 2025. “The weakening of health protections” from toxic chemicals “is just around the corner,” he said.
Lynn Dekleva, another former ACC lobbyist who spent more 30 years at DuPont, was placed in charge of approving new chemicals for market at the EPA, and federal reports documented that she retaliated against employees who raised concerns about chemicals she wanted to greenlight.
Steven Cook, a former lawyer representing PFAS polluters, now works as a principal deputy within the EPA and is actively seeking to scrap the “polluter pays” rules that would hold PFAS manufacturers financially responsible for cleanup.
The financial firepower behind this effort is staggering.
Almost 20 industry trade groups and companies representing PFAS polluters, the fossil fuel industry, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s pro-PFAS deregulation coalition collectively spent up to $60 million lobbying the EPA and more than $12 million lobbying the White House on PFAS-related issues in just the first half of 2025 alone, according to a September 2025 analysis by Food & Water Watch.
Since 2023, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce coalition against PFAS regulation has spent up to $272.8 million in PFAS-related lobbying. Major PFAS producers increased their EPA-focused lobbying spending by 25 percent compared to the first half of the prior year.
In September 2025, the Trump EPA asked a federal appeals court to throw out the regulations limiting four types of PFAS in drinking water, regulations that the Biden administration had spent years developing.
Internal EPA documents leaked to the New York Times revealed that the agency changed its position after meeting with industry representatives. The public will be left footing the bill for cleanup costs, and polluters are off the hook.
What This Looks Like on the Ground
The Bad Chemistry report traces these conflicts state by state, and the examples are damning.
In California, an estimated 25 million people are exposed to PFAS through their water systems, with health impacts costing the state between $5.5 billion and $8.7 billion annually.
When California’s legislature advanced SB 682, a bill that would have banned PFAS in several categories of consumer products, lobbying firms were simultaneously lobbying for the bill on behalf of water agencies and against the bill on behalf of chemical industry clients.
KP Public Affairs, for instance, lobbied for the PFAS clean-up fund on behalf of Western Municipal Water District while opposing the PFAS ban for the California Restaurant Association.
It collected $281,400 from the City of Los Angeles, a city with a 30 percent PFAS contamination rate in parts of its water system and $73,700 from its chemical industry clients.
California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 682 in October 2025, allowing those double-dipping lobbying firms to claim a win with both sides.
In New York, five PFAS-related bills passed the State Senate overwhelmingly in 2025, one of them 53-0, only to die without a vote in the Assembly, blocked by Speaker Carl Heastie. Chemical and plastic industry lobbyists were widely blamed.
The firm Ostro Associates lobbied against a PFAS consumer products ban for the American Chemistry Council and the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, while simultaneously lobbying for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
The firm Actum lobbied for the Cookware Sustainability Alliance while also representing DoorDash, meaning a firm working to keep PFAS in cookware also represents the company delivering food in containers that may be contaminated with PFAS.
In Oregon, lobbying firm Tonkon Torp opposed a bill that would have phased out PFAS in consumer products (HB 3512) on behalf of Oregonians for Food and Shelter, a position co-signed by the ACC. At the same time, a Tonkon Torp lobbyist testified in favor of a bill to fund newborn disease screening.
The irony is not lost on anyone who has read the science: a January 2025 study found that exposure to PFAS in utero and through breastmilk is associated with birth defects, reduced birth weight, diminished immune response, and increased risk of cardiometabolic problems in children.
Tonkon Torp is helping to fund tests for one set of childhood diseases while working to block legislation that would reduce children’s exposure to the chemicals causing those diseases.
In Michigan, where PFAS contamination in drinking water is widespread and school districts sit within miles of contaminated military bases, the lobbying firm Kelley Cawthorne represents both the ACC and the Michigan Chemistry Council, and also represents multiple public school districts, Wayne County, and the Michigan Council on Foundations, which has called clean freshwater “essential for our health, environment, and economy.”
Michigan’s lobbyist disclosure laws are so weak that the full extent of these conflicts can’t even be fully documented.
Minnesota Showed What’s Possible. Now Industry Is Trying to Dismantle It.
Minnesota passed Amara’s Law, the strongest ban on toxic PFAS in the nation, in 2023. By January 2025, the law began implementation. Its goal: eliminate nonessential PFAS use by 2032 and create a public reporting system so consumers can know what’s in the products they buy.
