• A woman confronted the EPA administrator Scott Pruitt at a restaurant in Washington, DC, on Monday. Video of the encounter was posted on Facebook.
• In the video, the woman read from a list of notes, criticizing Pruitt for the manner in which he has used taxpayer money while in his role at the EPA, and accused him of failing to protect the environment.
• "I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out," the woman said before the video ended.

A woman confronted EPA administrator Scott Pruitt at a restaurant in Washington, DC, on Monday, in the latest encounter between a member of the public and a Trump administration official.

Video of the incident was posted on Facebook, showing the woman, who identifies herself on her Facebook profile as Kristin Mink, criticizing Pruitt for decisions he has made at the EPA, and accusing him of failing to protect the environment.

"We deserve to have someone at the EPA who actually does protect our environment; someone who actually does believe in climate change and actually takes it seriously for the benefit of all of us, including our children," Mink said.

"So, I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out," she added. Pruitt can be seen listening to Mink silently. The video ends shortly after she finished speaking. Mink says Pruitt left the restaurant before she returned to her seat.

Watch the encounter below:

Pruitt has been at the center of multiple scandals at the EPA since the Senate confirmed the Trump appointee in early 2017. The latest unflattering news surrounding Pruitt emerged on Monday with a CNN report in which a whistleblower claimed Pruitt kept "secret" calendars to hide "controversial meetings" and calls with industry representatives.

President Donald Trump has remained publicly supportive of Pruitt, despite the EPA chief's scandals.

The confrontation on Monday follows similar encounters between Trump administration officials and the public in recent weeks. A crowd heckled Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a restaurant last month, at the height of the turmoil over the administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy.

Trump adviser Stephen Miller reportedly faced similar treatment days earlier. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she was asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia because of her affiliation with Trump.

California Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters capitalized on the growing dissent last month, calling on people to stare down Trump administration officials in public and "tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere."

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• Democrats have asked the EPA's inspector general to investigate Scott Pruitt's office for creating "secret calendars" that allegedly concealed events and meetings.
• The lawmakers want to probe whether the scrubbing of information from calendars violated federal records-keeping laws.

WASHINGTON — Democratic lawmakers are pushing the inspector general's office to investigate whether Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt may have violated the Federal Records Act with the use of "secret calendars" meant to conceal parts of his day-to-day operations.

In a Tuesday report from CNN, Pruitt's former deputy chief of staff for operations, Kevin Chmielewski, alleged that staffers at the EPA regularly convened to "scrub" unflattering meetings and events from Pruitt's official calendar to avoid bad appearances.

"We would have meetings what we were going to take off on the official schedule. We had at one point three different schedules. One of them was one that no one else saw except three or four of us," Chmielewski told CNN. "It was a secret ... and they would decide what to nix from the public calendar."

In a letter obtained by Business Insider, Reps. Don Beyer of Virginia and Ted Lieu of California are requesting the inspector general probe into what could be major violations of federal records-keeping laws.

"Willful concealment or destruction of such records is a federal crime carrying penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment," the two Democrats wrote.

"Congress established and updated these laws because the American people deserve to know how their government is operated, and who is exerting influence over determinations which affect them," they added. "We ask that you protect that public trust and establish whether Administrator Scott Pruitt violated the Federal Records Act, and if so, determine what he concealed and why. Further, we ask that you take the appropriate steps to hold him accountable for such actions, as required by law."

Pruitt has been at the center of numerous scandals during tenure at the EPA. Still, the responses from the White House and Republicans in Congress have remained fairly tepid. Republicans have signaled they would not call for Pruitt's ouster unless President Donald Trump does so first, which does not appear likely anytime soon.

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• President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that his embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief, Scott Pruitt, had resigned.
• Pruitt has for months faced increasing pressure to resign amid numerous reports about his ethically questionable leadership of the agency.
• Pruitt joins a long list of senior officials who have either been fired or resigned from the Trump administration. 

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that his embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief, Scott Pruitt, had resigned.

In a series of tweets, the president thanked Pruitt for his service and announced that Andy Wheeler, the EPA's deputy head who was formerly a coal lobbyist and Senate staffer, would take over as acting administrator.

"I have accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency," Trump said. "Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this."

