Revolving Door Project | Trump Hands Another Victory To Cancer’s Profiteers

A hundred industrial sources of carcinogenic air toxics will now be exempt from Biden-era rules intended to reduce cancer risk around the country.

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A Dow Chemicals facility that exploded in a ball of fire in Plaquemines, Louisiana in 2023, releasing tens of thousands of pounds of carcinogens. A leaky medical sterilization plant in a Los Angeles County neighborhood being sued by local residents suffering from breast, blood, and stomach cancers. A coal-fired power plant in Colorado whose emissions have been tied to dozens of premature deaths a year.

What do all of these facilities have in common? They’re among the approximately one hundred facilities with cancer-causing emissions that President Trump has exempted from hazardous air pollution limits.

In a series of four proclamations issued last Friday—the government’s favorite day to publish unpopular reports—the president listed specific facilities that won’t have to comply with stronger pollution controls set to take effect within the next few years. (I say roughly one hundred because it appears that two of the facilities named in the White House’s typo-riddled proclamations, both identified as TotalEnergies petrochemical plants in Alabama, may not exist.)

Between March and May 2024, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency issued stronger rules for the four sectors identified in the map above, tightening requirements on ethylene oxide emissions from medical sterilization facilities, mercury and other air toxics from coal plants, hazardous emissions from chemical manufacturers, and pollutants like arsenic, lead, and formaldehyde from taconite iron ore processing. Claiming that it was necessary for “national security,” Trump extended the timeline for compliance with those standards by two more years.

The updated rules should have significantly decreased the amount of cancer-causing air pollution to which Americans were exposed. As the map illustrates, communities all around the country will be impacted, but people in Louisiana—including the overburdened stretch known as Cancer Alley—and Texas will be hit particularly hard.

When the EPA strengthened its hazardous air pollution standards for chemical manufacturers making plastics in 2024, it said that the new requirements would “reduce the number of people who have elevated air toxics-related cancer risk by 96 percent” in communities within 6 miles of the plants. That would be an extraordinary improvement. Biden’s EPA also noted that “most of the facilities covered by the final rule are owned by large corporations,” for whom “the cost of implementing the final rule is less than 1 percent of their annual national sales.”

Trump is trading a 96 percent reduction in cancer risk among the most exposed communities for a less than 1 percent profit increase for plastic manufacturers like Dow, Formosa, BASF, TotalEnergies, and Phillips 66.

The new emissions rule for facilities where medical equipment is sterilized was also expected to significantly reduce the lifetime risks of cancer for people who live nearby. By lowering emissions in outdoor air by 90 percent, the rule aimed to prevent any individual from being exposed to ethylene oxide at levels that caused a lifetime cancer risk of over 100 cases in 1 million people.

Back in 2022, the EPA did a national survey that identified twenty-five medical sterilization facilities where neighbors’ lifetime cancer risk exceeded 100 in 1 million. Sixteen of those twenty-five high-polluting facilities are among the thirty-nine medical sterilization facilities that Trump is exempting from the emissions limits implemented after that survey.

Trump’s “regulatory relief” for these corporations will increase cancer risk for people in and around Groveland, Florida; Taunton, Massachusetts; Salisbury, Maryland; Columbus, Nebraska; Franklin, New Jersey; Linden, New Jersey; Queensbury, New York; Ardmore, Oklahoma; Allentown, Pennsylvania; Erie, Pennsylvania; Añasco, Puerto Rico; Salinas, Puerto Rico; Villalba, Puerto Rico; New Tazewell, Tennessee; Sandy, Utah; and Henrico, Virginia.

Maps of elevated cancer risk in Sandy, Utah and Salinas, Puerto Rico as of 2022.

Imagine that it was your house, your church, your workplace, your child’s school inside of the blue cloud of airborne carcinogens. (These 2022 risk maps were archived by the Environmental Protection Agency because they “no longer portray everything we know about risk,” but given the Trump administration’s steps to unravel the EPA’s updated standards, they offer a useful illustration of the stakes. We are tracking the Trump administration’s attacks on public data like this here.) Imagine that finally the government recognized this danger to you and your family, and took steps to solve it. Then imagine that protection was ripped away because the new president decided that it was too much of a financial burden on some multinational corporation to not be able to give you cancer.

Every day the Trump administration chooses to sacrifice people’s lives to the engines of profit. In this way it is particularly aligned with the ethos of Silicon Valley today as articulated by Edward Ongweso Jr., who writes: “Most of my thinking on Silicon Valley—on its firms, its products, its financiers, its ideologues, its boosters, and its projects—rests on a relatively simple understanding: these people will sacrifice us.”

My colleague Dylan recently connected the dots between the Trump administration and Silicon Valley’s shared fever dream—AI supremacy—and how the rapid buildout of AI data centers, and fossil fuel infrastructure to power them, will invariably cause more cancer. Writing in The American Prospect about her own recent experience surviving cancer, Dylan drives home the excruciating human cost of decisions made by businesses and policymakers to expose people to carcinogens.

“Just as a tumor can grow and spread far from its site of origin, having cancer metastasizes out into every aspect of life,” Dylan writes. “Our current trajectory puts us on a course to inflict that fate on many Americans in the name of technology that is often as much boondoggle as breakthrough.”

In the last six months, the Trump administration’s deregulation and policy decisions have already significantly increased health risks by allowing greater pollution and weakening environmental protections. From approving fossil fuel projects that emit millions of tons of carbon and harmful pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, to rolling back methane emission fees and loosening wildfire safeguards, these actions worsen air quality and disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities. Collectively, these policies contribute to rising respiratory illnesses, premature deaths, and environmental injustice across the country.

For weekly updates on the public health, ecological, economic, environmental justice, and government capacity impacts of Trump 2.0’s anti-environmental policies, visit our page “Tracking the Environmental Harms of Trump Actions.”