The second Trump Administration’s blitz of immediate executive orders include a rulemaking pause causing an uncertain future for proposed PFAS chemical manufacturer regulation. An influential nominee and Project 2025 architect who helped craft new executive orders is charged with overseeing the directive’s implementation.
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Trump issued an executive order last week directing federal agencies to withdraw pending rules until the new administration reviews them, including a draft regulation to limit PFAS discharges in the organic chemical, plastic, and synthetic fiber industries. New administrations often implement temporary rulemaking freezes until new appointees can evaluate them to guarantee alignment with the president’s agenda.
Betsy Southerland — former EPA director of Office of Science and Technology in the Office of Water — noted the draft rule was composed from a multi-year analysis of treatment technologies, economic impact, and feedback from dischargers including Chemours’ Fayetteville Works Facility.
“The Biden Administration spent the entire four years drafting technology-based wastewater permit limits for chemical manufacturers,” Southerland told Port City Daily. “They finally got all that done and gave it to the Office of Management and Budget to send out for public comment. Now it’s frozen and we don’t know if it’s ever going to be seen.”
The withdrawal does not impact a separate Safe Drinking Water Act regulation announced by the Biden administration in April. The drinking water rule requires public water utilities to complete a five-year compliance schedule to achieve legally enforceable concentration levels for six PFAS compounds by 2029. The drinking water rule does not enforce limits on industrial dischargers.
Local officials — including Cape Fear Public Utility Authority Executive Director Kenneth Waldroup and Pender County Utilities Executive Director Anthony Colon — expressed concerns the utility rule unfairly burdened ratepayers without limiting pollution at the source.
Two months later in June, the Environmental Protection Agency sent a draft PFAS regulation focused on chemical manufacturers to the White House for consideration. The Office of Management and Budget states review for the proposal concluded the date of Trump’s regulatory freeze executive order.
“The Biden administration should have released the discharge limits before the change in administrations,” Clean Cape Fear co-founder Emily Donovan said. “But that doesn’t absolve the Trump administration from its duty and responsibility to protect the American public, especially when this administration has been making claims about wanting to save taxpayer dollars.”
The withdrawn rule would have guided state regulators’ use of technology-based PFAS limits in discharge permits. The Clean Water Act gives states authority to implement pollutant discharge controls but the vast majority of North Carolina’s PFAS dischargers remain without permit limits; powerful state lobby groups including the NC Chamber of Commerce have pushed against proposed state regulations.
“[The Department of Environmental Quality] has waited for EPA guidance to bolster their strength,” Cape Fear River Watch executive director Dana Sargent said. “Now they’re not going to get them. So it’s going to be even harder for us to persuade the Department of Environmental Quality to use their existing authority to require polluters to stop PFAS at the source.”
Port City Daily reached out to the EPA to ask if the Trump Administration plans to implement effluent limits on PFAS manufacturers, if there is an estimated timeline for further action on the withdrawn proposal, and if the second Trump Administration has a differing PFAS regulation stance from the first administration.
“President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship while promoting economic growth for families across the country in his first term and will continue to do so this term,” an EPA spokesperson wrote in response. “The Trump EPA was also the first to ever issue a comprehensive nationwide PFAS action plan.”
Several of Trump’s new appointees — from former chemical industry lobbyists to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — have expressed starkly divergent views on PFAS regulation. Trump’s nominee to head the EPA, Lee Zeldin, was a member of the House PFAS task force during his time as a representative (R-NY) from 2015-2023. He described addressing PFAS pollution as a “top priority” at his Senate Environment and Public Works confirmation hearing earlier this month.
“We have to ensure we are moving the needle all across this country,” Zeldin said at the hearing. “There are cleanup projects large and small across America where many Americans have been waiting decades — generations for that action.”
Zeldin co-signed a 2019 letter to former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler criticizing the agency’s “slow response” to setting nationwide PFAS drinking water standards and requested regulations for PFOA, PFOS, and 1,4-dioxane. The former representative also twice voted in favor of the PFAS Action Act, which passed in the House but died in the Senate Public Works Committee after a surge of chemical industry lobbying.
Southerland — who worked in the EPA under Republican and Democrat administrations for 30 years — expressed doubt that the incoming administration will prioritize stronger PFAS regulation. She noted Senate Environment and Public Works chair Shelley Moore Capito criticized the Biden Administration’s new PFAS regulations at a November hearing commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act.