He continued: "I have no doubt that Andy will continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda. We have made tremendous progress and the future of the EPA is very bright!"

In a resignation letter made public shortly after Trump's tweets, Pruitt said that the decision to resign was a difficult one but that the "unrelenting attacks" on him and his family forced him to leave the role.

"It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role first because I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity, but also, because of the transformative work that is occurring," he wrote. "However, the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us."

Pruitt, now the shortest-serving chief in the EPA's history, lavished praise on the president and argued that he had been able to advance Trump's agenda "beyond what anyone anticipated at the beginning" of his administration.

"I believe you are serving as President today because of God's providence," Pruitt said in the letter. "I believe that same providence brought me into your service. I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people."

Eric Lipton, a New York Times reporter who has covered Pruitt extensively, pushed back on Pruitt's suggestion that the negative reports on his leadership were personal.

Pruitt is the subject of at least 13 federal investigations into his behavior and decision-making at the agency, including those related to his frequent first-class flights and copious spending on personal security. Both Democrats and Republicans have urged Pruitt to resign amid months of scandalous reports of potential ethics violations.

Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general, was one of the most controversial members of the Trump administration and brought a deeply conservative agenda to the agency. A climate-change skeptic, Pruitt has close ties to the fossil-fuel industry and spent years suing the EPA over policies he argued constituted federal overreach, including ozone and methane-emissions rules and coal-plant regulations.

The administrator's resignation was celebrated by his critics on Thursday. He joins a long list of senior officials who have either been fired or resigned from the Trump administration.

"Good bye Scott Pruitt, the worst Administrator in EPA history and perhaps the word cabinet member ever," said Richard Painter, President George W. Bush's chief ethics lawyer. "Fake science, fake ethics and fake religion (complete with a cultish theology of planet destruction) all rolled into one."

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a top government watchdog, released a one-word statement in response to Pruitt's resignation.

"Good," the group said.

A long list of ethics scandals

News reporting and federal investigations into Pruitt's practices at the EPA have exposed an array of allegations of abuses, some of which are listed below:

• Pruitt is accused of enlisting a government aide to help secure his wife a business opportunity with the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A and of having an aide inquire about a $200,000-a-year job for his wife at a GOP group.
• The New York Times reported last month that Pruitt had a top aide assist him with personal matters, including helping him look for a DC apartment, planning family vacations, and attempting to secure him a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel.
• For six months, Pruitt paid a DC lobbyist, whose clients were regulated by the EPA, a below-market rate to rent a room in her luxury condo.
• Pruitt, the first EPA administrator to have round-the-clock security and a 10-person team of bodyguards, spent an unprecedented $3 million on security.
• Pruitt paid $3,000 of EPA money to a contractor to do a security sweep of his office and approved a $43,000 soundproof privacy booth for his office. The agency spent about $6,000 on biometric locks.
• Pruitt regularly flew first class and stayed in luxury hotels on the taxpayer's dime, prompting investigations into his travel spending. A former senior aide of Pruitt's said he chose airlines not approved by the agency in order to earn personal frequent-flier miles and sometimes fabricated reasons for travel.
• An EPA official told The Washington Post that Pruitt repeatedly asked his assistants to pay for his hotel reservations on their personal credit cards, then refused to pay them back.
• He accepted courtside tickets to a college basketball game from a billionaire coal baron.
• He used flashing lights and sirens on his motorcade to speed up his travel in DC, The Times reported.
• The administrator gave significant pay raises to two longtime aides after the White House rejected the proposal, according to The Atlantic. Pruitt appeared to change his story about the raises during congressional testimony.

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• The embattled, and now former, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt delivered a resignation letter that was both unapologetic and clear about one thing: he served President Donald Trump.
• Trump announced Pruitt's departure on Thursday, after months of scandal surrounding Pruitt's behavior at the environmental agency.
• In his resignation letter, Pruitt made no mention of the turmoil that engulfed the agency under his leadership and described the criticism he faced as personal attacks.

Scott Pruitt, the now-former EPA administrator who resigned on Thursday following a string of scandals surrounding his behavior at the agency, delivered a goodbye letter that unequivocally declared where his loyalty was.

"It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role," Pruitt's letter reads, addressing President Donald Trump. In another sentence, Pruitt says, "I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity."

