Early this year, Steven Cook was a lawyer representing chemical companies suing to block a new rule that would force them to clean up pollution from “forever chemicals,” which are linked to low birthrates and cancer.
Now Mr. Cook is in a senior role at the Environmental Protection Agency, where he has proposed scrapping the same rule his former clients were challenging in court. His effort could shift cleanup costs away from polluters and onto taxpayers, according to internal E.P.A. documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Last month Mr. Cook met with industry groups that are still challenging the rule in court. By the next business day after the meeting, the E.P.A. office that oversees toxic cleanups had reversed its internal recommendation on the rule, the documents show, to advise repealing instead of upholding it.
The change was evident in a presentation being prepared for Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator. The document contained edits saying that the office recommended repealing the rule and that its “cons outweigh pros.” Previously, the document had recommended keeping the rule in place and that its “pros outweigh cons.”
The rule in its current form could require the chemicals industry and others to pay billions of dollars in cleanup costs for chemicals known as PFAS, or forever chemicals. The reversal in the E.P.A.’s internal guidance, and Mr. Cook’s role in the policy change, has not been previously reported.
“It’s outrageous,” said Tracey Woodruff, a researcher at the University of California San Francisco who studies environmental health, particularly the effects of chemical exposures on pregnant mothers and their babies. “If they overturn this, it would leave the public responsible for cleaning up, not the companies that knowingly polluted the land.”
Mr. Zeldin, the E.P.A. chief, has yet to publicly issue a decision on the future of the rule. He is expected to be briefed on the internal recommendation as early as next week.
On Tuesday Carolyn Holran, the agency’s spokeswoman, said “no decisions have been made” on whether the E.P.A. will continue to defend the rule in court.
“Like every Trump political appointee, Steven Cook works with the career employees in the E.P.A. Ethics Office to ensure all applicable ethics obligations are addressed,” she said. “Steven Cook is recused from the litigation and has not been in any conversations from the case. As advised by E.P.A.’s career ethics officials, he is not recused from policy-making.”
Mr. Cook, whose formal title is principal deputy assistant in the agency’s Office of Land and Emergency Management, did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Cook’s actions are the latest example of regulators who had close industry ties playing a major role in oversight of businesses they previously represented.
A separate division of the E.P.A., which evaluates chemical safety, now includes two former executives of the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s main trade group. One of the two, Nancy Beck, said recently that the agency would probably reconsider most efforts to strengthen chemicals regulations taken by the Biden administration, which had made chemical safety a priority.
More broadly, the agency is preparing to repeal dozens of environmental regulations, including limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks and protections for wetlands. This year Mr. Zeldin said he was reframing the E.P.A.’s mission to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”
PFAS has been a focus for the Trump administration. It has taken steps to roll back some regulations on forever chemicals but also has upheld one. In May, the administration moved to weaken standards for the presence of PFAS in drinking water, which health experts say would be harmful to human health, but decided to maintain strict limits on the two most commonly detected types of PFAS, which are also covered by the cleanup rule.
Mr. Zeldin said at the time that the agency would “uphold the agency’s nationwide standards to protect Americans from PFOA and PFOS,” referring to the two chemicals. “E.P.A. will also continue to use its regulatory and enforcement tools to hold polluters accountable,” he said.
Mr. Cook’s recusal statement, provided by E.P.A., says he will “not participate in a particular matter involving specific parties in which any of my former clients is a party or represents a party for one year from the date I last provided services,” unless authorized by E.P.A. ethics officials.
Until January, Mr. Cook represented the trade group American Fuel & Petroleum Manufacturers in its legal challenge of the E.P.A. cleanup rule.
“It’s a conflict of interest for him to then go into the government and work to repeal the exact same rule,” said Richard W. Painter, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School who served as President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007.
“This fits within a broader pattern that we’ve seen, of wealthy industries seeking to take advantage of relationships in the administration,” he said.
The American Fuel & Petroleum Manufacturers did not respond to requests for comment.
Forever chemicals have been widely used for decades in a range of products, including waterproof clothing, firefighting foam, nonstick cookware and many others. They are now so ubiquitous that they can be detected in the blood of almost every person in the United States.
