They are among the biggest sources of cancer-causing pollution in the United States: chemical manufacturers, steel-making plants, facilities that sterilize medical devices.
In 2024, they were required to take steps to reduce their toxic emissions. That all changed when President Trump returned to office and gave them a pass.
It was the biggest presidential intervention in the Clean Air Act since the bedrock environmental law was enacted more than 50 years ago.
Mr. Trump has gone further than any president in dismantling regulations designed to protect the environment, resulting in dirtier air and water. Even so, his aid to specific polluters stands out. To understand these efforts, The New York Times reviewed more than 10,000 pages of government documents and conducted more than 70 interviews.
Here are five takeaways from our investigation.
Mr. Trump issued more than 200 waivers to some of the worst polluters.
Mr. Trump exempted 202 facilities in 39 states and Puerto Rico from new regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency had adopted during the Biden administration.
The new rules came about because the Clean Air Act requires the E.P.A. to periodically study the latest pollution controls and impose them if they are affordable and effective.
The rules required medical sterilizers, chemical plants and steel facilities to monitor for emissions of cancer-causing gases along their property lines by 2027. If they detected certain levels of the gases escaping into communities, they had to fix the leaks. And they had to post the findings publicly, so that neighbors could see what was in the air.
When it comes to chemical manufacturers, the government estimated companies would have to spend about $440 million to install equipment to comply with the new rules and about $163 million each year after that.
That would amount to less than 1 percent of the chemical industry’s annual sales.
The manufacturers fought the new rules and looked to the president for help.
The chemical industry criticized the rules as expensive, unnecessary and unworkable. Its lawyers filed petitions with Congress, the E.P.A. and federal courts to overturn or at least delay the regulations. It also challenged the scientific findings underpinning the policies.
Yet the industry lost again and again as agency officials and the courts concluded its claims lacked merit.
As soon as Mr. Trump returned to office, though, the industry players saw an opportunity to change their fortunes. Less than two weeks after the inauguration, trade groups asked the E.P.A. administrator, Lee Zeldin, to push Mr. Trump to exempt them from the rules. A trade association for the medical device industry, which uses ethylene oxide, donated to Mr. Trump’s inauguration fund and to his campaign affiliate, MAGA Inc.
They kept their pressure up until they got what they wanted.
On July 14, 2025, the chief executives of Dow, BASF, Eastman Chemical and Huntsman Corporation sent a letter directly to Mr. Trump, and shared it with the E.P.A.
“We write to bring to your attention the urgent need for action on requests submitted earlier this year for presidential exemptions under the Clean Air Act to provide relief from unnecessary and ineffective obligations imposed by E.P.A.,” they wrote.
Three days later, on July 17, Mr. Trump began answering their pleas.
The exemptions handed out by the president were unprecedented.
Never before had a president let specific polluters off the hook with the stroke of his pen.
An obscure provision of the Clean Air Act allows the president to issue exemptions from rules if a manufacturing disruption would undermine national security and the technology needed to comply is not widely available. President Richard M. Nixon signed the law in 1970, but the provision had never been invoked.
Yet Mr. Trump approved the requests for waivers even though the technology was readily accessible and the industry’s national security arguments had little detail to substantiate them, according to documents reviewed by The Times.
The E.P.A. set up a special email inbox for requests for exemptions. Companies flooded the agency with submissions.
The president put former chemical industry lobbyists inside the E.P.A.
The waivers were good for two years, with the possibility of an extension. The reprieve for the companies gave Mr. Trump time to stock the E.P.A. with former industry insiders who worked from within to gut the rules altogether.
For example, Mr. Trump nominated a former top lobbyist for the Advanced Medical Technology Association, or AdvaMed, a powerful trade association, to lead the agency’s air regulation office. The former lobbyist, Aaron Szabo, had been helping the industry fight the regulations under the Biden administration. Now he oversaw the effort to rewrite them. Documents reviewed by The Times indicate that Mr. Szabo helped handle the waiver requests and then pushed employees to pull back on enforcement.
The president’s decisions were a huge victory for an industry that backed his re-election campaign and continued to donate to his pet causes once he took office again.
AdvaMed boasted earlier this year in a letter to members that its lobbying efforts, which included political contributions to Mr. Trump’s causes, had paid off in the form of curbs on air toxics rules that saved companies millions of dollars in upgrades per plant.
“Membership has its privileges,” the group wrote.
The waivers potentially affect the health of around 3.3 million people.
That is how many Americans live within three miles of at least one facility that received a permission slip to pollute from Mr. Trump.
Before the E.P.A. finalized the new rules in 2024, it held meetings to warn people who lived near facilities that sterilize medical devices about the elevated cancer risks.
These facilities use ethylene oxide, a colorless, sweet-smelling, toxic gas. The agency’s research had found that long-term exposure to ethylene oxide increased the risk of leukemia, multiple myeloma and other types of cancer, particularly for people living close to where the gas is produced or used.
“You see these pretty buildings and you think they’re OK,” said Wayne Powell, who lives a five-minute drive from a sterilizer outside of Richmond, Va., that resembles an ordinary warehouse. “But you don’t know that they’re harboring things that are hazardous to our health.”
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