EPA Plans PFAS Rule Rollbacks After Court Tosses Chemours Order

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last month published a memorandum noting health assessments it has conducted have linked specific types of man-made chemicals known as PFAS to developmental and reproductive toxicity, immune system suppression, liver damage, thyroid disruption and elevated risk of kidney and liver cancers

But that memorandum wasn’t touting protection against those PFAS, short for per- or polyfluoroalkyl substances — a class of chemicals with a history of toxic industrial pollution in the Ohio River Valley.

Instead, the memorandum was an overview of costs and benefits for a proposal from the EPA under President Donald Trump to eliminate maximum contamination levels and the country’s first-ever national drinking water limits implemented for the PFAS linked to those adverse health impacts, enacted in 2024 under then-President Joe Biden.

How to Comment on EPA's Proposed PFAS Rollbacks

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is taking comments until July 20 on its proposals to:

* Rescind its determinations to regulate four per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS), perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid and its ammonium salt (HFPO-DA, commonly known as GenX chemicals), and mixtures of these three PFAS plus perfluorobutane sulfonic acid (PFBS) — under the Safe Drinking Water Act

* Extend the dates of compliance with federal maximum contaminant levels for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) from April 26, 2029, to April 26, 2031, for those systems that submit a request

The proposals may be found at bit.ly/PFASrescissions and bit.ly/PFASdelays, respectively.

Comments may be submitted, identified by Docket ID Nos. EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0654 and EPA-HQ-OW-2025-1742, respectively, via:

* Federal eRulemaking Portal: regulations.gov (the EPA’s preferred method)

* Email: [email protected]. with the docket number in the subject line of the message

* Mail: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Docket Center, Office of Water Docket, Mail Code 28221T, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20460

The EPA will hold a virtual hearing at 11 a.m.-7 p.m. on July 7. The hearing will continue until public testimony is finished. Registration is available at bit.ly/PFASEPAhearing.

Trump’s EPA published the memorandum last month as it announced it also was proposing to allow for a two-year extension of compliance deadlines set under Biden in 2024 for two of the most common PFAS.

The EPA in 2024 estimated benefits of $1.5 billion per year based on fewer cancers, lower incidents of heart attacks and strokes, and reduced birth complications stemming from the rule.

But now the EPA claims its new plan would lower national compliance costs and relieve public water systems of monitoring, treatment and reporting obligations, two years after it announced roughly $1 billion in available funding through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to help states implement PFAS testing and treatment at public water systems and to help owners of private wells address PFAS contamination.

PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because they build up in the human bloodstream — a toxicity risk that has loomed large in West Virginia for generations.

The Washington Works chemical facility near Parkersburg has been a national hot spot for PFAS pollution through groundwater and air since PFAS use began there under DuPont control in 1951.

“This is really a historic day,” environmental attorney Rob Bilott said during a webinar hosted by the environmental health advocacy nonprofit Environmental Working Group upon the EPA’s April 2024 rollout of its first-ever national drinking water standards for PFAS, over two decades after his work that drew attention to PFAS exposure linked to elevated concentrations of cancers and other diseases in the Parkersburg area.

Two years later, water quality allies have castigated the Trump administration for what they view as it spurning its responsibility to guard against PFAS. Those allies include West Virginia advocates and Mark Ruffalo, the Academy Award-nominated actor who played Bilott in the 2019 legal thriller “Dark Waters” about Bilott’s case against DuPont.

“The moniker for this administration is ‘Make America Cancerous Again,’" Ruffalo said in a statement released by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy organization, in response to the Trump EPA’s proposed PFAS rule rollbacks. “Let’s cut the crap and call it how it is.”

“Polluters must be held accountable — not given more time, weaker standards, or legal escape routes,” West Virginia Rivers Coalition communications manager Maggie Stange said in response to the EPA’s planned rollbacks.

But a federal court has ruled against the Rivers Coalition and in favor of DuPont’s successor as a chronic PFAS-discharging operator of the Washington Works facility in a case the coalition brought indicating the chemical giant was unlawfully dumping PFAS into the Ohio River, a drinking water source for over 5 million people.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit tossed a preliminary injunction approved by the District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia in a June 3 ruling, siding with Chemours after it argued the district court erred in finding “irreparable harm” from the company’s Washington Works plant polluting a PFAS known as HFPO-DA (hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid) or GenX chemicals.

HFPO-DA is one of the PFAS for which the EPA is proposing to eliminate a legally enforceable contamination level it set in 2024.

In a DEP-overseen study of treated water published by the United States Geological Survey in July 2025, at least 11 of 109 sites throughout the West Virginia yielded detections above the enforceable limit for a PFAS known as PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid), with five above the enforceable limit for PFOS (perfluorooctanesulfonic acid).

Those are the two PFAS for which the EPA is proposing to extend enforceable contamination limit compliance deadlines for two years — until 2031.

“The EPA was created to protect Americans from exactly this kind of chemical contamination,” Ken Cook, president and cofounder of the Environmental Working Group, said in a statement responding to the EPA’s proposal announced on May 18. “You cannot make America healthy again while allowing toxic PFAS to flow freely from our taps.”

Vulnerable W.Va. Lacks Its Own Enforceable Standards

The EPA set enforceable maximum contaminant levels last year of 4 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS — what the agency has said are the lowest levels feasible for effective implementation.

The EPA plans to keep those maximum contaminant levels but extend the compliance date by two years for public drinking water systems, from 2029 to 2031.

A USGS study released in 2022 revealed PFOA or PFOS levels above what was then a federal health advisory level 17.5 times higher than the EPA’s current drinking water standards for both in raw water samples at 37 sites in West Virginia. Eighteen were in counties that border Ohio.

