'Death started to come': The Trump offer that exposed millions to lethal pollution

In March 2025, President Donald Trump’s administration made a tantalizing offer to coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturing facilities and other factories: Their operations could be exempted from key provisions under the Clean Air Act, the bedrock environmental law estimated to have prevented thousands of premature deaths. All they had to do was ask.

No rigorous application was needed. An email, which they had until the end of the month to send, would suffice.

Within two weeks, executives across major industries began flooding an inbox set up to receive and funnel requests from the Environmental Protection Agency to the White House. They asked that their facilities be excused from expensive Clean Air Act requirements, relief that would save their companies money but pollute the air breathed by millions of Americans.

At least 3,000 pages of emails were sent to and from this inbox in the weeks that followed. ProPublica obtained them via public records requests, giving the most complete look to date at a key aspect of what Trump’s EPA calls the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”

Richard Shaffer, asset manager at Scrubgrass Reclamation Company, emailed asking for an exemption covering a western Pennsylvania power plant that burns coal waste. A significant portion of the electricity it generates is used to mine bitcoin. Keeping the cost of environmental compliance low was important “for the security of the United States,” Shaffer wrote.

A response came 11 days later in a presidential proclamation. Approved.

A Citgo Petroleum Corporation lawyer, Ann Al-Bahish, sought exemptions for petroleum refineries in Illinois, Louisiana and Texas, which had all been hit with Clean Air Act violations in recent years. The rule at issue, the agency had previously concluded, would “provide critical health protections to hundreds of thousands of people living near chemical plants.” (The company agreed to install new pollution controls to resolve some of its violations.)

Kevin Wagner, vice president of the medical sterilizer company Sterigenics, messaged asking that nine facilities emitting the carcinogenic gas ethylene oxide, including near Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Charlotte and Atlanta, be exempted. More than 45,000 people, most of them not white, live within a mile of these facilities, according to federal data.

Both companies got their response in July proclamations. Approved and approved.

The companies did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

In granting these requests, the White House didn’t seek input from EPA scientists. The administration cited authority under the Clean Air Act that had never before been used.

More approvals followed. All told, more than 180 facilities in 38 states and Puerto Rico have, by Trump’s unilateral decision, been given a two-year reprieve from following the latest Clean Air Act rules. About 250,000 people live within a mile of these facilities, according to EPA and U.S. Census Bureau data collected by the Environmental Defense Fund.

A majority are coal power plants and medical sterilizers. And more than 70 had faced formal enforcement action in the past five years by the EPA for violations such as emitting contaminants above regulatory limits and failing to properly track facilities’ pollution.

Few requests appear to have been denied. The administration hasn’t made public its decisions on requests from three classes of plants that it said it would consider exempting: manufacturers of rubber tires, iron and steel, and lime, which is used in products ranging from metals to concrete. About 55 facilities are covered by those rules, although Republicans in Congress have already repealed the rubber tire updated rule.

In response to ProPublica’s questions, an EPA spokesperson said in a statement: “EPA played no role in the determinations set out in the statute and specifically vested in the President. Any requests sent to the EPA’s electronic mailbox were forwarded to the White House.”

In defending the exemptions, the administration cited two standards in the Clean Air Act that a president must invoke to exercise such powers: The industry must be integral to national security, and the technology needed to meet the EPA requirements must be unavailable. Sticking with Biden-era requirements could shut down businesses, Trump argued.

“The President has provided regulatory relief from certain burdensome Clean Air Act requirements due to national security concerns that critical industries would no longer be able to operate under such stringent standards,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “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.”

Numerous policy experts told ProPublica that they do not believe the White House’s justifications for the use of the exemptions.

“It’s being absolutely abused now, and it couldn’t be more obvious,” said one EPA staffer who asked not to be named because they currently work for the agency.

Indeed, multiple utilities have publicly said that they were already implementing pollution controls to comply with the more stringent rules, undercutting the administration’s claim that the technologies necessary to do so don’t exist.

Community groups and environmental nonprofits have sued the administration five times to halt the exemptions. A coalition of 12 organizations labeled the action an “illegal scheme.” (Four of the cases have been consolidated and are ongoing. In a motion to dismiss them, the administration argued that the groups did not have legal standing to sue and reiterated its stance that the law gives the president the authority to grant such exemptions.)