Later in the letter, Pruitt pleads to Trump: "I pray that as I have served you, that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people."

Pruitt has received fierce criticism over his management at the EPA, and his use of taxpayer funds to pay for extravagant travel and other expenses. He is at the center of more than a dozen investigations as a result.

Pruitt's resignation letter also says nothing of the multiple scandals related to his tenure at the EPA, or that the public had lost faith in him. The latter point was made clear last week, when a mother approached Pruitt at a restaurant, with her child on her arm, and told Pruitt: "I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out."

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• After months of ethics scandals, Scott Pruitt resigned as head of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday.
• In a series of tweets, President Donald Trump announced Pruitt's resignation and said deputy EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler would take his place for now.
• Wheeler is a former coal lobbyist, and some experts think he could be more effective at undoing environmental protections than Pruitt was. 

After months of ethical and financial scandals, Scott Pruitt has resigned as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Pruitt's long list of scandals included reportedly sending his staffers out in search of pricey beauty creams, spending high sums on first-class flights, instituting a 24-hour security detail, and purchasing an infamously expensive $43,000 phone booth, all on the public's dime. 

President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday that Pruitt had done an "outstanding" job leading the EPA, and that deputy administrator Andrew Wheeler will become acting administrator of the EPA starting Monday. 

"He was very much an early Trump supporter," Trump told reporters on Air Force One, referring to Wheeler. "He was with us on the campaign. He is a very environmental person. He’s a big believer, and he’s going to do a fantastic job."

Pruitt's agenda for the EPA involved delays and rollbacks of previously enacted environmental regulations, so environmentalists cautiously cheered his resignation while expressing concern about Wheeler.

"While we applaud Pruitt’s departure, our focus now shifts to acting administrator and coal industry crony Andrew Wheeler," Erich Pica, president of the environmental organization Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "Fossil fuel industry insiders have no business leading the EPA and we will hold Wheeler accountable for his efforts to harm our public health and environment." 

Wheeler's path to the EPA

Wheeler, a Washington University law school graduate, spent the first four years of his career at the EPA under presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. At that time, he was a special assistant in the Pollution Prevention and Toxics office, working on issues involving pollution and chemicals.

Since then, Wheeler has zig-zagged between lobbying Capitol Hill and working inside the halls of the federal government. On the lobbying side, he has worked for big names in the beltway energy sector, including Murray Energy (coal), Domestic Energy Solutions Group, Whirlpool Corporation, Xcel Energy and at least a dozen others, which ProPublica lists online.

Most recently, Wheeler worked for law firm Faegre Baker Daniels as an attorney, consultant, and co-chair of the firm's Energy and Natural Resources Industry team, according to Wheeler's EPA biography.

On the governement side, Wheeler has worked as chief of staff for Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) and on staff for Senator George Voinovich (R-OH) as well.

He held several roles on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works from 2003 to 2009: majority staff director, minority staff director, and chief counsel.

According to a biography posted on ProPublica's website, Wheeler worked on "every major piece of environmental and energy-related legislation before Congress for over a decade." 

For example, he worked for the Committee on Environment and Public Works when the Clear Skies Act of 2003 was proposed, which aimed to reduce restrictions on toxins in the air. He was also there for the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which raised taxes on oil and gas producers in the US.

Wheeler doesn't deny the scientific facts of climate change, but said during his confirmation hearing that the human impact on the Earth's rising temperature is "not completely understood," as Inside Climate News reported. 

Scott Segal, a fossil fuel lobbyist who has worked with Wheeler, told The New York Times: "He’s a careful, studious person. A quiet fellow. He knows the agency very, very well."

Many environmentalists are fearful about what that savvy perspective might mean for the future of the EPA. The agency is tasked with protecting the nation's air and water, but the Trump administration has pushed to undo a host of environmental regulations. 

Jeremy Symons, vice president for political affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund, put it bluntly to Politico: 

"Wheeler is much smarter and will try to keep his efforts under the radar in implementing Trump’s destructive agenda," Symons said, comparing Wheeler to Pruitt. "That should scare anyone who breathes."

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• Scott Pruitt, the Trump-nominated EPA administrator, has resigned in the wake of a long list of scandals.
• Pruitt was in the process of trying to roll back more than 30 environmental protections, including regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, clean water, and dangerous pesticide use.
• It's likely that acting administrator Andrew Wheeler will continue with a similar agenda.

