Trump Halts Clean Air Laws For Most of the Country

President Donald Trump signed four separate proclamations granting blanket exemptions to over 100 facilities, including chemical plants, coal-fired power plants, commercial sterilizers, and taconite mills, allowing them to ignore clean air standards and release more toxic air pollution in most of the country, or over at least 30 states and U.S. territories.

The orders Trump signed Thursday evening are unprecedented and let facilities put off using better technology or even turn off the systems that filter out some of the most potent cancer-causing chemicals the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates, including ethylene oxide, benzene, chloroprene, and formaldehyde.

“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 Patrice Simms, Vice President of Litigation at Earthjustice’s Healthy Communities Program. “Trump’s action on behalf of big corporate polluters will cause more cancer, more birth defects, and more children to suffer asthma. The country deserves better.”

Now, more than 50 chemical facilities can turn off pollution controls or dodge recently strengthened emission limits, including those under the Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (HON) standards. Factories processing taconite iron ore, manufacturing chemical polymers and resins, and facilities using ethylene oxide, are also getting similar free passes to pollute, even though pollution controls are available.

EPA is also exempting over 30 commercial sterilization facilities. These include over half of the facilities that EPA has already found to pose an exceptional cancer risk to their surrounding communities. Some facilities have cancer risk rates over 80 times EPA’s unacceptable cancer risk rate, and are capable of causing a new cancer diagnosis every month and a half.

Neighborhoods next to chemical plants, power plants, commercial sterilizers, and metal processing sites in Texas, California, Utah, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky, and West Virginia will face the worst of this continuing pollution, as these states are home to major facilities. Some of the protections being delayed, like the HON standards, prevent over 6,000 tons of toxic emissions each year and help protect more than 7 million people, many of them children, from breathing chemicals linked to cancer, asthma, and birth defects.

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.

The 68 coal-fired power plants exempted from mercury and arsenic pollution limits span 23 states. (Source: Environmental Defense Fund and Environmental Integrity Project analysis of EPA data)

Types of facilities exempt from clean air standards include:

• Ethylene oxide commercial sterilizers: At least 39 facilities in 23 states and territories (Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia).
• Chemical manufacturing facilities: 52 facilities in 13 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia).
• Taconite iron ore processing facilities: Eight facilities in two states (Michigan and Minnesota)
• Coal-fired power plants: Three facilities in three states (Colorado, Ohio, and Illinois)