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earthjustice
Trump Eases Pollution Rules for 100+ Facilities, Including Chemical and Coal Plants
"Trump is illegally delaying clean air laws from his desk because polluters make more money when they just dump their toxic chemicals in our air," said one critic.
Jul 18, 2025
Continuing a trend of prioritizing polluters over public health and the planet, U.S. President Donald Trump late Thursday signed a series of proclamations to provide what the Republican called "regulatory relief" to various industries.
While the names of Trump's four proclamations suggest they are intended to promote American "security" regarding energy, chemical manufacturing, iron ore processing, and sterile medical equipment, what they actually do is allow over 100 facilities across the country to not comply with rules put in place under Democratic former President Joe Biden.
A Trump White House fact sheet describes the rules from Biden's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as "burdensome." Meanwhile, environmental and health advocates blasted Trump over his new exemptions for coal-fired power plants, ethylene oxide commercial sterilizers, and facilities that manufacture chemicals and process taconite iron.
"If your family lives downwind of these plants, this is going to mean more toxic chemicals in the air you breathe."
Patrice Simms, vice president of litigation at Earthjustice's Healthy Communities Program, said in a Friday statement that "Trump is illegally delaying clean air laws from his desk because polluters make more money when they just dump their toxic chemicals in our air."
"Trump's action on behalf of big corporate polluters will cause more cancer, more birth defects, and more children to suffer [from] asthma," Simms warned. "The country deserves better."
The proclamation is not the first handout Trump has given the coal industry since returning to office in January. As Earthjustice noted:
In April 2025, the Trump administration exempted 68 coal-fired power plants from pollution limits set in the strengthened MATS rule, even though pollution controls are widely available and already in use. These came after EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin invited corporations to email the agency to request exemptions from clean air standards. Companies were told they could cite "national security" or "lack of available technology" as justification.
John Walke, clean air director for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Associated Press that Trump's claims about national security concerns and technology issues were "pretexts" to further enrich large corporations.
"President Trump just signed a literal free pass for polluters," Walke said of the new proclamations. "If your family lives downwind of these plants, this is going to mean more toxic chemicals in the air you breathe."
The AP reported that "in a related development, the EPA said Thursday it will give utility companies an additional year to inspect and report on contamination from toxic coal ash landfills across the country," which Zeldin also called "regulatory relief."
Earthjustice senior counsel Lisa Evans told The New York Times on Thursday that while it may not seem like a lengthy delay, "a year's time is not irrelevant when you are living next to a coal plant."
"It's one more year of hazardous contaminants getting into the groundwater," Evans said. "And the more chemicals that get into the groundwater, the more difficult and expensive it is to remediate."
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Fury as Trump Puts Tens of Millions of Protected Forests on the Chopping Block
"The roadless rule is the most effective conservation rule on the books at protecting mature and old-growth forests," said one environmental campaigner.
Jun 24, 2025
A top Trump official on Monday announced a plan to end a rule that protects tens of millions of acres in the National Forest System and which would clear the way for road development and timber production on those lands—news that elicited alarm from conservation and environmental groups.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that the Trump administration plans to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which has for decades protected 58.5 million acres of forests from timber harvesting and road construction.
Rollins called the rule overly restrictive and added that the move "opens a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation's forests. It is abundantly clear that properly managing our forests preserves them from devastating fires and allows future generations of Americans to enjoy and reap the benefits of this great land."
The environmental law group Earthjustice took issue with wildfire prevention being used to justify the rollback.
"While the Trump administration has suggested that wildfire risk is an underlying reason for these sweeping policy changes, rolling back the roadless rule actually threatens to cause more fires. That's because fire ignitions are far more likely in roaded landscapes," said Drew Caputo, the group's vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife, and oceans, in a statement on Monday.
Rollins made the announcement at the annual meeting of the Western Governors' Association. Hundreds of protestors gathered outside of the building where the event was taking place in Santa Fe, New Mexico in order to denounce efforts that might lead to federal public lands being privatized, according to The Associated Press.
The roadless rule covers areas including the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. In 2019, during the first Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture codified a regulatory framework that exempted Tongass from the roadless rule. Former President Joe Biden undid that change while he was in office.
Idaho and Colorado have adopted state roadless area rules that supersede the boundaries of the federal roadless rule boundaries for those states, according to the USDA's website, which appears to mean that not all of the 58.5 million acres would be impacted if the Trump administration goes through with this change.
"The roadless rule is one of the country's conservation success stories, safeguarding singular natural values across nearly 60 million acres of America's great forests," said Garett Rose, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Great Outdoors Campaign Director Ellen Montgomery at Environment America similarly said that "the roadless rule is the most effective conservation rule on the books at protecting mature and old-growth forests."
"Once again, the Trump administration is ignoring the voices of millions of Americans to pursue a corporate giveaway for his billionaire buddies. Stripping our national forests of roadless rule protections will put close to 60 million acres of wildlands across the country on the chopping block," said Sierra Club's forest campaign manager, Alex Craven, in a statement on Monday. "That means polluting our clean air and drinking water sources to pad the bottom lines of timber and mining companies—all while pursuing the same kind of mismanagement that increases wildfire severity."
