When Donald Trump took office in 2017, he wasted no time throwing wrenches into the gears of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Before the ink on his oath was dry, he categorically obstructed the EPA from its core mission: protecting public health and the environment. Now, nearly eight years later, with Trump set for a second term, communities that have long fought relentlessly for clean air, safe drinking water, and protections from hazardous chemicals are bracing for yet another onslaught on public health and environmental safeguards.  

During Trump’s first presidency, he oversaw the dismantling of dozens of environmental rules, targeting everything from air quality standards and chemical exposure to clean water protections. This time there’s even a playbook: Project 2025, a far-right policy blueprint engineered by Trump loyalists that maps out a step-by-step plan to dismantle health protections to favor polluters. The strategy is clear: decimate safeguards for chemical safety, undermine air quality rules, and unravel hard-won drinking water protections at the worst possible time. As it is, minority communities endure nearly eight times higher rates of pediatric asthma and 1.3 times higher risk of dying prematurely from exposure to pollutants.  

Based on Project 2025 and his track record of prioritizing profits over people, pollution over health, here’s how Trump’s anti-environmental agenda is set to reverse progress on public health and environmental justice. 

Chemical Safety
Chemicals seep into nearly every corner of modern life—they invade our homes, workplaces, clothing, drinking water, and even the paint on our walls. They’re not just around us; they’re in us. In fact, some 20, 000 pounds of chemicals are produced annually for each person in the United States. Many of these are harmful, even carcinogenic, and most haven’t been fully studied.  

The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) is supposed to ensure these chemicals are managed to prevent harm. But under a new Trump administration, the EPA’s ability to regulate toxic chemicals would almost certainly be undermined. This will make it easier for chemical companies to ramp up flooding the market with dangerous substances like new PFAS, a class of forever chemicals linked to cancers and developmental damage to infants and children, that despite historic protections in the Biden EPA, still lacks stringent safeguards. 

Pro-chemical Trump officials are likely to demand that the EPA wait for unattainable certainty of harm before regulating toxic chemicals. This would delay safety actions and overlook that if the EPA waited for absolute certainty—a slow process unsupported by the National Academies of Sciences—more people would face serious health risks like cancer and neurodevelopmental harm. Plus, the agency already struggles to meet the precautionary approach it strives for, so any further weakening would be a death sentence for vulnerable communities. 

Air Quality Standards 

The first Trump administration delayed or gutted standards on smog, soot, and other toxic emissions, and Trump 2.0 is poised to launch a full-scale assault on the Clean Air Act, one of the most effective tools we have to protect communities. Indeed, Trump operatives have their crosshairs on essential air regulations like Biden’s strengthened soot standards, the expanded Mercury & Air Toxics Standards (MATS), and the ‘Once In, Always In’ rule, which puts emission limits on major pollution sources like power plants and heavy manufacturing.  

These protections are supported by decades of science showing that reducing air pollution prevents thousands of premature deaths, lowers rates of asthma and respiratory disease, and reduces cardiovascular illness. Weakening these standards would only deepen health disparities, exposing millions—especially in vulnerable communities—to toxic air. Simply put, air policies are health policies and dismantling the Clean Air Act would deal a major blow to environmental justice, worsening racial and socioeconomic health disparities from increased pollution. 

Clean Water Safeguards
In 2017, Trump issued an Executive Order calling for a “review” of the EPA regulations protecting our waterways, before proposing their removal and ushering extreme deregulation under the guise of promoting economic growth and states’ rights.  And while Trump’s efforts to reduce Clean Water Act protections, were opposed by the EPA’s scientific advisory board, and were later ruled illegal by the courts thanks to an Earthjustice lawsuit, they foreshadowed the 2023 Sackett v. EPA decision, when the Supreme Court removed federal protections for over 65% of wetlands and millions of miles of streams.  

Despite overwhelming public support for water safeguards, a second Trump administration will almost certainly further erode clean water protections. His EPA will likely exacerbate the Sackett ruling through administrative actions, will likely target newer protections regulating PFAS in drinking water, and will likely attempt to weaken the new Biden rule requiring removal of lead service lines. The fact is Trump, his appointees, and congressional Republicans are obsessed with gutting clean water rules for corporate profit. 

A Clear Path Forward 

Without federal environmental protections, chemical companies, Big Oil and Gas, Big Ag, and mining corporations can pad their bottom lines faster and with fewer consequences. Stripped of EPA oversight, they can drill, frack, and pollute without a second thought about the water we drink, the air we breathe, or the communities left to deal with the toxic fallout. When environmental protections disappear, it’s ultimately our neighborhoods, our families, our children, who are left cleaning up the mess—or worse, continue living with it. 

Given the stakes, this is a call to action to the most consequential fight of our lifetimes. We’ve been here before, we know the harm, and we know what works. Policies like the Inflation Reduction Act prove that clean energy investments and stronger infrastructure can transform communities.  And when the EPA is free to prioritize science and public health, the improvement is undeniable.  

With an egregiously anti-public health agenda looming ahead, we have a roadmap forward: Build partnership with champions in Congress to combat every attempt to rollback, diminish, and demolish health protections, defend scientific integrity as the bedrock of environmental policy, and defend transparent, evidence-based standards that hold polluters accountable. Most importantly, we must turn significant resources, recognition, and amplitude to the real leaders in this fight: grassroots communities, whose expertise has been synonymous with the backbone of environmental justice for decades. In their stories, wisdom and sacrifice, we hold sacred that clean air and safe water are not privileges, but rights for all. 

Ranjani Prabhakar is the legislative director for Earthjustice’s Healthy Communities. She is Based in Washington, D.C.