The EPA says water systems need more time to comply with drinking water limits on PFOA and PFOS and that costly violations stemming from its oversight wouldn’t expedite public health protection, instead adding paperwork and fees that detract from attempts to lessen exposure to those PFAS.

Todd Grinstead, executive director of the West Virginia Rural Water Association, a statewide group representing water and wastewater systems, declined to comment on the proposal. In 2024, Grinstead told the Gazette-Mail upon the EPA’s Biden-era PFAS standard rollout that the agency’s then-new limits were “reasonable.”

The American Chemistry Council, a prominent chemical industry trade group, applauded an EPA announcement last year that it planned PFAS drinking water standard rollbacks, arguing the Biden-era standards would divert key resources away from state and local drinking water priorities.

But the EPA had estimated under Biden that roughly 6% to 10% of 66,000 public drinking water systems subject to the rule may have to take action to meet the new standards.

West Virginia is more reliant on federally set maximum contaminant levels because of its relative dearth of state oversight.

At least 16 states have adopted guidance, health advisory or notification levels for certain PFAS, and 11 have established enforceable standards, according to an estimate by Safer States, a national alliance of environmental health groups and coalitions.

West Virginia is not among them.

“The science is clear that PFAS threaten human health, and delaying protections will only increase costs for states and prolong exposure to toxic chemicals that should never have been allowed to contaminate drinking water in the first place,” Sarah Doll, national director of Safer States, said in a statement following the Trump EPA’s rollback proposal.

EPA Attributes Proposed Regulation Removals to Technicality

The EPA has proposed rescinding legally enforceable maximum contamination levels set in 2024 for three PFAS known as HFPO-DA, PFHxS (perfluorohexane sulfonic acid) and PFNA (perfluorononanoic acid), as well as mixtures of those PFAS plus another known as PFBS (perfluorobutane sulfonic acid).

The EPA has based that proposal on an asserted technicality, saying that, under Biden, the agency’s rulemaking procedure for those PFAS was unlawful.

The EPA says it wrongly concluded it could simultaneously publish a preliminary regulatory determination and a proposed regulation for public comment, and to simultaneously publish a final regulatory determination with a final regulation.

But the EPA said in its new rule proposal “the best reading” of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act is that the soonest the EPA may publish a proposed regulation is with the final regulatory determination, not with the preliminary regulatory determination.

Chemours has chronically exceeded HFPO-DA pollution limits via discharges into the Ohio River at its Washington Works facility.

Greater Cincinnati Water Works treatment superintendent Jeff Swertfeger said in federal court testimony filed in February 2025 in the Rivers Coalition’s case against Chemours his organization was concerned elevated HFPO-DA levels reported from Chemours discharges at its Washington Works plant may pose an increased health risk to Kentucky and Ohio communities that use the Ohio River as a drinking water source.

Chemours monitoring results from had shown consistent exceedances of maximum contaminant levels for HFPO-DA in treatment systems to remove those chemicals in Wood County.

Some exceedances were recorded from samples Chemours indicated were treated and ready for discharge, per reports by the company to public water systems and Blennerhassett Island Historical State Park, where systems have been installed.

Chemours spokesperson Jess Loizeaux said last year in an emailed statement the Biden administration used “selective science” and “incorporated grossly overstated exposure assumptions and uncertainty factors” to inflate possible risk in its 2024 rulemaking.

Loizeaux cited one reviewer’s contention that in an external peer review published in 2021 that a value the EPA has used in risk assessment to account for data uncertainty as it formulated the HFPO-DA standard was “an extreme application of the precautionary principle.”

Why Court Determined No 'Irreparable Harm' Amid Violations

In August 2025, the District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia issued a preliminary injunction to stop Chemours from discharging HFPO-DA beyond pollution limits set by its permit.

“Chemours has treated its permit more as full permission to act without constraint,” U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin, nominated to his seat in 1995 by then-President Bill Clinton, wrote in the order, finding that Chemours “boldly violates” its permit and left the public “exposed to real and ongoing harm.”

But three Fourth Circuit Court judges, two nominated by Trump and one by former President George H. W. Bush, ruled that the district court’s “irreparable harm analysis rested on legal and factual errors.”

The circuit court opined that violating a permit cannot automatically constitute irreparable harm.

It also ruled that Rivers Coalition expert witness, Boston University environmental health professor Jennifer Schlezinger, had established that HFPO-DA increased the risk of harm “by some uncertain amount” and that drinking water with more than 10 parts per trillion of HFPO-DA made harm likelier — but not that doing so made harm “more likely than not,” which it held was a requirement to establish irreparable harm.

And the circuit court ruled that Rivers Coalition member and witness Charlise Robinson of Lubeck, just outside Parkersburg, wasn’t subject to irreparable harm because she testified she didn’t drink or cook with her tap water, only using it for activities “like brushing [her] teeth, bathing, laundry, cleaning, and watering [her] plants.”

Responding to the circuit court’s ruling, Rivers Coalition executive director Jennie Smith said her group intends to pursue civil penalties in district court. Smith noted that Chemours had changed how it comes into compliance by proposing a pollutant minimization program to reduce outlet concentrations during wet weather approved by the EPA last year in response to a 2023 EPA order requiring Chemours to take corrective measures to address PFAS discharges.

“The injunction did its job,” Smith said, “and we expect Chemours to remain in compliance going forward.”

Loizeaux said in response to the circuit court’s decision that Chemours “will continue to operate its Washington Works site safely and in compliance with the discharge permit limits on which the preliminary injunction was based.”

But it’s poised to do so under a significantly more lenient EPA.

“We had hoped that they meant it when they said ‘Make America Healthy Again,’” Ruffalo said of the Trump administration. “It is obvious they didn’t.”

© 2026 The Charleston Gazette (Charleston, W.Va.). Visit www.wvgazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.