Trump-nominated EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is out, but it's likely his legacy of rolling back environmental protections will continue.

On July 5, President Trump announced that he had accepted Pruitt's resignation, which came in the wake of a laundry list of scandals.

Pruitt was facing over a dozen federal investigations for his behavior and the decisions he made as EPA Administrator. He faced inquiries about installing a $43,000 secure phone booth without informing Congress; spending millions on a 24-hour security detail that was more that triple the size of security details for previous administrators; and spending staggering amounts of money on travel and office upgrades.

The list kept growing — in recent days, CNN reported that Pruitt had his official calendar scrubbed and used secret calendars to keep track of meetings.

Amidst all the scandal, Pruitt still pushed for rapid widespread rollbacks of protections that many scientists consider essential for human and environmental health, instead favoring the fossil fuel industry.

Legal experts say that Pruitt's deputy, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal-industry lobbyist who is now acting administrator of the EPA, will continue with a similar agenda. As Trump tweeted, announcing that he'd accepted the resignation, "I have no doubt that Andy will continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda. We have made tremendous progress and the future of the EPA is very bright!"

As The New Yorker reported, Pruitt "proposed repealing or delaying more than thirty significant environmental rules" in his first year on the job.

These are some of the most significant environmental protections Pruitt was in the process of eliminating — and which Wheeler could continue rolling back.

Environmental protections Pruitt was working to roll back

• Pruitt was trying to repeal the Clean Power Plan — the centerpiece of the Obama administration's plans to deal with climate change by requiring power plants to cap their greenhouse gas emissions.
• Pruitt's EPA moved to rescind the Clean Water Rule, which clarified the Clean Water Act to prohibit industries from dumping pollutants into streams and wetlands.
• Under Pruitt, the EPA reversed a ban on a pesticide that can harm children's brains, against the advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics. "There is a wealth of science demonstrating the detrimental effects of chlorpyrifos exposure to developing fetuses, infants, children, and pregnant women," the academy wrote in a letter to Pruitt.
• Pruitt pushed for President Trump to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, an international agreement to avoid the worst effects of climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
• Pruitt's EPA backed a plan to stop requiring auto manufacturers to make their cars more fuel efficient. The plan also includes language forbidding California and other states from imposing stricter standards, which they planned to do.
• Pruitt pushed to fill EPA jobs with personnel from the coal, oil, and chemical industries. He reportedly even sent a "plea" for candidates to an oil company.
• Under Pruitt, the EPA has lagged in collecting penalties from and punishing polluters, collecting fewer than half the penalty fees that EPA administrations under Obama, Bush, and Clinton did. This was reportedly because Pruitt wanted to avoid legal battles.
• Pruitt unveiled a plan to cut the EPA workforce to its lowest level since the Reagan era.
• Pruitt's EPA proposed plans to eliminate programs designed to protect children from lead paint. The goal of this elimination was theoretically to cut the EPA's budget.

Stymied by courts, but likely to continue

As The New York Times has reported, a number of these regulation rollbacks were enacted so swiftly that they have been unable to hold up in court. Several have been struck down, including the rules on lead paint listed above. Courts also told the EPA that they had to enforce a rule requiring companies to monitor for methane leaks, even if they were reconsidering the regulation.

Former colleagues of Wheeler and legal experts told The New York Times that now-acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler will be more effective at rolling back environmental protections than Pruitt. Wheeler is reportedly a protege of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who once brought a snowball onto the Senate floor in an effort to disprove global warming.

"[Wheeler] will be similar to Pruitt in terms of the agenda — he understands the Trump administration and will carry out the agenda," Matthew Dempsey, a former colleague of Wheeler's who works with an energy lobbying firm told the Times. "But he's been around Washington a long time. He knows how D.C. works and he does things by the book."

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• Toxins are turning up in dozens of public water systems across the United States, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, and Delaware, according to a report by the AP.
• The water systems are reportedly testing positive for dangerous levels of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

• Dumped into water, the air or soil, some forms of PFAS compounds are expected to remain intact for thousands of years; one public-health expert dubbed them "forever chemicals."