A government study published in 2023 discovered PFAS chemicals in nearly half of the nation’s tap water, and recent estimates by the Environmental Working Group, also based on government data, suggest that number could be higher. The E.P.A. has found that the chemicals cause harm at levels “much lower than previously understood,” and that almost no level of exposure is safe.
The cleanup rule targeted by Mr. Cook designates two ubiquitous types of the chemicals, PFOA and PFOS, as hazardous substances under the nation’s Superfund law. That put polluters on the hook to potentially pay billions of dollars to clean up tens of thousands of industrial, military and agricultural sites across the country that are thought to be contaminated with the chemicals.
Mr. Cook previously spent more than two decades as top counsel at LyondellBasell, one of the world’s largest plastic, chemical and refining companies. After a stint at the E.P.A. during the first Trump administration, he went to work at the law firm Bracewell, where he represented the American Fuel & Petroleum Manufacturers in the group’s legal challenge against the PFAS Superfund cleanup rule.
On July 25, a Friday, Mr. Cook met with a group of industry representatives led by Chuck Chaitovitz, an executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, according to publicly available E.P.A. calendars and visitor logs. (The Chamber has also sued over the PFAS Superfund cleanup rule.)
The U.S. Chamber said that it had shared its view that the Biden-era approach was “the wrong tool” for addressing PFAS contamination. It and other trade groups wrote to the White House in March calling on the Trump administration to rescind the regulation. The rule would “result in significant costs, impacts, and unintended consequences for both companies and affected communities,” the groups wrote. The Chamber has estimated that the rule will cost companies as much as $800 million a year, and tens of billions of dollars over time.
On Monday, July 28, Mr. Cook circulated a memo among E.P.A. colleagues that echoed the industry’s concerns. The rule “comes with considerable drawbacks including potentially staggering compliance costs,” Mr. Cook wrote. The potential business liabilities “cast an economic shadow over any material with any level of PFOA/PFOS,” he said, referring to the two kinds of forever chemicals covered by the rule.
By the end of the day, the internal PowerPoint presentation prepared for Mr. Zeldin, which had previously recommended keeping the rule in place, had been edited to recommend repealing the rule, with the new language, “cons outweigh pros,” marked in red.
In a follow-up email sent on Aug. 4, John Evans, another Trump appointee at the E.P.A., attributed the change in the office’s policy to meeting with industry. “In this revision OLEM’s recommendation departs from tacit support for defending the rule to support for repealing the rule,” he wrote, referring to the agency’s Office of Land and Emergency Management. “The change has been informed,” he wrote, by “briefings from industry groups currently impacted by the rule.”
If the E.P.A. were to to seek to repeal the rule, the agency would need to undergo a lengthy new rule-making process. It would also likely face legal challenges from environmental groups.
Federal Superfund laws were written “for this very purpose, which was to say that polluters should pay for cleanups,” said Carlton Waterhouse, an environmental lawyer and professor at the Howard University School of Law who served in Mr. Cook’s role under the Biden administration.
The industry’s cost concerns are real, said Craig Johnston, a professor at the Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon, who previously worked as regional counsel with the E.P.A., enforcing toxic cleanups, and later represented corporate clients.
But those might decline as cleanup technologies improved, he said. And ultimately, cleanups were in the public good, making contaminated land reusable again as parks, industrial sites and more. “The Superfund program has existed for 45 years now,” he said. “And guess what? It hasn’t devastated the economy.”
In November, two months before he was reappointed to the E.P.A., Mr. Cook appeared on a podcast hosted by his law firm, where he emphasized the enormous scale of PFAS cleanup costs, including on federally owned land. In fact, he said, the costs were comparable to cleaning up after the military buildup of decades past. “Which one’s going to be more expensive, cleaning up the Cold War, or cleaning up PFAS?,” he asked.
But he also expressed optimism for the future of PFAS cleanups. “I think the PFAS will be cheaper,” he said, “because I think the technology is going to get there.”
Hiroko Tabuchi covers pollution and the environment for The Times. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years in Tokyo and New York.
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