President Trump has exempted 202 industrial facilities in 39 states and Puerto Rico from new clean-air rules meant to cut cancer-causing pollution, according to a New York Times investigation published Saturday. The Times called it the biggest presidential intervention in the Clean Air Act since the landmark law was signed more than 50 years ago.
Some of the facilities are among the country’s worst industrial polluters, including chemical manufacturers, copper smelters, steel facilities, plants that sterilize medical devices and coal-burning power plants. About 3.3 million Americans live within three miles of at least one facility that received a waiver.
What the rules would have required
The rules were adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2024, under the Biden administration. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to periodically study the latest pollution controls and impose them when they are affordable and effective.
Under the new rules, medical sterilizers, chemical plants and steel facilities had to monitor for cancer-causing gases along their property lines by 2027. If they detected certain levels escaping into nearby neighborhoods, they had to fix the leaks, and they had to post the results publicly so neighbors could see what was in the air.
For chemical manufacturers, the government estimated compliance would cost about $440 million in equipment up front and about $163 million a year after that. According to the Times, that amounts to less than 1 percent of the chemical industry’s annual sales.
An industry that kept losing, until it didn’t
The chemical industry fought the rules as expensive, unnecessary and unworkable, filing petitions with Congress, the EPA and the federal courts. It lost again and again, as agency officials and courts concluded its claims lacked merit.
Less than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, trade groups asked EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to push the president to exempt them. A trade association for the medical device industry, which uses the cancer-linked gas ethylene oxide, had donated to Trump’s inauguration fund and to MAGA Inc., the Times reported.
On July 14, 2025, the chief executives of Dow, BASF, Eastman Chemical and Huntsman Corporation wrote directly to Trump urging “action on requests submitted earlier this year for presidential exemptions under the Clean Air Act.” Three days later, on July 17, Trump began granting them.
A power no president had ever used
The waivers rely on an obscure provision of the Clean Air Act that lets a president exempt facilities if the technology needed to comply is not widely available and the exemption serves national security. The provision had never been invoked since President Richard Nixon signed the law in 1970.
Documents reviewed by the Times show Trump approved the requests even though the technology was readily accessible and the industry’s national security arguments offered little detail to back them up. The EPA set up a special email inbox for exemption requests, and companies flooded it with submissions.
Former lobbyists on the inside
The waivers last two years, with the possibility of extension. The Times reported that the reprieve gave the administration time to staff the EPA with former industry insiders who worked to gut the rules altogether.
Trump nominated Aaron Szabo, a former top lobbyist for the medical device trade group AdvaMed who had helped the industry fight the regulations, to lead the EPA’s air office. Documents indicate Szabo helped handle the waiver requests and then pushed employees to pull back on enforcement. AdvaMed later told its members that its lobbying, which included political contributions to Trump’s causes, had paid off. “Membership has its privileges,” the group wrote.
Who pays the price
Ethylene oxide is a colorless, sweet-smelling, toxic gas. EPA research found long-term exposure increases the risk of leukemia, multiple myeloma and other cancers, especially for people living close to where it is produced or used. Before finalizing the rules in 2024, the agency held meetings to warn people living near sterilization facilities about the elevated cancer risks.
“You see these pretty buildings and you think they’re OK,” Wayne Powell, who lives a five-minute drive from a sterilizer outside Richmond, Virginia, told the Times. “But you don’t know that they’re harboring things that are hazardous to our health.”
The Times said it reviewed more than 10,000 pages of government documents and conducted more than 70 interviews for the investigation.