HORSHAM, Pa. (AP) — Lauren Woeher wonders if her 16-month-old daughter has been harmed by tap water contaminated with toxic industrial compounds used in products like nonstick cookware, carpets and fast-food wrappers.

Henry Betz, at 76, rattles around his house alone at night, thinking about the water his family unknowingly drank for years that was tainted by the same contaminants, and the pancreatic cancers that killed wife Betty Jean and two others in his household.

Tim Hagey, manager of a local water utility, recalls how he used to assure people that the local public water was safe. That was before testing showed it had some of the highest levels of the toxic compounds of any public water system in the US.

"You all made me out to be a liar," Hagey, general water and sewer manager in the eastern Pennsylvania town of Warminster, told Environmental Protection Agency officials last month.

At "community engagement sessions" like the one in Horsham, residents and state, local and military officials are demanding that the EPA act quickly — and decisively — to clean up local water systems testing positive for dangerous levels of the chemicals, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

The Trump administration called the contamination "a potential public relations nightmare" earlier this year after federal toxicology studies found that some of the compounds are more hazardous than previously acknowledged.

PFAS have been in production since the 1940s, and there are about 3,500 different types. Dumped into water, the air or soil, some forms of the compounds are expected to remain intact for thousands of years; one public-health expert dubbed them "forever chemicals."

EPA testing from 2013 to 2015 found significant amounts of PFAS in public water supplies in 33 US states. The finding helped move PFAS up as a national priority.

So did scientific studies that firmed up the health risks. One, looking at a kind of PFAS once used in making Teflon, found a probable link with kidney and testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, hypertension in pregnant women and high cholesterol.

Other recent studies point to immune problems in children, among other things.

In 2016, the EPA set advisory limits — without any direct enforcement — for two kinds of PFAS that had recently been phased out of production in the United States. But manufacturers are still producing, and releasing into the air and water, newer versions of the compounds.

Earlier this year, federal toxicologists decided that even the EPA's 2016 advisory levels for the two phased-out versions of the compound were several times too high for safety.

EPA says it will prepare a national management plan for the compounds by the end of the year. But Peter Grevatt, director of the agency's Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, told The Associated Press that there's no deadline for a decision on possible regulatory actions.

Reviews of the data, and studies to gather more, are ongoing.

'I know that you can't bring back 3 people that I lost. But they're gone.'

Even as the Trump administration says it advocates for clean air and water, it is ceding more regulation to the states and putting a hold on some regulations seen as burdensome to business.

In Horsham and surrounding towns in eastern Pennsylvania, and at other sites around the United States, the foams once used routinely in firefighting training at military bases contained PFAS.

"I know that you can't bring back three people that I lost," Betz, a retired airman, told the federal officials at the Horsham meeting. "But they're gone."

State lawmakers complained of "a lack of urgency and incompetency" on the part of EPA.

"It absolutely disgusts me that the federal government would put PR concerns ahead of public health concerns," Republican state Rep. Todd Stephens declared.

After the meeting, Woeher questioned why it took so long to tell the public about the dangers of the compounds.

"They knew they had seeped into the water, and they didn't tell anybody about it until it was revealed and they had to," she said.

Speaking at her home with her toddler nearby, she asked, "Is this something that, you know, I have to worry? It's in her."

While contamination of drinking water around military bases and factories gets most of the attention, the EPA says 80 percent of human exposure comes from consumer products in the home.

The chemical industry says it believes the versions of the nonstick, stain-resistant compounds in use now are safe, in part because they don't stay in the body as long as older versions.

"As an industry today ... we're very forthcoming meeting any kind of regulatory requirement to disclose any kind of adverse data," said Jessica Bowman, a senior director at the American Chemistry Council trade group.

Independent academics and government regulators say they don't fully share the industry's expressed confidence about the safety of PFAS versions now in use.

While EPA considers its next step, states are taking action to tackle PFAS contamination on their own.

'It's a serious problem.'

In Delaware, National Guard troops handed out water after high levels of PFAS were found in a town's water supply. Michigan last month ordered residents of two towns to stop drinking or cooking with their water, after PFAS was found at 20 times the EPA's 2016 advisory level.

In New Jersey, officials urged fishermen to eat some kinds of fish no more than once a year because of PFAS contamination.

Washington became the first state to ban any firefighting foam with the compound.