“The cancer risk presented by these facilities is huge,” said Sarah Buckley, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, adding that years of scientific study and public input informed the rules. “With a stroke of a pen, President Trump thinks he can just brush all that away.”

“He Disregards the Checks-and-Balances System”

Freeport-McMoRan’s massive copper mining and smelting operation sits on the hills above the towns of Miami, Claypool and Globe in eastern Arizona. A Clean Air Act rule that was updated in 2024 regulates the smelter’s emissions and, by extension, the air breathed by the 10,000 people who live in these towns.

Nearly two and a half years of fine-tuning passed between publication of a draft rule and the final product. Some of it was spent gathering input from residents, public health groups, Native American governments and companies — feedback the agency addressed in subsequent rewrites. Years of air monitoring data also informed the process. Implementing the updated rule would “reduce emissions of toxic metals, primarily lead and arsenic, by nearly 50 percent” at the country’s several copper smelters, the EPA concluded.

Trump undid that work when he signed a proclamation in October pausing implementation and approving Freeport’s request that its Arizona copper smelter be given a pass on “all the deadlines promulgated under” the rule.

On a sunny morning a few weeks after Freeport received the exemption, white smoke poured from its smelter above a Baptist church and residential neighborhood. The plant’s low rumble reverberated across the surrounding desert, unusually green from a recent rain.

Trina Bunger has lived her life next to this smelter. Decades ago, the air was so polluted that her children wore handkerchiefs over their mouths when they went to school. So many of the family’s cattle fell ill that she no longer believed the sicknesses were a coincidence.

Years ago, on particularly bad days, when the air around the smelter was hazy, “it would choke you out. It was like walking in a cloud,” Bunger said. “If you read the obituaries, ‘Died of cancer. Died of cancer,’” she said of her neighbors. “Well, that’s our destination, so I better get done what I’m gonna get done.”

But she’s seen air quality steadily improve as regulations tightened, following advances in emissions control technology. Freeport spent $250 million on improvements completed in 2017 to better control sulfur dioxide emissions.

“It’s better than in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s,” Bunger said.

Trump paused the requirement that Freeport follow the latest rule, including by installing additional pollution control equipment.

William Cobb and Todd Weaver, Freeport’s vice president and senior counsel, respectively, emailed the EPA in March 2025 to request a reprieve from the Clean Air Act. They argued that complying with the rule governing copper smelters would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, while bringing minimal emissions reductions.

“Significant investments have been made over the smelter’s long history to manage sulfur dioxide, lead and other regulated emissions in accordance with applicable standards, contributing to sustained improvements in local air quality,” Linda Hayes, Freeport’s spokesperson, said in a statement. The company has increased monitoring around the smelter and asked for the additional time to work with the EPA on evaluating “flaws” in the updated rule, she said.

For this conservative county, where more than two-thirds of voters went for Trump, the smelter is an economic blessing. Freeport’s broader copper operation here employs nearly 950 people, according to the company. A brightly painted mural down the road from the smelter reads: “If it can’t be grown, it must be mined.”

Eduardo Sanchez lauds the company’s economic impact and is hesitant to criticize the smelter. But, he said, Trump has no right to unilaterally decide when laws do and do not apply.

“In order to help the rich get richer, he’s deregulating everything,” Sanchez said. “He’s a tyrant! He disregards the checks-and-balances system. He overreaches through executive dictates.”

An Error-Ridden Process

While Trump’s exemptions will affect millions of Americans like those in Miami, Claypool and Globe, the process for granting themhas been sloppy.

Because presidents have never previously used this authority to circumvent the Clean Air Act, industries were left guessing how to make the request, experts said.

“Hello, I am a gas company looking for an exemption. How do I start?” one businessman wrote in an email to the EPA.

Others appeared to mock the administration’s regulatory rollback, with one email calling for a coal power plant to be built on a 300-foot-wide mangrove island just offshore of the president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. “It will produce power so strongly that jobs and power will be the best that people have ever seen,” the email stated.

