Reporting Highlights
- Taken for Granted: The Trump administration has granted more than 180 polluting facilities nationwide a two-year pause on compliance with Clean Air Act rules.
- Deregulating by Email: The administration set up an email address through the Environmental Protection Agency where companies simply had to send an email to make their request.
- Silenced Science: The EPA’s air quality experts played no meaningful role in determining whether a facility should be handed an exemption to the rules, according to the agency.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
In March 2025, President Donald Trump’s administration made a tantalizing offer to coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturing facilities and other factories: Their operations could be exempted from key provisions under the Clean Air Act, the bedrock environmental law estimated to have prevented thousands of premature deaths. All they had to do was ask.
No rigorous application was needed. An email, which they had until the end of the month to send, would suffice.
Within two weeks, executives across major industries began flooding an inbox set up to receive and funnel requests from the Environmental Protection Agency to the White House. They asked that their facilities be excused from expensive Clean Air Act requirements, relief that would save their companies money but pollute the air breathed by millions of Americans.
At least 3,000 pages of emails were sent to and from this inbox in the weeks that followed. ProPublica obtained them via public records requests, giving the most complete look to date at a key aspect of what Trump’s EPA calls the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”
Richard Shaffer, asset manager at Scrubgrass Reclamation Company, emailed asking for an exemption covering a western Pennsylvania power plant that burns coal waste. A significant portion of the electricity it generates is used to mine bitcoin. Keeping the cost of environmental compliance low was important “for the security of the United States,” Shaffer wrote.
A response came 11 days later in a presidential proclamation. Approved.
A Citgo Petroleum Corporation lawyer, Ann Al-Bahish, sought exemptions for petroleum refineries in Illinois, Louisiana and Texas, which had all been hit with Clean Air Act violations in recent years. The rule at issue, the agency had previously concluded, would “provide critical health protections to hundreds of thousands of people living near chemical plants.” (The company agreed to install new pollution controls to resolve some of its violations.)
Kevin Wagner, vice president of the medical sterilizer company Sterigenics, messaged asking that nine facilities emitting the carcinogenic gas ethylene oxide, including near Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Charlotte and Atlanta, be exempted. More than 45,000 people, most of them not white, live within a mile of these facilities, according to federal data.
Both companies got their response in July proclamations. Approved and approved.
The companies did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.