Trump EPA Repeals Mercury Limits On Coal Plants, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Nation's Dirtiest Power Plants Still Had To Account For The Mercury They Were Putting In Children's Air

WASHINGTON. The Environmental Protection Agency on February 20 finalized the repeal of the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, freeing the nation's coal- and oil-fired power plants to release greater quantities of mercury, arsenic, lead, and soot into the air breathed by the communities surrounding them. The agency described the rollback as a measure that would save Americans more than a billion dollars a year, a figure it reached by counting the money the plants will no longer spend on pollution controls and declining to count anything that happens after the mercury leaves the smokestack.

Mercury, a neurotoxin that accumulates in the body and is understood to interfere with the brain development of fetuses and young children, had been subject to federal limits since 2012, an arrangement the agency now characterizes as having gone on long enough. Those limits cut mercury emissions from power plants by roughly 90 percent and, by the EPA's own accounting, helped prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths a year, a benefit the agency has elected to discontinue. The 2024 update being repealed would have required pollution-control upgrades at only 33 plants, most of which were already on track to comply, a fact officials cited as evidence that the rule was accomplishing very little and therefore had to be eliminated at once.

In a related provision, the agency removed the requirement that power plants continuously monitor and report the amount of toxic pollution they emit, resolving the long-standing concern that operators were still in a position to know how much mercury they were releasing and that the public was in a position to find out. Going forward, the quantity of heavy metals entering any given community's air will be a matter strictly between the plant and the prevailing wind.

"The previous administration imposed enormous costs on hardworking energy producers, and we are proud to deliver relief," said a senior administration official, who described the affected facilities as the backbone of American power and declined to specify which Americans had asked for more mercury. The official added that the repeal was fully consistent with the administration's broader commitment to making the country healthy again, a commitment maintained at a separate department.

The greatest relief is expected at the small number of aging, particularly dirty plants that had so far declined to install modern controls, among them the Colstrip facility in Montana, described by environmental groups as the highest emitter of toxic particulate matter in the national coal fleet. The action follows exemptions the administration granted in 2025 excusing 71 coal plants from the standards for two years, a temporary courtesy now made permanent.

At press time, the EPA had clarified that the billion dollars in annual savings would accrue to the power companies, while the corresponding costs would accrue to the people living downwind, an allocation the agency confirmed was working precisely as intended.