Throughout 2026, SF Bay PSR alongside other PSR chapters and our national office will be working to save our Environmental Protection Agency.
In January 2026, SF Bay PSR joined a national letter calling on Congress to hold the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accountable and to require Administrator Lee Zeldin to testify. The EPA is abandoning its core mission to protect human health and the environment. Instead, it is pursuing an aggressive de-regulatory agenda that is already increasing harmful air pollution, toxic chemical exposure, and climate-heating greenhouse gases. These actions endanger our children, our communities, and the health of communities across the country for generations to come.
We are deeply alarmed by EPA decisions that undermine foundational public health protections including the following:
- Endangerment Finding and climate framework – Targeted for dismantling, erasing the science-based determination that climate pollution endangers public health and weakening the legal basis for climate protections.
- Clean Air Act health standards – Weakened for soot, smog, and hazardous air pollutants, increasing exposure to fine particles, ozone, and mercury that drive asthma, heart disease, lung damage in children, and premature death.
- Vehicle pollution and greenhouse gas standards – Repealed or proposed for elimination, reversing fifteen years of progress and increasing toxic tailpipe pollution and climate emissions from cars, trucks, and buses.
- Power plant pollution standards – Weakened for both air toxics and climate pollution, allowing more mercury, fine particles, and greenhouse gases from coal and gas plants.
- Methane standards for oil and gas – Delayed and weakened, allowing greater releases of one of the most powerful climate pollutants into frontline communities.
- Chemical safety rules under TSCA – Loosened, making it easier for industry to introduce thousands of toxic chemicals, including PFAS and phthalates, into products, air, food, and water.
- Formaldehyde exposure limits – Doubled, permitting higher levels of a known human carcinogen in the air families and children breathe.
- Hazardous air pollutant exemptions – Expanded to give major industrial facilities “free passes” from basic safeguards.
- Regional Haze Rule – Rolled back, stripping clean air protections from national parks and wilderness areas.
- Climate monitoring and reporting – Eliminated, reducing transparency and accountability required by Congress.
- EPA climate communications – Purged of references to human-caused climate change, obscuring scientific reality.
Health impacts: These actions will lead to more asthma attacks and lung damage in children; more pregnancy complications and premature births; more dementia, cancer, heart attacks, and strokes; and more premature deaths and mental health harms. Also, our already overburdened environmental justice communities will be the most harmed. These rollbacks will also worsen the affordability crisis. Medical bills will rise, health insurance will become more expensive, and the costs of electricity, food, water, and home insurance will increase.
Economic analyses project billions in annual losses and more than a trillion dollars in lost GDP by 2035. This represents a radical and unprecedented departure from EPA’s mission to protect human health and the environment under laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
We urge Congress to exercise its oversight authority and ensure that EPA fulfills its mandate—starting by calling Administrator Zeldin to testify. The cost to industry is being put above human lives and this should concern us all.
For CURRENT ACTIONS please visit our Action page here.
READING
NY Times: EPA to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution
Guardian: ‘Shameful’: Trump’s EPA accused of prioritizing big business over public health
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2025 ACTIONS TAKEN
Save the EPA Endangerment Finding
PSR Members Submit More than 1,000 Comments!
Many thanks to all of you who submitted comments and shared our action alert with your networks in opposition to EPA’s proposed repeal of the Endangerment Finding, the science-based finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. SF Bay PSR contributed to National PSR efforts and combined we submitted over 1000 comments out of the hundreds of thousands that were submitted. This is in addition to many PSR members who testified at the hearings for the proposal and the organizational sign on letters led by American Lung Association and the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health!
