The Toxic Assault on Your Right to Breathe Safe Air

In the space of a single month, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans  kicked off coordinated attacks on your right to breathe clean, safe air. 

For the first time in the almost 55-year history of the Clean Air Act, the Republican-led U.S. Congress voted on strict party lines to abolish core protections against cancer-causing hazardous air pollutants, and President Trump signed it into law. 

This represents the first time that Congress and a president have signed a measure into law that abolishes Americans’ clean air protections and authorizes increases in hazardous air pollution. Adding insult and more injury to that injury, the reversal of federal clean air safeguards allows sources to evade Clean Air Act monitoring, recordkeeping, reporting, and operating permits that provide transparency about emissions of hazardous air pollution to federal and state regulators, as well as ordinary Americans. 

Specifically, Congress passed legislation to weaken existing safeguards and allow more than 1,000 industrial polluters nationwide to increase hazardous air pollutants that are known to cause cancer, birth defects, and neurological damage. These include lead, mercury, arsenic, benzene, dioxins, PCBs, acid gases, and heavy metals. This coordinated attack not only rolls back safeguards already in place that block those dangerous increases, drastically weakening current protections, but it would also let toxic polluters reduce or stop operating existing pollution control equipment, often installed for decades, and increase cancer-causing pollutants. Why? To save corporations money at the expense of your health and air quality.  

We know these toxic chemicals accumulate in our bodies and get passed on to babies in the womb and via breast milk. We know these chemicals cause cancer, infertility, birth defects, and developmental harm to children. We knew all of this in 1990, when Congress specifically listed them in the Clean Air Act to protect us. At that time, Congress identified 189 hazardous air pollutants by name in the 1990 Clean Air Act because they cause cancer, birth defects, genetic damage, and other serious health effects. Congress directed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reduce these hazardous air pollutants by the maximum degree achievable using modern air pollution control technology, including their elimination where feasible. 

In total, 89 senators and 401 representatives voted for the law and its historic protections against the most hazardous air pollution known, over concerns about cancer, brain damage, birth defects, and numerous, severe health threats. 

And yet, with little fanfare, the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress eliminated EPA safeguards that had carried out the bipartisan directives in the 1990 law, letting industrial polluters actually increase all of their hazardous air pollutants, like mercury and other toxic chemicals, above the levels that maximum achievable reductions had required them to reach.  

Not to be outdone by Congress, the EPA announced its plan to roll back standards for toxic air pollution from electric power plants that burn coal and oil; standards that most power plants have been meeting. The proposed EPA rule also lets companies avoid installing continuous pollution monitors that would alert surrounding communities to excessive hazardous air pollution. Eliminating pollution monitors—which prevents people from knowing whether their air is safe to breathe—at the very same moment as rolling back air pollution standards means we’re exposed to a lot more unsafe air. 

Cutting air pollution is good for our health and the economy. The 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for power plants was based on previous standards, which had cut mercury emissions by 90 percent, reduced other toxic metals by 80 percent, and helped save up to 11,000 lives each year. The strengthened 2024 MATS built on this tremendous success and were estimated to result in $33 million in annual health benefits, all of which are now at risk from the Trump administration’s reckless rollbacks. 

President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin may say that they care about Americans’ right to clean air, but their actions say otherwise. We know that 156 million Americans (46 percent) still live in areas with smog and soot air pollution. Now, with partisan congressional backing, communities across the nation will be exposed to even more hazardous air pollution that causes cancer, infertility, birth defects, and brain damage. 

None of this will make America stronger or healthier.