Given the findings on the compounds, alarm bells "should be ringing four out of five" at the EPA, Kerrigan Clough, a former deputy regional EPA administrator, said in an interview with the AP as he waited for a test for PFAS in the water at his Michigan lake home, which is near a military base that used firefighting foam.

"If the risk appears to be high, and you've got it every place, then you've got a different level" of danger and urgency, Clough said. "It's a serious problem."

Problems with PFAS surfaced partly as a result of a 1999 lawsuit by a farmer who filmed his cattle staggering, frothing and dying in a field near a DuPont disposal site in Parkersburg, West Virginia, for PFAS then used in Teflon.

In 2005, under President George W. Bush, the EPA and DuPont settled an EPA complaint that the chemical company knew at least by the mid-1980s that the early PFAS compound posed a substantial risk to human health.

The EPA in the past "didn't have much of a hammer to come down on a bad existing chemical," said Lynn Goldman, the agency's assistant administrator over toxic substances in the 1990s, now dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

But Congress has boosted the agency's authority to regulate problematic chemicals since then. That includes toughening up the federal Toxic Substances Control Act and regulatory mandates for the EPA itself in 2016.

For PFAS, that should include addressing the new versions of the compounds coming into production, not just tackling old forms that companies already agreed to take offline, Goldman said.

"Otherwise it's the game of whack-a-mole," she said. "That's not what you want to do when you're protecting the public health."

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• A class of industrially produced chemicals called PFAS are found in many products, including cosmetics, fire-retardant foams, and food packaging.
• Almost everyone in the industrialized world has some of these so-called "forever chemicals" in their blood.
• But scientific evidence suggests they may also be linked with cancer and other serious health issues.
• More than 30 communities across the US have water sources that are contaminated with dangerously high levels of PFAS chemicals. 

In the US, consumers usually assume that the water coming out of our taps has been thoroughly tested and is safe to drink.

But residents in more than 30 communities around the country have found out that’s not the case.

In states including Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, and North Carolina, local water systems have been contaminated with toxic chemicals called PFAS, which stands for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

This class of artificial lab-grown chemicals doesn't break down in the environment, and instead remains intact in water, air, and bodies for thousands of years, according to the Associated Press. For that reason, they've become known as "forever chemicals."

PFAS can both be attracted to and repelled by water — two opposite tasks — which makes them a unique class of industrially useful chemicals. The compounds are found in everyday items like cosmetics, non-stick pans, firefighting foams, and products such as Teflon and Scotchgard. PFAS can even turn up in some food packaging, like pizza boxes and microwave-popcorn bags.

But PFAS concentrations can build up quickly in the environment, and people or animals who consume too much of these chemicals can suffer potentially life-threatening consequences.

What PFAS chemicals can do to your body

One common way we come into contact with PFAS is when they end up in the water supply. Waste that's dumped from chemical manufacturing plants can contaminate groundwater, or PFAS can enter lakes and other freshwater sources after firefighting foam gets used.

In humans, the buildup of PFAS chemicals has been linked to a host of health conditions, including:

• low birth rates
• liver damage
• high cholesterol
• chronic kidney disease 
• asthma
• attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and immunization resistance in children
• early menopause
• colon ulcers

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) both think PFAS may also be cancer-causing, since [people with higher-than-average exposures to the chemicals have increased rates of testicular and kidney cancers. But that link hasn't been demonstrated for sure.

According to the EPA, people shouldn’t be exposed to a concentration of PFAS higher than 70 parts per trillion (ppt). But a draft report from the US Department of Health and Human Services suggests that threshold may be far too high. Other states put the safe drinking threshold much lower when they test for the five most ubiquitous PFAS chemicals.

"If your water has been tested and the total sum of the five PFAS is more than 20 ppt, we recommend not using your water for drinking, food preparation, cooking, brushing teeth, preparing baby formula, or any other manner of ingestion," Vermont's state health website advises. The contaminated water shouldn’t even be used to quench your garden, it says, because the PFAS could be absorbed into vegetables you eat.

A cross-country water crisis

Eight big companies, including 3M and DuPont, phased out the chemicals from their products and plants in 2015.

But much of the damage has already been done. It can take upwards of two to nine years for concentrations of these chemicals in your body to be cut in half. Some just never go away.

