Poisoning America

Corporate profits. Public costs.

ABC News: In this undated file photo, steam and pollution rise on a cold day at the Arapaho Station Coal Power Plant, a coal fired power plant along the Platte River in Littleton, just outside Denver, Colorado. Photo Credit: Getty Images

In the past sixteen months, the Trump regime has moved to dismantle environmental and public health protections at a scale never before seen in modern American history. Federal protections covering public lands, air pollution, climate oversight, disaster preparedness, and environmental monitoring have been weakened, delayed, or eliminated. The administration describes this effort as deregulation and energy expansion. Critics argue that the long-term costs are simply being shifted from industries onto the public, which is to say, onto us.

On May 13, Representative Jared Huffman accused the Trump regime of treating public lands and natural resources as assets for private industry and political allies.

Huffman: President Trump is gutting funding and personnel in the agencies that manage our public lands, ordering what’s left of the beleaguered National Park Service staff to whitewash history, shutting down projects that are ready to bring cheap, reliable, clean energy to millions of families who are struggling with skyrocketing utility bills and bullying the offshore wind industry into abandoning billions in investments that would bring even more affordable energy online. Oil and gas prices are soaring. As America pulled back from global leadership on clean energy technology, China stepped right in to fill the void. Trump’s policies have been terrible for our competition with China, terrible for workers and families trying to pay their bills. There is only one group that benefits from these policies and that is the oil and gas oligarchs who funded Trump’s campaign.

The reason for this is very simple. Donald is pro-oligarch. He aspires to be one himself. If protecting the interests of oligarchs comes at the expense of our environment, our natural resources, and the health of future generations, so be it. Donald and the people around him do not value those things.

They know that they will always have access to clean water because they can afford expensive filtration systems. The rest of us are increasingly expected to accept a world in which basic environmental protections disappear and contaminants like arsenic become somebody else’s problem.

There is, however, a limit to how far even the wealthy can outrun the crises they are creating. Unless they intend to spend the rest of their lives in bunkers, they need clean air too.

The Trump regime has proposed cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by roughly fifty percent, a reduction that would rank among the largest in the agency’s history. According to the Climate Action Campaign tracker, the administration has logged tens of thousands of environmental rollbacks, funding pauses, regulatory delays, and enforcement changes since returning to office.

The question is not simply why the administration is doing this. The answer to that is obvious. Deregulation enriches industries that no longer have to bear the cost of cleaning up their own pollution. The more difficult question is why so many Americans have been convinced that agencies designed to protect them are somehow the enemy.

For decades, beginning in large part with Ronald Reagan, Americans have been taught that government itself is the problem. In reality, government is simply a tool. When functioning properly, it exists to solve collective problems that individuals cannot solve on their own.

The Environmental Protection Agency was created so Americans could have clean air, clean water, and protected public lands. The Food and Drug Administration was created so Americans would not die unnecessarily from contaminated food and unsafe products. These institutions exist because history repeatedly demonstrated what happens when corporations are left entirely to police themselves.

On May 12, the Trump regime finalized the repeal of the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule. The rule, finalized under President Biden in 2024, required conservation to be considered alongside drilling, mining, logging, grazing, and energy development across 245 million acres of federal land.

Donald’s repeal removes conservation as an equal-use priority and reorients federal land policy toward extraction and development.

Those lands contain habitat for more than 300 threatened and endangered species and more than 2,400 species considered at risk. The Bureau of Land Management is now planning to remove hundreds of bison from federal land in Phillips County, Montana because ranchers want additional grazing space.

It is worth noting that roughly eighty-one percent of Bureau of Land Management land is already open to oil and gas leasing. Only a small fraction is managed primarily for conservation, and even that limited protection is now under attack.

The administration is also pursuing changes to the Roadless Rule, which currently limits development on nearly sixty million acres of national forest land.

At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency under Lee Zeldin has moved aggressively to weaken major Clean Air Act protections. In March 2025, industrial facilities were invited to request exemptions from federal air quality requirements through a process requiring little more than direct written requests.

ProPublica later described the internal system handling those requests as the “inbox from hell.”

The EPA has since pursued exemptions for coal-fired power plants and other major industrial sources while rolling back mercury and air toxics standards. These standards limit pollutants including mercury, benzene, acid gases, and particulate matter, substances linked to neurological damage in infants and fetuses, lung disease, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

Perhaps most significantly, the Trump regime rescinded the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the legal foundation for much of the federal government’s climate regulation framework.

Lee Zeldin called it the single largest act of deregulation in American history.

It may also be one of the most destructive.

Donald: Under the process just completed by the EPA, we are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers. This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory costs and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically.

As usual, Donald makes his priorities perfectly clear. None of them involve protecting public health or safeguarding the environment.

That brings us to what the EPA is currently doing to our drinking water.

The administration has rolled back rules governing so-called forever chemicals, known as PFAS, in drinking water supplies.

This is how Washington Post’s Amudalat Ajasa described them:

PFAS are a class of thousands of carbon fluoride compounds used to repel grease, water and oil, and they’re the strongest bond in chemistry. They’re really persistent. They have the nickname forever chemicals for a reason.

When asked how widespread they are she explained,

Scientists estimate that PFAS are in the blood of almost every American and they’re found in remote regions around the world, even as far as Antarctica.

And when asked where they can be found:

It’s in the environment. It’s in the air, it’s in the soil, it’s in the water, but people are primarily exposed to PFAS through drinking water.

Another reason the Trump regime appears so unconcerned about pollution is that the effects disproportionately fall on poor communities. Air pollution, contaminated water, and environmental degradation rarely affect the wealthy first.

Rescinding the Endangerment Finding does not change the scientific reality of climate change or pollution. It simply removes the federal government’s legal obligation to address those realities.

That distinction matters.

The science remains the same. The danger remains the same. The consequences remain the same.

What has changed is that the government under the Trump regime no longer pretends its responsibility is to protect the public. Its priority is protecting the industries responsible for the damage.