The American Chemistry Council and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, two trade groups representing chemical manufacturers, sent a letter requesting a blanket exemption for their roughly 640 member companies. “Without immediate intervention, such as a Presidential exemption,” the groups wrote, referencing the section of law Trump was using to hit pause on Clean Air Act rules, “companies will evaluate whether to shut down units or offshore their operations to prevent the application of an imprudent and unlawful rule.”

It emerged later that the administration had decided that companies must submit requests on their own behalf.

Rank-and-file agency staff also had little understanding of how the process would run, according to hundreds of pages of internal EPA communications obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund. Instead, a political appointee who had previously worked for a utility and a petrochemicals trade group played a key role in creating the inbox where companies sent their requests for exemptions, the records showed.

“There’s certainly no input from experts in EPA,” the EPA employee told ProPublica.

The administration gave notice of approved exemptions by publishing presidential proclamations listing the factories’ locations on the White House’s website. “It is in the national security interests of the United States to issue this Exemption,” Trump wrote when exempting Freeport’s smelter.

These proclamations at times added to the confusion. In a July proclamation, Trump appears to have granted an exemption to a plant south of Baton Rouge, although he listed it as being located in Alabama, not Louisiana, and to another in Alabama that may not exist at all.

Spelling mistakes and formatting errors throughout the proclamations have made identifying exempted plants a guessing game. The name of an Arkansas coal plant receiving an exemption was misspelled, for instance, as was the name of the company Phillips 66, which was granted exemptions at its oil refineries in Illinois and Texas.

Phillips 66 declined to comment.

In April, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Adam Schiff, both Democrats, introduced a bill to amend the process by requiring the president to obtain Congress’ consent before granting pauses to Clean Air Act compliance. The exemptions, Whitehouse said in a statement, show a willingness to “abuse every loophole available to pollute for free, damn the health consequences for Americans.”

A Sweeping Deregulatory Agenda

Trump’s exemptions give companies an extra two years to comply with updates to nine sets of regulations written under the law’s authority that mandate lower emissions or better monitoring around facilities in specific industries. The rules were slated to take effect this year and next.

This pause is part of a much larger strategy to unwind the Clean Air Act, buying time for the administration to deconstruct large portions of the legislative framework regulating the nation’s air quality — weakening regulations on everything from ethylene oxide emissions to plastics pyrolysis plants. And while the law largely governs toxins, the rollback has also undermined action on climate change, including repealing the legal theory used to classify greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide as regulated pollutants.

The White House has focused these efforts most intently on one industry: coal. Trump has so far granted 71 coal power plants — more than any other category — two-year exemptions to the Clean Air Act rule governing them, called the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. Then, in February, the administration formalized the rollback of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, in effect making the exemptions permanent.

Among the beneficiaries of these moves is Ameren Corp.’s Labadie Energy Center west of St. Louis. The coal-fired power station is massive — 2.4 gigawatts, enough to power roughly 2 million homes — as are its emissions. It’s one of the nation’s largest sources of sulfur dioxide, which forms haze and harms the respiratory system, and the second-largest source of carbon dioxide, according to EPA data. But due to its age, the plant isn’t equipped with most modern pollution controls and can be linked to more than 300 premature deaths per year, according to a recent Sierra Club and Clean Air Task Force analysis of EPA data.

Patricia Schuba’s family has lived in Franklin County, Missouri, for five generations. From her home, she can see the plant and, emanating from it, “black clouds on an otherwise normal day.” Schuba keeps a mental list of the friends and family members who suffer from cancer, respiratory issues and other diseases and wonders if these health problems are linked to the emissions.

“I’m hopeful that the American public will wake up and elect people who actually put the American public first. And if we can do that, we can unwind some of this and clean up these sites,” said Schuba, who has served as the president of the Labadie Environmental Organization, a nonprofit community group, for about 15 years.

Sunil Bector, an attorney with the Sierra Club, said that heavily polluting facilities will reap overlapping benefits from the assault on the Clean Air Act. Research by his organization suggests that the Labadie power station stands to gain from every major action rolling back coal plant regulations.

