In March 2025, the Trump... - Alt National Park Servicehttps://www.facebook.com/share/179d779f2V/In March 2025, the Trump administration set up an email inbox through the EPA. They sent word to coal plants, chemical manufacturers, oil refineries and other industrial facilities telling them to send us an email by the end of the month and you can get a two-year exemption from Clean Air Act rules. No application or scientific review it was just an email.
They came flooding in. ProPublica obtained 3,000 pages of them through public records requests. The result over 180 facilities across 38 states and Puerto Rico got a presidential pass to ignore updated air quality rules for two years. Rules that took years to develop. Rules that went through public comment periods, air monitoring data, input from Native American governments and public health groups. All gone with a signature.
The EPA scientists played zero role in approving any of it. The agency itself said so. Instead, a political appointee who previously worked for a utility company and a petrochemicals trade group was the one who set up the system. The White House reviewed the requests. The White House approved them.
The legal justification was “national security”. The Clean Air Act does have a presidential exemption clause, but it had never been used this way before in U.S. history. To invoke it, the president has to certify that the industry is essential to national security AND that the technology needed to comply simply doesn’t exist.
Multiple utilities had already publicly said they were installing the required pollution controls. The technology exists. They were already doing it.
The exemptions were given to mostly coal power plants (71 of them), more than any other category. Medical sterilization facilities emitting carcinogenic ethylene oxide. Oil refineries, copper smelters and chemical plants.
More than 70 of these facilities had active EPA enforcement violations in the past five years. They weren’t complying with the old rules, and now they don’t have to comply with the new ones either.
Trump Let Polluters Sidestep Clean Air Act Rules With Just an Email — ProPublicahttps://www.propublica.org/article/clean-air-act-exemptions-trump-emails