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Trump waives clean-air rules for 202 facilities

newsOct 24, 2026241,566

President Trump temporarily waived new EPA clean-air rules for 202 industrial facilities in 39 states and Puerto Rico, exemptions the New York Times calls the biggest presidential intervention in Clean Air Act enforcement in the last half-century. The affected sites include some of the country’s worst polluters, among them chemical manufacturers, copper smelters and coal-burning power plants, with named examples such as Ameren’s Sioux and Labadie coal plants, the Wood River Refinery and SunCoke Energy in Granite City. The Times reports about 3.3 million people live within three miles of at least one exempted facility. Investigative reporting based on more than 10,000 pages of records says administration appointees then moved to weaken the regulations themselves, staffing the EPA with industry insiders, letting industry set meeting agendas, and seeking changes that would keep plants running longer before shutdowns for repairs. The paper frames the sequence as first granting temporary waivers and then working to gut the rules, actions its reporters say raised cancer risk exposures for nearby communities.

Eric Lipton NYT
@ericlipton.nytimes.com

JUST POSTED: Today at The NYT we are publishing a major investigation into how President Trump used his executive powers to expose millions of Americans to greater cancer risks. A six month-long investigation built on more than 10,000 pages of FOIA records. Read it www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...

10413h ago
Mark Chadbourn
@chadbourn.bsky.social

New research on how air pollution penetrates deep into the brain and could cause serious illness. As a reminder, Trump has dismantled, rolled back or paused major Clean Air Act rules.

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