In partnership with the Chicago Tribune and Deep South Today.

Shortly after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, political appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency announced the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” Foundational environmental laws, rules and regulations that for decades had been used to clean up the nation’s air and waterways, protect its plants and animals, and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions were suddenly on the chopping block.

Amid the deregulatory flurry, the administration set up an inbox within the EPA where executives who run chemical plants, coal power stations, copper smelters and other factories could email to request a temporary exemption to Clean Air Act rules. The president said it was a matter of national security because disruptions to the affected industries could interrupt supply chains. EPA staff and others disagreed. No rigorous application was necessary, no public comment, no EPA oversight — all it took was an email sent to that EPA inbox stating your case, which was passed to the White House for approval.

ProPublica obtained thousands of pages of EPA communications that told the inside story of how quickly and sloppily the Trump administration received, processed and accepted these requests. As of mid-July, the administration had granted Clean Air Act exemptions to about 200 polluting facilities across 39 states and Puerto Rico, issuing its decisions in presidential proclamations full of typos and errors. In one case, a factory that doesn’t appear to exist received an exemption. The factories and plants that were given a temporary pass on Clean Air Act rules, while scattered across the country, fall disproportionately in majority nonwhite neighborhoods, according to EPA and U.S. Census Bureau data collected by the Environmental Defense Fund. Roughly 250,000 people live within a mile of at least one of the exempted facilities.

An EPA spokesperson told ProPublica that the agency “played no role” in the decisions and “any requests sent to the EPA’s electronic mailbox were forwarded to the White House.” A spokesperson for the White House said that the “exemptions were issued due to crushing Biden-era regulations that required large swaths of our industrial base to adopt technologies that don’t exist outside the imagination of Biden’s EPA bureaucrats.”

But the exemptions, which granted a two-year reprieve from complying with specific Clean Air Act rules, are just the tip of the spear. Congress and executive agencies are currently working to undo several dozen other rules and regulations meant to safeguard air quality.

In this session, ProPublica reporter Mark Olalde joins fellow environment journalists from across the country to discuss the unprecedented rollback of the Clean Air Act and what it means for public health in urban and rural communities, in red and blue states. 

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