November, 13 2018, 11:00pm EDT
Hormone-Disrupting Weed Killer Taints Tap Water for Millions in Corn Belt
Atrazine Spikes Up to 7x EPA Limit, but Utilities Dodge Testing to Stay Legal
WASHINGTON
Seasonal spikes of atrazine - a weed killer that can disrupt hormones and harm developing fetuses - contaminate drinking water in corn-growing areas of the Midwest and beyond, according to an analysis of federal records by the Environmental Working Group.
Environmental Protection Agency data show that in some Corn Belt communities, atrazine levels can spike three to seven times above the legal limit in late spring and early summer. But by avoiding water testing during peak periods, some water utilities stay in compliance with drinking water regulations - and don't have to tell customers they were exposed to a hazardous chemical in their tap water.
"Our investigation found that nearly 30 million Americans have atrazine in their tap water," said Olga Naidenko, Ph.D., EWG senior science advisor for children's environmental health. "But many may never know, because outdated federal policies allow utilities to test for atrazine before or after the spike."
EWG's investigation is the most comprehensive analysis to date of national data on the pervasive contamination of drinking water by this chemical. EWG found that last year, utilities in Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio had atrazine spikes much higher than the federal legal limit of three parts per billion, or ppb. The two highest spikes were reported in Evansville, Ill., at 22 ppb, and Piqua, Ohio, at 16 ppb.
But the Safe Drinking Water Act, last updated in 1996, only requires the reporting of annual averages of testing for the chemical. That means the utilities don't have to tell the EPA or their customers they exceeded the legal limit for multiple days or weeks during the growing season.
Atrazine is the second-most heavily used herbicide in the U.S., with more than 70 million pounds sprayed in 2016. It is used mostly to control weeds in cornfields, but it is also applied to sorghum, sugarcane and other crops.
Studies show that atrazine and similar chemicals harm the reproductive system and disrupt the nerve and hormone systems, affecting the brain, behavior and hormones such as estrogen, testosterone and dopamine. Even short-term exposure to elevated levels of atrazine can pose health risks to expectant mothers and their babies, including an increase in the risk of preterm delivery and lower birth weight.
The European Union banned atrazine in 2003 because of its potential to contaminate drinking water sources. In 2016, California state scientists listed atrazine, simazine and related chemicals as substances "known to cause reproductive toxicity." According to EWG's Tap Water Database, which aggregates testing data from utilities nationwide, in 2015, atrazine was found in water systems serving nearly 30 million Americans in 27 states.
The EPA is currently reviewing its atrazine standard of 3 ppb. For adequate protection of developing fetuses, EWG advocates that the atrazine limit in drinking water be set at 0.1 ppb, 30 times lower than the current standard. EWG's recommendation is based on the most current epidemiological data.
EWG's analysis of atrazine in drinking water comes at a time when water utilities across the U.S. are facing increasing scrutiny due to the discovery of widespread contamination from highly toxic chemicals, such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and pollutants from agricultural runoff, such as nitrate.
"The EPA must do more to protect Americans with policies that should reflect the latest independent science," said EWG's Naidenko. "Federal and state agencies and water utilities must ensure that tap water served across America does not have toxic chemicals such as atrazine."
Atrazine and similar herbicides can be removed from tap water by carbon filters, including inexpensive countertop pitchers and faucet-mount filters. EPA's data also show that these chemicals are devastating for wildlife and plants, which can't filter their water.
EWG submitted comments to the EPA today urging the agency to consider epidemiological studies when assessing the risk to human health posed by atrazine and related pesticides and to establish policies and regulations to reduce atrazine spikes in drinking water.
The Environmental Working Group is a community 30 million strong, working to protect our environmental health by changing industry standards.
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Judge Slaps Down Trump Administration Scheme to 'Starve' Nation's Top Consumer Protection Watchdog
"If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Dec 30, 2025
President Donald Trump and his administration have been openly plotting to scrap the nation's top consumer protection watchdog, but a federal judge has at least temporarily put those plans on hold.
