The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering granting an exemption from air pollution standards to U.S. Steel—one of the largest steel manufacturer in the country. The exemption, which would be for one of the company’s production facilities in Pennsylvania, came after the Trump administration invited companies to seek written permission to break compliance with the Clean Air Act in March. It’s the latest in a string of actions this administration has taken to gut air quality protections—including a sweeping rollback of power plant pollution limits recently announced, which weakens standards for mercury, carbon, and other toxic emissions.
It also exposes the toxic hypocrisy of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda—a cornerstone of President Donald Trump‘s reelection platform championed by Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. While this administration claims to prioritize the health of everyday Americans, its environmental and industrial policies reveal a stark contradiction that would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.
Residents living near the aging and polluting U.S. steel plants in Indiana and Pennsylvania have been raising alarms for decades about the environmental and health harms, and medical associations and industry experts have echoed their calls. The American Lung Association’s recent State of the Air report found that 156 million Americans breathe unhealthy air, with coal-fired steel plants as a major culprit. A recent Industrious Labs report on 17 coal-based steel plants found that they are linked to cancer rates up to 26 percent higher than the national average. In some areas, residents in communities neighboring toxic steel plants rely on flimsy barriers like tarps to shield themselves from harmful toxins. I’ve seen it firsthand in my work with communities and people on the frontlines of industrial decarbonization at the Sierra Club. People routinely wake up in the morning to a haze over the sky resembling snow. Mothers fretting over their children’s respiratory illness, wondering why their elected leaders aren’t fighting for stronger protections and cleaner manufacturing now.
Callously, rather than addressing the rampant pollution caused by coal-fired steel manufacturing, the administration is doing the opposite—shielding polluters by carving out exemptions and distracting the public with pseudoscience. One of the most bizarre examples is MAHA’s misguided “wellness” agenda—including a proposal from RFK Jr. to create government-run “wellness farms” as a cure for chronic illness through a simple fresh air detox. The idea went viral this spring and drew widespread criticism across the political spectrum for its impracticality and for overlooking the root causes of the health problems it claimed to solve. But RFK’s musings about “curing” chronic illness with a summer in the countryside aren’t just silly pseudoscience—they’re a smokescreen. They’re a deliberate distraction from the policies that could actually make people healthier, like reducing pollution in the air we breathe.
The EPA’s decision to weaken air quality standards for coal-fired steel plants directly threatens communities already disproportionately burdened by air pollution. These plants emit toxic pollutants linked to asthma, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses—a connection backed by proven medical research and reflected in decades of devastating health outcomes for communities.
Rolling back these regulations prioritizes industry inertia over human lives and lays bare the emptiness of MAHA’s “health and wellness” rhetoric. As a result, millions more children and vulnerable people will be forced to choke on toxic fumes while manufacturing executives pour more money into dying steel plants.
To really make America healthy, the administration should strengthen, not weaken, air quality protections—and that starts with supporting clean manufacturing. Rather than dismantling EPA regulations, the MAHA agenda and those behind it should focus on protecting, enforcing, and expanding existing air quality standards across the board, especially in high-pollution industries like steel manufacturing. That means urging companies to transition from coal-fired steel plants to clean, modern production technologies that reduce emissions and could improve health outcomes for millions. It should also include urging Congress to pass federal investments in clean steel manufacturing that would help incentivize the industry to modernize and create thousands of new blue-collar jobs.
It’s the kind of real solution that the Sierra Club and our local partners have been calling for, and that puts community well-being over short-sighted corporate interests.
Rather than protecting the working-class communities they claim to champion, this administration is trading science for stunts. They are rolling back the very protections that keep people safe and hoping no one notices. The resulting media circus of their incompetence distracts us from their behind-the-scenes actions that are fueling a growing health crisis impacting the very working-class communities that helped deliver Trump his second term.
As long as this administration enacts policies that make it easier for companies to poison the air we breathe, the MAHA agenda’s rhetoric of health and wellness is hollow at best and dangerously deceptive at worst. Americans and their families deserve far better, and it’s time to hold this administration accountable and demand policies that truly prioritize public health for this generation and the next.
CeCe Grant is a national campaign director at the Sierra Club.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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