“For her to have made a big public declaration like that — she wouldn’t have done that unless she was sure the EPA would reconsider those rules,” Southerland said.
PFAS manufacturers have donated large sums to members of the senate environment committee in recent years; Capito’s campaign has received $17,000 from the American Chemistry Council, $15,000 from the National Association of Chemical Distribution, $14,100 from Chemours, and $8,500 from DuPont.
A coalition including the American Chemistry Council and North Carolina Chamber of Commerce sent a December letter to President Trump criticizing the Biden administration’s PFAS rules as a “suite of overly burdensome and unworkable regulations.”
The groups requested Trump roll back PFAS drinking water limits, monitoring requirements, designation of PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances, and pause PFAS rulemaking — including proposed discharge limits withdrawn as part of the president’s executive order.
The American Chemistry Council and Alliance for Chemical Distribution sent a letter to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee expressing support for Zeldin’s nomination a week before his confirmation hearing.
PFAS and Project 2025
Former Trump Administration officials wrote 25 of the 30 chapters in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy plan for a second Trump term. Trump distanced himself from the controversial initiative during his campaign but claimed its authors would “lay the groundwork and detail plans” for his administration during an April 2022 Heritage Foundation event.
Mandy Gunasekara — who served as chief of staff to former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler — wrote a section of the Project 2025 playbook proposing reforms to the agency’s chemical regulation process.
She recommended including EPA actions in an inauguration day freeze on pending rules, revisiting the designation of PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances, revising PFAS groundwater cleanup regulations, and rejecting funding for the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), the mechanism EPA uses to determine PFAS toxicity assessments.
Gunasekara is the former director of legislative affairs for the National Association of Chemical Distributors, which has lobbied against PFAS regulation.
Russ Vought, one of Project 2025’s key contributors, said Trump supported the initiative but disavowed Project 2025 for political reasons in a secretly recorded video published by the Centre for Climate Reporting.
“We have detailed agency plans,” Vought said in 2024 speech. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Vought is Trump’s appointee to head the Office of Management and Budget, a position he held during the first administration. The OMB director has unique authority over proposed environmental regulations, as demonstrated in last week’s executive order withdrawing EPA’s proposed PFAS discharge rule:
“The OMB Director shall oversee the implementation of this memorandum and any communications regarding any matters pertaining to this review should be addressed to the OMB Director.”
Vought’s Project 2025 chapter emphasized the importance of the OMB as the only office capable of overriding other agencies.The OMB published a memo directing a freeze on federal grants and loans on Monday that the Southern Environmental Law Center warned could jeopardize funding for various North Carolina programs, including water quality sampling. A federal judge temporarily halted the directive until a hearing next week.
Project 2025 advocates restoring a 2020 executive order that would have reclassified thousands of federal employees to remove protections preventing at-will firings; the president signed an executive order to do so last week. Project 2025 supporters argue the initiative is necessary to reduce bureaucratic overreach and inefficiency; Southerland expressed concerns the reclassification would particularly inhibit technical expertise within the EPA.
“It would turn the merit-based system into a political patronage system,” she said.
Vought said he wanted to shut down EPA’s funding and “put them in trauma” in a 2023 speech.
In 2018, the Trump Administration’s OMB and EPA sought to suppress a Center for Disease Control and Prevention study on PFAS health impacts due to an anticipated “public relations nightmare,” according to emails obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The EPA inspector general issued a 2023 report finding a Trump appointee interfered with a PFAS health assessment to make it look less toxic. In September, the EPA IG found previous Trump Administration EPA supervisors retaliated against three scientists who pushed back against pressure to delete data on chemical toxicity assessments. The whistleblower complaints alleged inappropriate industry influence continued into the Biden Administration.
Trump fired 18 inspector generals last week, including his 2020 appointee and EPA IG Sean O’Donnell. American Accountability Foundation executive director Tom Jones — who created a list of federal employees suspected of inhibiting a second Trump administration agenda — advocated the next president appoint IGs to ensure “control of the people that work in government” in a Project 2025 training video obtained by ProPublica.
“EPA IG’s office focused on politically charged investigations going after numerous former Trump appointees,” Project 2025 co-author Gunasekara told Bloomberg Law. “Overall, no one should be surprised with the EPA IG’s removal.”
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