Trump's EPA Just Put More Cancer in Your Tap Water

This week, the Environmental Protection Agency under Administrator Lee Zeldin announced two major rollbacks of public health and environmental regulations.On Monday, the EPA proposed removing the legally enforceable nationwide drinking water limits on four forever chemicals, including GenX, a Teflon byproduct that contaminates the Cape Fear River in North Carolina and is linked to cancer, hormone disruption, liver damage, and infertility. The Biden administration had set the country’s first nationwide limits on these chemicals in 2024. Zeldin’s EPA is now scrapping those limits and giving water utilities until 2031 to comply with rules on the better-known forever chemicals PFAS and PFOA.Today, Trump is signing an executive action loosening restrictions on hydrofluorocarbons, the refrigerants used in cooling equipment. HFCs are greenhouse gases thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. The action reverses a bipartisan 2020 law Trump himself signed in his first term. The signing event at the White House includes executives from Kroger, Piggly Wiggly, and other grocery chains. The EPA argues the rollback will lower grocery prices, but has provided no estimate of how much or when.Make America Healthy Again activists, who petitioned for Zeldin’s removal last year over similar moves, have so far been silent. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who built his public identity around removing toxins from the American body, has not commented. Zeldin said the action represents “a dagger through the heart of climate change religion.”Sources:https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/19/trump-epa-forever-chemicals-pfas-drinking-water-rulehttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/21/trump-refrigerant-rule-krogerhttps://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-actions-pfas-drinking-water-2031-deadline-extension Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe