Trump EPA Moves To Exempt More Than 100 Coal Ash Dumps From Federal Cleanup, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Arsenic And Lead Were Still Being Asked To Stay Out Of The Groundwater

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The Environmental Protection Agency moved Wednesday to free more than 100 of the nation's coal ash dumps from the federal requirement that they refrain from leaking arsenic, lead, and mercury into the groundwater beneath them, resolving a long-standing concern within the administration that the country's largest industrial waste piles were still being asked to keep track of where their contents ended up.

The proposed rule would rescind the monitoring and cleanup obligations that had for the first time been extended in 2024 to older, inactive disposal areas and so-called management units, the aging ponds and landfills where utilities deposited the residue of burning coal for the better part of a century. Under the new approach, hundreds of such sites would fall outside federal regulation entirely, and the question of whether and when to address contamination would pass from uniform national standards to site-by-site permits issued by individual states.

"The previous administration operated under the assumption that coal ash, simply because it contains arsenic, lead, mercury, and hexavalent chromium, was going to behave like a hazardous substance," said one senior administration official, who characterized the existing rule as a needless burden on operators who had done nothing more than store millions of tons of toxic material in unlined pits next to rivers. "We are restoring flexibility and letting the states that host these facilities decide how much cleanup, if any, the facilities require."

Coal ash remains one of the largest waste streams produced in the United States, and the industry's own groundwater data, disclosed under the rule the proposal would unwind, has shown contamination above federal safety levels at the overwhelming majority of monitored sites. The agency framed the rollback as a reduction of regulatory cost, noting that contamination which is never measured cannot be confirmed to exist.

"Nobody has proven that the water near these sites is unsafe to a degree we find convenient," a second official said, adding that residents who remained concerned were welcome to monitor their own wells. The proposal opened a public comment period running through June, during which affected communities will be invited to submit objections that the agency will retain on file.

At press time, EPA officials confirmed that the toxic metals themselves would be permitted to continue migrating through the soil at their current pace, free at last of the obligation to report on their progress.

Who Benefits

§Donald Trump, who adds yet another rollback to a second-term record built on the promise of deleting federal rules, irrespective of what those particular rules were preventing.
§Electric utilities and coal plant operators, who are relieved of the expense of monitoring, and in many cases cleaning up, the toxic waste their plants have accumulated for decades.
§The Utility Solid Waste Activities Group and allied industry lobbies, whose long-running petitions to narrow the coal ash rule are now largely granted.
§Owners of more than 100 inactive ash dumps, which under the proposal would face no federal oversight whatsoever.
§EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin's agency, which logs another step toward its publicly stated ambition of rolling back as many environmental protections as it can locate.
§Industry-friendly state permitting offices, which inherit the cleanup decisions that uniform federal standards had previously made on the public's behalf.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment