The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is moving to roll back several of the drinking water standards it finalized for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in 2024, drawing sharp criticism from North Carolina advocates who have spent nearly a decade pushing for federal protections against contamination in the Cape Fear River.
What the EPA Is Walking Back
When the Biden administration’s EPA issued the first-ever national enforceable limits on six PFAS chemicals in 2024, it was widely considered a milestone for communities dealing with contamination that had gone unregulated for generations. Those limits covered PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS, PFNA, GenX (HFPO-DA), and a mixture standard including PFBS.
Under EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, the agency announced plans last month to rescind the standards for PFHxS, PFNA, GenX, and the PFAS mixture provision entirely. The EPA also signaled it would extend the timeline for water systems to comply with the remaining limits on PFOA and PFOS, the two most widely studied PFAS compounds.
EPA has previously identified roughly 15,000 distinct PFAS chemistries. Critics say loosening rules on even a handful of them leaves communities exposed, particularly those already dealing with documented contamination.
North Carolina at the Center
The Cape Fear River basin in North Carolina has been a focal point of the national PFAS conversation since contamination there became public in 2017, linked primarily to releases from the Chemours chemical manufacturing facility near Fayetteville. The city of Fayetteville was already exceeding proposed drinking water limits for multiple PFAS compounds even as federal rules were still being developed.
Wilmington, which draws drinking water from the Cape Fear River, has spent close to $92 million on PFAS treatment infrastructure — a cost borne largely by ratepayers. That investment was made partly in anticipation of federal standards that now face rollback.
Emily Donovan, a North Carolina advocate who has been central to the state’s PFAS accountability efforts and helped introduce former EPA Administrator Michael Regan at a Fayetteville event in 2024, was direct in her reaction to the agency’s reversal. “For communities like Wilmington and across North Carolina, this feels like a slap in the face,” she said.
Donovan argued the underlying approach to chemical regulation needs to change fundamentally. “The only sustainable solution is to control pollution at the source,” she said. “PFAS and similar chemicals should never be allowed into drinking water supplies to begin with.”
Funding and Timing
The Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $2 billion to help water utilities address PFAS contamination. That funding came with a five-year window, and the program is now in its final year. With federal standards potentially shrinking and infrastructure funding winding down, water utilities and advocates in affected states face uncertainty about what compliance timelines and cost obligations will actually look like going forward.
Regan, who served as North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality secretary before leading the EPA, championed the 2024 rule as a culmination of what communities like Wilmington had demanded for years. The standards he finalized are now being partially unwound by the current administration.
What Comes Next
The EPA’s rollback plans are not yet final and are expected to move through a formal rulemaking process, which would include a public comment period. Water utilities that have already invested in PFAS treatment — like Wilmington’s — are in a difficult position: the compliance infrastructure exists, but the federal standards requiring it may no longer apply to all the compounds they were built to address.
For North Carolina communities still dealing with contamination along the Cape Fear River corridor, the federal retreat raises questions about whether source-control enforcement under state consent orders — like the one governing Chemours, which references a 10 parts per trillion threshold — will carry more weight than federal drinking water limits going forward.
Environmental contaminants and toxins in food and water have become a central focus of the broader Make America Healthy Again movement, which has argued that chronic disease rates are tied in part to long-term chemical exposures that federal agencies have historically been slow to regulate or address at the source.
Category: Toxins & Environment