US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled on Tuesday that the US Federal Reserve must continue providing funds to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), rejecting the Trump administration's claims that the nation's central bank that the nation's central bank currently lacks to "combined earnings" to fund the bureau's operations.
The administration had argued that the Federal Reserve should not be making payments to the CFPB because it has been operating at a loss since 2022, when it began a series of aggressive interest rate hikes aimed at taming inflation.
However, Jackson rejected this reasoning and accused the administration of using it as a cover to defund an agency that the president and top officials such as Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, had long expressed a desire to abolish.
"It appears that defendants’ new understanding of 'combined earnings' is an unsupported and transparent attempt to starve the CPFB of funding," the judge wrote.
The CFPB must now be funded at least until the DC Circuit of Appeals weighs in on an ongoing lawsuit brought by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) against Vought over layoffs at the agency that is scheduled for hearings in February.
The NTEU took a victory lap in the wake of the ruling and taunted Vought for his defeat.
"Yet another loss for Rusty Vought," the union posted on Bluesky. "Wonder how much longer Donald is going to put up with this?"
While it will continue to receive funding for the time being, the CFPB has still seen its ability to fulfill its mission severely diminished during Trump's second term.
A Tuesday report from Reuters claimed that the CFPB is "on the brink of collapse" given that the Trump administration, congressional Republicans, and industry lawsuits have "undone a decade's worth of CFPB rules on matters ranging from medical debt and student loans to credit card late fees, overdraft charges and mortgage lending."
The report also noted that, during Trump's second term, the CFPB has "dropped or paused its probes and enforcement actions, and stopped supervising the consumer finance industries, leading to a string of resignations" at the agency.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who first drew up plans to create the CFPB in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, explained the agency's importance in an interview with Reuters.
"I was stunned by the number of people in financial trouble who had lost a job or got sick but who had also been cheated by one or more of their creditors," she said. "For no agency was consumer protection a first priority, it was somewhere between fifth and 10th, which meant there was just no cop on the beat. If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated."
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UN Describes 'Crime Scene' in el-Fasher, Sudan After Gaining Access to War-Torn City
UN officials said they were "still very concerned about those who are injured, who we didn’t see, those who may be detained."
Dec 30, 2025
After weeks of pushing for access to el-Fasher, the city in Sudan's Darfur region that was taken over by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in October, United Nations officials reported on Tuesday that their recent visit to the city showed evidence of a "crime scene," with the few people remaining there showing signs of trauma from the mass atrocities they suffered and witnessed.
UN humanitarian workers gained access to the city last Friday, two months after the government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) lost control of el-Fasher to the United Arab Emirates-backed RSF.
The city was the SAF's last major stronghold in Darfur, and fighting has now escalated in the Kordofan region.
Reuters reported that the RSF has attempted to portray el-Fasher as "back to normal" since its takeover, even as the Yale Humanitan Research Lab published a report earlier this month on the mass killings that the paramilitary group have sought hide evidence of "through burial, burning, and removal of human remains on a mass scale."
Denise Brown, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, told Reuters that the few people remaining in el-Fasher are living in empty buildings or tents made of plastic sheets. A small market was operating, but was selling only locally grown vegetables.
"The town was not teeming with people," Brown said. "There were very few people that [we] were able to see... We have photos of people, and you can see clearly on their faces the accumulation of fatigue, of stress, of anxiety, of loss."
Healthcare staff were seen at Saudi Hospital in el-Fasher, where 460 people were killed in an RSF attack, but they were working without medical supplies, Brown said.
Yale's report earlier this month relied partially in satellite imagery taken between October 26-November 28, which showed clusters of what researchers said were consistent with human remains in and around el-Fasher. More than 70% of the clusters had become smaller in satellite images by late November, and 38% were no longer visible.
