Project 2025 Ensures PFAS "Forever Chemicals" Will Contaminate Us Forever
Welcome back to Environmental Protection News. As we continue our series on how Project 2025 would negatively impact the environment and our health, EPN volunteer Dr. Betsy Southerland provides insight into what would happen with the efforts to mitigate the harmful effects of PFAS. PFAS are a group of engineered “forever chemicals” that are resistant to heat, water and grease and do not break down in the environment or the body. They are found in many common household products, including non-stick cookware, carpeting, furniture, food packaging, certain cosmetics, waterproof clothing and more. In 2021, with input from many environmental and public health organizations, EPN developed recommendations for a new PFAS Action Plan that set forth an expansive framework for dealing with PFAS, including recommendations related to its manufacture, commercial uses, release, disposal and cleanup, and the health effects of exposure to PFAS in the air, land and water. Please read on to learn more about the PFAS protections that could be stripped away if Project 2025 is enacted. - Steve Fantes, EPN Public Affairs Manager
Project 2025 Ensures PFAS "Forever Chemicals" Will Contaminate Us Forever
By: Betsy Southerland
Project 2025 is a detailed policy agenda prepared by the conservative Heritage Foundation to guide the next Republican president in radically reshaping the federal government and consolidating executive power. At its core is a proposal to eliminate or restructure federal agencies and reclassify tens of thousands of federal civil service workers as political appointees, which could facilitate their removal without cause and replace them with the president’s loyalists. Project 2025 has been endorsed by a coalition of over 100 conservative organizations, and many of its authors served as senior policy advisors to former President Trump during his administration. While much has been written about how Project 2025 will end all efforts to address the existential public health crisis of climate change, it will also stop or significantly delay all efforts to address the widespread public health risks of exposure to the “forever chemicals” per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
The Biden-Harris administration prioritized action on PFAS because these highly persistent, toxic chemicals are used in hundreds of industrial and consumer products, are being discharged into the environment without any regulation, and are found in the blood of most Americans. Sadly, every child is born with PFAS in their blood. Adverse health effects of PFAS chemicals include immune system suppression, increased risk of cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, and reproductive and development impairments. In 2022, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine advised clinicians to offer PFAS blood testing to any patients likely to have elevated exposures to seven PFAS chemicals and to test for thyroid function, kidney and testicular cancer, and ulcerative colitis if PFAS levels in their blood are elevated.
If implemented, Project 2025 would hinder the actions of any federal agency that has a role in addressing PFAS, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be especially affected. Since 2021, EPA has been implementing a PFAS Strategic Roadmap, which focuses on preventing new PFAS contamination, stopping ongoing contamination, cleaning up contaminated areas, and determining the toxicity of PFAS chemicals in the environment. EPA has made significant progress in each of these areas.
Project 2025 will stop or delay all EPA actions to prevent, control, remediate, and research PFAS. While it is standard practice for a new administration to freeze rules that have not been finalized, Project 2025 plans to broaden that practice by calling for all EPA assessments, determinations, standards, and guidance to be frozen. Attempts will certainly be made to repeal or replace all final rules with weaker versions, as was done in the most recent Republican administration.
Project 2025 specifically calls for the revision of final rules and policies on the cleanup of PFAS in groundwater, designation of PFAS chemicals as Superfund hazardous substances, and the review of new chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). It recommends that all guidance documents on deriving the costs and benefits of environmental rules be withdrawn and revised, artificially suppressing benefits. It will immediately stop all EPA efforts to determine the toxicity of PFAS chemicals contaminating our land, air, and water.
In addition, Project 2025 will have a devastating impact on research and the assessment of risks to people and the environment. It calls for the elimination of EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), a critical research tool that identifies the health effects of pollutants, and rejects the use of all precautionary default methods used to calculate the toxicity of carcinogenic and non-cancer-causing pollutants. It recommends that all EPA science advisory boards be suspended and that no fewer than six senior political appointees be assigned to oversee and reform EPA research and science activities. The qualifications for these positions would be based on politics, not scientific expertise.
If Project 2025 recommendations for EPA are implemented, the agency will lose almost all of its ability to protect people and the environment from PFAS contamination. Looking to future generations, “forever” is a very long time to accept PFAS exposure when there are effective actions underway that should continue and be expanded to protect people’s health.
About Betsy Southerland: Betsy worked at the EPA for 33 years in the national Water and Superfund programs, retiring as director of science and technology in the agency’s Office of Water in 2017. She has remained active on environmental issues as a volunteer with the Environmental Protection Network and regularly testifies before Congress about clean water issues, PFAS, and emerging, unregulated contaminants.
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