NRDC report alleges Trump administration has weakened carcinogen safeguards

EPA shifted risk assessments toward thresholds for safe exposure

Amid a surge in early onset cancer, the Trump administration has taken more than 500 actions to systematically dismantle protections against carcinogens once in place across the federal government, an October report by the Natural Resources Defense Council alleges.

The report, and comments from current and former officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, bring into focus how myriad changes in federal rules or protocol will dramatically increase the public’s exposure to carcinogens, the Guardian reported. Those changes are taking effect at a time when some forms of early onset cancer are spiking by about 30% per decade, according to the Guardian’s reporting.

Officials estimate there will be more than 2 million US cancer diagnoses this year. People younger than 50 years old have experienced a nearly 3% increase in colon cancer rates each year from 2013 to 2022, the Guardian reported. More broadly, rates for 14 types of common cancers have jumped in recent decades, including a 35% increase in childhood leukemia.

A photograph accompanying the Guardian’s report showed a rancher watching as a rig helped replug one of the abandoned wells at her ranch near Crane, Texas, on 9 July 2021; some of the wells were leaking carcinogenic chemicals into the fields and drinking water. The image was credited to Eric Gay of the Associated Press.

Natural Resources Defense Council lead author Erik Olson said he was “surprised by the breadth of the whole government effort to undermine all the protections against cancer.” It is not just the EPA, Olson said, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, independent commissions and many other governmental entities.

“The vast majority of people have no idea that this is happening because the Trump administration is mostly doing it without a lot of fanfare, so it’s hard to piece together this jigsaw puzzle, but we did and it shows a stark and shocking picture,” Olson said.

The report lists the elimination of protective regulatory rules, the exploitation of presidential exemptions for polluters, the delay of new regulations already in motion, the elimination of research funding and wide-scale cuts to cancer research staff. The actions amount to a “pro-cancer” agenda, the report states.

Some of the changes have drawn widespread outrage and backlash, including the administration delaying new protections around asbestos, or siding with Bayer in its fight to keep the carcinogenic pesticide glyphosate on the market. But most changes lie in the nuts and bolts of the federal government, the Guardian reported, including alterations to important scientific processes that determine the level of risk people face in exposure to carcinogens. With a few minor adjustments, once-problematic levels of exposure to carcinogens, like formaldehyde, are no longer considered a danger in the federal government’s eyes.

Among the most widely reverberating changes is the shift away from the “no safe level of exposure” principle that guided EPA science in developing protections for carcinogens. That principle works by assuming any level of exposure to carcinogens presents a risk, and the risk grows as the exposure dose grows. The Trump EPA has started implementing a “threshold” approach in which it determines that some exposures to carcinogens is safe.

That change has already resulted in weaker protections against formaldehyde, a toxicant widely used in consumer goods, according to the report. The administration appears to be taking a similar approach to its regulation of hexavalent chromium, a widespread water contaminant.

Nuclear regulators are also eliminating the obligation to reduce exposure to radioactive carcinogens to the lowest reasonably achievable level, despite decades of scientific evidence that any level of radiation poses a cancer risk, the report states.

David Fotouhi, the second in command at the EPA, wrote in an early 2026 memo that the agency had been too conservative in estimating toxic chemicals’ health risks, including carcinogenicity, and suggested those values should be revisited and loosened. Betsy Southerland, a former water office director at the agency, said the changes undermine work on 500 risk assessments done since 1985 by the Integrated Risk Information System, the small EPA office that determines chemical toxicity.

Southerland said the changes to risk assessments are among the “most pernicious Trump EPA moves” because the findings underpin regulations that protect people from carcinogens in the air, water, consumer goods and elsewhere. The change to the threshold approach is part of that, she said, and the agency is also targeting a mechanism that protects children by factoring in an increased risk in their exposure to chemicals.

“This is a killer for any emerging contaminant work, and for [carcinogens and other chemicals] that they are revisiting,” Southerland said. According to the Guardian’s reporting, the changes could also weaken cleanup requirements at Superfund sites, the designation for the nation’s most polluted areas, many of which contain cancer-linked substances.

The Trump EPA quietly loosened guidance around the type of studies required to set regulations around carcinogens, the report alleges. Long-term human or animal studies are the norm, but the agency now uses short-term modeling studies called new approach methodologies, or NAMs, that the Guardian reported are known to be unreliable and easy to manipulate. A NAM study was used to weaken the risk assessment for p-DCB, a widely used consumer chemical that most regulatory agencies label a carcinogen.

Trump has also dramatically increased the use of “presidential pardons” for carcinogenic air pollution, which the report claims will increase exposure to arsenic, ethylene oxide and similar carcinogenic chemicals. Meanwhile, the agency appears to be systematically using stall tactics through multiple channels to grind the regulatory process to a halt: it delayed requirements for industry to provide cancer data for carcinogenic chemicals like benzene, bisphenol A and vinyl chloride, the building block for PVC material, which were supposed to be reviewed during the administration. It is unclear when this will happen.

An EPA employee who declined to use their name for fear of retribution said the situation calls for more protections, but that those rules, regulations and scientific processes that are most essential have long been on industry’s hit list. Former industry officials are now running the EPA, and it is “horrifying to watch it all play out,” the employee said.

“It is coming from the top [of the agency], and they are being methodical, and doing a lot of damage to these very critical protection points, which is exactly what the chemical industry has wanted,” the employee said. “There is no way to sugarcoat what is happening.”

Olson likened the situation to someone “dumping a huge dump truck full of termites on your house.” He said: “It’s not like any one termite is causing the house to collapse, but this is a totally intentional strategy of having innumerable termites eating away at the foundation of all our protections, and the house is going to collapse.”

The Guardian said it had contacted the White House and the EPA for comment.