“Ameren may expect that these rules are going away,” Bector said, “which means the levers that would force Ameren to internalize the cost of pollution are going away, which means the people who breathe air in St. Louis are internalizing the cost of pollution through their lungs.”

Craig Giesmann, the company’s director of environmental services, said in a statement, “Ameren Missouri’s Labadie Energy Center provides electricity to our customers in a cost-effective manner, operates in compliance with all applicable environmental regulations designed to protect public health and is supported by decades of investment in emissions controls.” Additionally, Giesmann said, the power plant is “critical infrastructure.”

The law requires the president to tie such exemptions to national security, and Trump has declared a national energy emergency over fears that emerging industries, like artificial intelligence, will not have access to the massive amounts of electricity they need. Data center proposals have come to Franklin County, and the county recently voted to recommend one despite the opposition of hundreds of locals. As the Trump administration speaks of an artificial intelligence arms race, Schuba fears Labadie will remain open for years to power data centers.

“There are real human consequences,” Schuba said, “lives that we sacrifice for whatever we think our future should be.”

“Death Started to Come”

Amid the rush to give out passes to the Clean Air Act, communities already saddled with air pollution find themselves affected once more.

An 85-mile stretch of Louisiana, running southeast from Baton Rouge, hosts such a concentration of heavy industry that it long ago garnered the nickname “Cancer Alley.” Studies have shown elevated cancer rates in the region, home to tens of thousands of people, and local chemical plants received passes on Clean Air Act rules. Louisiana hosts 20 of the facilities Trump has exempted. (Texas and Pennsylvania, two other states with histories of heavy industry, rank first and third, respectively, for the number of exempted facilities.)

Tonga Nolan grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood on the north side of Baton Rouge and remembers it fondly as a tight-knit community. She also remembers when “death started to come.” Years later, she can recite the names of more than a dozen neighbors and family members who lived within a few blocks and died of cancer.

Nolan also had cancer. Wondering about a link between emissions from nearby facilities and her own health woes, Nolan moved away after undergoing a hysterectomy, she said. She is now in remission.

Chemical plants mark the western edge of the neighborhood, including a Formosa Plastics facility, which produces the plastic commonly called PVC.

The plant, owned by a Taiwanese chemicals company worth about $300 billion, has a history of violations. In 2003, the company accidentally released 8,000 pounds of carcinogenic vinyl chloride into Baton Rouge, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. And EPA data shows that its pattern of reported infractions has continued in recent years. (A company spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement that “significant improvements have been implemented” relating to “process safety, monitoring, and operational controls” since the 2003 incident.)

Formosa Plastics’ Baton Rouge plant applied for an exemption to a Clean Air Act rule. Jay Su and Tamara Lasater Wacker, executive vice president and corporate environmental director of Formosa Plastics, respectively, wrote to the EPA in March 2025 to make their case for it. They said that the company needed more time to design and install technology to comply with the rule and that the plastic synthesized at the plant was important to national security because it’s used in products such as blood bags.

“Due to the complexities and challenges that the rule currently presents, we request that the President grant a 2-year compliance date exemption for related emission limits and standards, performance testing, monitoring, recordkeeping and reporting requirements,” Su wrote.

The rule would have mandated better monitoring at the fence lines of Formosa Plastics and other plants. Such facilities can leak toxic gases from pipelines, valves and tanks, and they often vastly underestimate local emissions. But monitoring for leaks has proved effective in other industries; fence-line emissions of benzene, a carcinogen, fell 30% at petroleum refineries after implementation of a similar monitoring program, according to the EPA.

The administration granted Formosa Plastics’ request in July.

“We take our environmental responsibilities seriously and remain committed to safe, compliant, and transparent operations,” Formosa Plastics’ spokesperson said.

Exacerbating historical disparities, about 54% of people who live close to the facilities Trump exempted are not white, according to the federal data the Environmental Defense Fund collected. By comparison, only about 43% of the country is not white.

Polluting facilities “seem to be in the backyards of a lot of African American families,” Nolan said, adding that it’s hard to cope with the reality that many family members and neighbors are lost forever.

“You are hurting,” she said. “It’s like a hole that can never be filled.”