Minnesota is not a fringe state acting recklessly. Japan, England, and France have sent documentary filmmakers to study Amara’s Law. Lawmakers from New South Wales, Australia have come to learn from Minnesota’s approach. The state has become a global model for confronting PFAS contamination at its source.
And yet, since the law passed, industry groups have been working methodically to dismantle it. They’ve pushed for loopholes, exemptions, and extended timelines, arguing for “flexibility” and “feasibility” while the chemicals keep contaminating groundwater and bodies.
State Representative Josh Heintzeman is carrying a bill that would further delay implementation of the requirement that companies report PFAS content in their products, information that is supposed to be publicly available so that parents can make informed decisions about what they bring into their homes.
The industry argument always looks the same. Delay, obscure, exempt, and run out the clock. Meanwhile, communities need new water treatment systems, filtration upgrades, and landfill mitigation. Taxpayers foot the bill to clean up contamination that manufacturers knew about, in some cases for decades.
Internal documents from multiple PFAS manufacturers show that companies knew these chemicals were toxic and persistent and continued to produce and sell them anyway. PFAS is, in the most direct sense, a Minnesota-made problem: 3M pioneered these chemicals, and Minnesotans are still living with the consequences.
Delaying Amara’s Law won’t make contamination disappear. It won’t make cleanup cheaper. It will only guarantee more exposure, more illness, and a larger tab for taxpayers.
The Disclosure Problem
One reason these conflicts have gone largely unexamined is that state lobbyist disclosure laws are profoundly weak.
Only 16 of the 36 states tracked in the Bad Chemistry report require lobbyists to disclose the specific bills they lobby on. Michigan discloses no compensation figures and no bill numbers. Oregon requires no disclosure of bills lobbied or positions taken, and its compensation disclosure system is described as confusing and opaque.
Even in California, which has one of the better disclosure systems in the country, lobbyists are not required to disclose what position they take on each bill, making it easy to play both sides without being caught. F Minus discovered firms lobbying simultaneously for and against SB 682 only by filing a public records request with the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality.
This opacity is not accidental. The regulatory environment is often shaped in part by the very industries that benefit from secrecy.
What Can Be Done
The Bad Chemistry report ends with a clear prescription: local governments, public school districts, hospitals, cancer organizations, and wildlife groups that are clients of PFAS-lobbying firms have the power to disrupt this dynamic.
By adopting policies that prohibit contracting with firms that also lobby for PFAS clients, these institutions can force lobbying firms to choose sides. That choice, multiplied across hundreds of clients, will impose real economic and reputational costs on firms that continue to represent the industries driving the contamination crisis.
That is how Tobacco’s double-agent strategy eventually broke down. It can break down here too, but only if the institutions being harmed by PFAS stop funding the firms fighting on behalf of the polluters.
We need the political will to hold the responsible parties accountable and stop letting them play both sides of the table while communities drink poisoned water and pick up the bill.
Go to the Sources
Food & Water Watch, “PFAS Lobbying: Mid-2025 Update, September 2025
Clean Water Action, “Lobbying in PFAS: Big Money is Poisoning our Water,” April 2026
In Other News…
The EPA wants to weaken protections for groundwater near coal ash dumps.
Coal ash, the toxic waste from coal-fired power plants, is stored in massive unlined pits that leach arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and other heavy metals into groundwater, rivers, and lakes. U.S. coal plants produced roughly 63 million tons of it in 2024 alone, according to industry estimates.
The agency’s proposal, made at the behest of electric utilities, would allow site-by-site exemptions from national standards, eliminate volume limits on coal ash spread on land, push groundwater monitoring points further from the pits, and grant more time to remove ash from waste sites. The EPA is already structuring the rule to be legally “severable,” so that courts can’t strike it down all at once.
You can fight this. Public comments are open through June 12. Submit yours at regulations.gov, docket number EPA-HQ-OLEM-2020-0107.
Alright, everyone. That’s a lot to digest! Be kind in the comments to one another, and let us know if you have questions or just want to keep the conversation going down below.
Excellent research here thank you for sharing
It feels like one step forward three steps back. We know the problem. We just don’t deal with it. Thank you for the investigation.