Caputo at Earthjustice made some of these same points and indicated his organization is ready to sue over the move. "If the Trump administration actually revokes the roadless rule, we'll see them in court," he said.
The move follows a March executive order from U.S. President Donald Trump directing Rollins and the secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior to take steps to increase timber production.
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After Marathon Markup, House GOP Advances 'Most Extreme Anti-Environment Bill in American History'
"Donald Trump and his allies in Congress are working like mad to hand over our public lands to billionaires and corporate polluters to drill, mine, and log with the bare minimum oversight or accountability," said one critic.
May 07, 2025
Leading up to and after an early Wednesday morning vote by a key GOP-controlled committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democratic lawmakers and conservationists renewed their criticism of "a corporate polluter's wish list" that Republicans aim to include in the next reconciliation package.
Republican President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to "drill, baby, drill" and raked in cash from the climate-wrecking fossil fuel industry. While House Committee on Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) celebrated the new vote that advanced legislation intended to deliver on the president's "agenda to make our nation energy dominant," Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) has called the effort to pass the polluter-friendly bill "corruption in broad daylight."
"House Republicans' budget cuts national park funding, slashes clean air and water protections, and pushes the most extreme anti-environment bill in American history as the cherry on top," Huffman said on social media Tuesday, when the committee held a markup for the legislation. "Today, while Democrats called out this billionaire giveaway, Republicans hid in their offices."
Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Md.), a panel member who proposed amendments during markup, said in a Tuesday statement that "House Republicans are once again putting polluters over people. But as a mother, I refuse to let my children's future be auctioned off to Big Oil."
"I offered commonsense amendments that range from blocking funds to agencies that refuse to comply with the courts to stopping oil and gas drilling near schools and hospitals," said Dexter. "This bill is a giveaway to Big Oil and billionaires. My amendments demand House Republicans choose: people or polluters?"
We’re more than 8 hours into this Reconciliation markup in the House Natural Resources Committee and the GOP has completely stopped engaging on answering basic questions about their own bill. We have never seen anything like it. It’s going to be a long night.
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— Rep. Melanie Stansbury (NM-01) (@repstansbury.bsky.social) May 6, 2025 at 7:55 PM
Earthjustice has specifically sounded the alarm over proposed lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska; reinstatement of flawed management plans for both locations; additional lease sales in Cook Inlet; and mandates that the U.S. Forest Service enter into long-term timber contracts in each U.S. region annually for the next decade.
"Here in Alaska, temperatures are rising four times faster than the rest of the planet. We're facing warmer and wetter winters, and communities [are] already facing forced relocation because of climate change," Earthjustice Alaska office managing attorney Carole Holley said Monday. "This bill, if passed without drastic changes, would make things worse by doubling down on reckless oil and gas extraction in the Arctic, maximizing mining and logging on lands valued by the public for recreation and subsistence activities, and halting clean energy projects."
"It amounts to a giveaway of some of our most cherished public lands to bolster corporate profits, all based on wildly speculative assumptions about revenue generation," Holley added. "At the same time, the language includes an attempt to throw away commonsense safeguards like judicial review and public participation in the resource decisions that affect our state."
The House Natural Resources Committee released its portion of the Republican House reconciliation bill late last Thursday. It doesn't look good for the wild. More information: biodiv.us/3GHS6cM
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— Center for Biological Diversity (@biologicaldiversity.org) May 6, 2025 at 1:13 PM
Ahead of the vote, Public Citizen research director Alan Zibel issued an ominous warning about Republicans' "radical budget plan."
"Welcome to the American petrostate," Zibel said. Like Holley, he blasted the proposed lease sales and "an absurd 'pay to play' permitting provision allowing wealthy corporations to pay a fee to speed up permitting and exemptions from judicial oversight."
"The plan is fiscally reckless, returning royalty rates to what they were in 1920, and half of what New Mexico and Texas charge," he argued. "Rolling back reforms to the antiquated federal oil and gas program would prevent taxpayers from receiving a fair return for the extraction of our public resources. Doing so would also impede sensible requirements that oil and gas companies clean up their messes."
After the vote, Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club's Lands Protection Program, said Wednesday that "public lands shouldn't have a price tag on them. But Donald Trump and his allies in Congress are working like mad to hand over our public lands to billionaires and corporate polluters to drill, mine, and log with the bare minimum oversight or accountability."
"These lands belong to all Americans, they shouldn't be given away to pad corporate bottom lines," Manuel added. "Congressional Republicans have made it clear that this is their plan, and our public lands, our clean air and water, critical habitat, and our communities will be threatened by unchecked industrial development. The American people will not tolerate it."
Food & Water Watch managing director of policy and litigation Mitch Jones put out a similarly critical statement on Wednesday.
"Selling public lands to pay for tax cuts to billionaires is a horrible idea," Jones said. "Fossil fuel corporations have been chomping at the bit to exploit federal protected lands for oil and gas drilling—House Republicans appear all too willing to pave the way. This partisan move to sell off federal lands is a betrayal of public trust. The spending bill must be dead on arrival."
This article has been updated with comment from Food & Water Watch.
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