CleanAIRE NC, et al. v. Trump, et al.

On July 17, 2025, President Trump issued a proclamation exempting 40 commercial sterilizers from the 2024 National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for sterilization facilities (the EtO rule). Many commercial sterilizers are located in residential areas, close to schools, day cares, places of worship, and other public facilities. The EtO rule standards protect communities living, working, playing, and recreating near sterilization facilities from exposure to ethylene oxide, a highly toxic, cancer-causing pollutant. 

Ethylene oxide was added to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) carcinogen list in 2016 after the agency’s updated assessment warned that ethylene oxide “was 30 times more carcinogenic to people who continuously inhale it as adults and 50 times more carcinogenic to those who are exposed since birth than the agency previously thought.” The EPA has estimated that 8.5 million Americans living near commercial sterilizers have elevated cancer risk, with some facilities posing a lifetime cancer risk as high as 6,000 in 1 million, 60 times higher than the agency’s own threshold for what constitutes “unacceptable risk.” The EPA further determined that the EtO rule would reduce ethylene oxide emissions from commercial sterilizers by more than 90 percent and reduce cancer risk from sterilization facilities by approximately 92 percent. 

President Trump’s sterilizers proclamation unilaterally sweeps away those protections for more than 45 percent of commercial sterilizers, giving facilities from Massachusetts to Georgia and California to Puerto Rico a free pass to continue polluting and putting communities at risk for an additional two years. By granting these exemptions, President Trump has allowed facilities to delay more stringent emissions controls and to forgo continuous emissions monitoring and quarterly reporting that would provide accountability and transparency for toxic emissions leaking into neighboring communities.

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To exempt these facilities, the Trump administration exploited a narrow and, until this year, never-before-used provision of the Clean Air Act. Section 112(i)(4) of the act provides authority to exempt sources from a hazardous air pollutant standard if the president determines that the technology to implement the rule is “not available” and that an exemption is in the interests of national security. But the Trump proclamation does not provide any evidence that the technology is not available—because it is. In fact, many of the exempted facilities already have the technology in place to comply with one or more standards imposed by the 2024 EtO rule. 

What makes this free pass particularly appalling is the indiscriminate, unjustified nature of the exemptions. The sterilizers proclamation even purports to exempt, for the stated purpose of “promot[ing] American security with respect to sterile medical equipment,” a facility that does not sterilize medical equipment but instead sterilizes spices and nuts. 

President Trump’s abuse of Section 112(i)(4) is not just limited to commercial sterilizers. In 2025, he exempted nearly one-third of coal-fired power plants, almost one-quarter of chemical manufacturers, the entire coke ovens industry, and the entire taconite iron-ore processing industry from hazardous air pollutant standards. With the stroke of a pen, President Trump has wiped away hazardous air pollutant rules for more than 180 facilities across these six industries. 

President Trump’s exemption of commercial sterilization facilities from regulations of hazardous air pollutants not only sacrifices the health of communities, but it is also illegal and undemocratic. Never before has a president claimed the authority to mass exempt from EPA regulations—rules issued only a year ago after extensive scientific and technical review and full public notice and comment.   

NRDC and the Southern Environmental Law Center—on behalf of CleanAIRE NC, Sustainable Newton, and Virginia Interfaith Power & Light—have filed suit in the District Court of the District of Columbia to challenge this ultra vires and illegal exemption.