The researchers said the RSF has used particular patterns of killing, including murdering people as they flee attacks, door-to-door and execution-style killings, and mass killings at detention centers and military installations.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab, said the UN's discovery of few signs of life in el-Fasher corroborated the lab's findings.
Brown said the UN team is "still very concerned about those who are injured, who we didn’t see, those who may be detained," and told Reuters the officials plan to return to assess water and sanitation access.
About 100,000 people fled el-Fasher in October, and about three-quarters of those forced to leave the city were already internally displaced people who had fled violence as many as three or more times. In total 1.17 million el-Fasher residents have been displaced.
Earlier this month, Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), released a short documentary detailing the experiences of people who left the city and are sheltering in Chad.
"They call it Paris, and now it is destroyed," a man named Noor told MSF of el-Fasher. "In the past it was a good city with all its lights on."
An estimated 30.4 Sudanese people are now in need of humanitarian assistance, and on Monday the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported unprecedented levels of child malnutrition in the Um Baru locality in northern Darfur.
More than half of children there are suffering from acute malnutrition, and 1 in 6 are severely, acutely malnourished—a condition that could kill them within weeks if left untreated.
“When severe acute malnutrition reaches this level, time becomes the most critical factor,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “Children in Um Baru are fighting for their lives and need immediate help. Every day without safe and unhindered access increases the risk of children growing weaker and more death and suffering from causes that are entirely preventable.”
Many of the families observed by UNICEF fled el-Fasher in recent weeks.
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Social Security Administration 'In Turmoil' as New Reporting Details Damage Done by Trump Cuts
In-depth reporting from the Washington Post found the Social Security Administration is dealing with "record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers."
Dec 30, 2025
An in-depth report published by the Washington Post on Tuesday offers new details about the damage being done to the Social Security Administration during President Donald Trump's second term.
The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is "in turmoil" one year into Trump's second term, resulting in a customer service system that has "deteriorated."
The chaos at the SSA started in February when the Trump administration announced plans to lay off 7,000 SSA employees, or roughly 12% of the total workforce.
This set off a cascade of events that the Post writes has left the agency with "record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers," as the remaining SSA workforce has "struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices."
The most immediate consequence of the staffing cuts was that call wait times for Social Security beneficiaries surged to an average of roughly two-and-a-half hours, which forced the agency to pull workers employed in other divisions in the department off their jobs.
However, the Post's sources said these employees "were thrown in with minimal training... and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions."
One longtime SSA employee told the Post that management at the agency "offered minimal training and basically threw [transferred employees] in to sink or swim."
Although the administration has succeeded in getting call hold times down from their peaks, shuffling so many employees out of their original positions has damaged the SSA in other areas, the Post revealed.
Jordan Harwell, a Montana field office employee who is president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 4012, said that workers in his office no longer have the same time they used to have to process pay stubs, disability claims, and appointment requests because they are constantly manning the phones.
An anonymous employee in an Indiana field office told the Post that she has similarly had to let other work pile up as the administration has emphasized answering phones over everything else.
Among other things, reported the Post, she now has less time to handle "calls from people asking about decisions in their cases, claims filed online, and anyone who tries to submit forms to Social Security—like proof of marriage—through snail mail."
Also hampering the SSA's work have been new regulations put in place by Tesla CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency that bar beneficiaries from making changes to their direct deposit information over the phone, instead requiring them to either appear in person at a field office or go online.
The Indiana SSA worker told the Post of a recent case involving a 75-year-old man who recently suffered a major stroke that left him unable to drive to the local field office to verify information needed to change his banking information. The man also said he did not have access to a computer to help him change the information online.
"I had to sit there on the phone and tell this guy, 'You have to find someone to come in... or, do you have a relative with a computer who can help you or something like that?'" the employee said. "He was just like, 'No, no, no.'"
Social Security was a regular target for Musk during his tenure working for the Trump administration, and he repeatedly made baseless claims that the entire program was riddled with fraud, even referring to it as "the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time."
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