3M, one of the first companies to use PFAS chemicals, settled an eight-year-long lawsuit with the State of Minnesota earlier this year for $850 million. The state alleged the company knew it was dumping toxic chemicals into waters around the Twin Cities for decades, but hid and distorted the scientific evidence from regulators.

In July, Michigan declared a state of emergency in Kalamazoo County because PFAS levels in the water supplies in Parchment and Cooper Townships were 20 times higher than what the EPA considers safe. That’s one of 34 spots across that state where PFAS levels were shown to be too high. 

Factory workers and people from the Mid-Ohio Valley have some of the highest PFAS exposure levels in the country.

But everyone has at least some in their system. Researchers from Harvard estimated in 2016 that at least 6 million Americans — nearly 2% of the population — were drinking water with PFAS levels higher than what the EPA recommends.

As one study put it earlier this month in the journal Environmental Research, "although use in the US has been phased out, PFOA persists indefinitely in the environment, and is present in the serum of virtually all people in industrialized countries."

Plus, PFAS chemicals are still in use in other places around the world, and can be imported in many products, including carpets, coatings, rubbers, plastics, and fabrics.

What you can do

To hear directly from people whose drinking waters have been contaminated with PFAS, the EPA embarked on a cross-country listening tour this summer. Agency representatives have stopped in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and North Carolina to learn about how to help local utilities manage and clean up toxic water. 

At one such hearing in Warminster, Pennsylvania in July, water and sewer manager Tim Hagey told the Associated Press that he used to assure people that drinking his town’s water was worry-free. But no more. 

"You all made me out to be a liar," Hagey reportedly told Environmental Protection Agency officials.

The most recent meeting was held Tuesday in Fayetteville, North Carolina. 

Scientists who study the concentrations of PFAS in our blood agree that it's almost impossible to avoid exposure to the toxic chemicals.

In the hopes of lowering PFAS concentrations, some cities have started using activated charcoal filtration systems and reverse osmosis. Others may shift where the municipal water is sourced from.

But it's hard to rid water of PFAS, and you can’t boil the chemicals away. Bottled water may not be any better, since it's much less regulated than tap water and isn’t required to be tested for PFAS.

If you're worried about your own drinking water, you can check the EPA's annual drinking-water report online or look at an independent tap-water database from the Environmental Working Group. You can also use an NSF/ANSI-approved filter at home.

SEE ALSO: Bottled water from major brands like Aquafina, Nestle, and Dasani has been found to contain tiny plastic particles that you're drinking

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NOW WATCH: Shocking footage shows a pipe spewing blood into public waters — and it's totally legal

• The Trump administration is proposing to weaken US radiation regulations, backed by scientific outliers who suggest a little radiation is actually good for you, comparing it to exercise or sunlight.
• This contradicts the government's decades-old stance that any exposure to harmful radiation poses a cancer risk and that no threshold of radiation exposure is risk-free.
• Toxicologist Edward Calabrese said the new EPA proposal will "have a positive effect on human health as well as save billions and billions and billions of dollars."
• But physicist Jan Beyea, said the EPA proposal represents voices "generally dismissed by the great bulk of scientists."

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is quietly moving to weaken US radiation regulations, turning to scientific outliers who argue that a bit of radiation damage is actually good for you — like a little bit of sunlight.

The government's current, decades-old guidance says that any exposure to harmful radiation is a cancer risk. And critics say the proposed change could lead to higher levels of exposure for workers at nuclear installations and oil and gas drilling sites, medical workers doing X-rays and CT scans, people living next to Superfund sites and any members of the public who one day might find themselves exposed to a radiation release.

The Trump administration already has targeted a range of other regulations on toxins and pollutants, including coal power plant emissions and car exhaust, that it sees as costly and burdensome for businesses. Supporters of the EPA's new proposal argue the government's current no-tolerance rule for radiation damage forces unnecessary spending for handling exposure in accidents, at nuclear plants, in medical centers and at other sites.

"This would have a positive effect on human health as well as save billions and billions and billions of dollars," said Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts who is to be the lead witness at a congressional hearing Wednesday on EPA's proposal.

Calabrese, who made those remarks in a 2016 interview with a California nonprofit, was quoted by EPA in its announcement of the proposed rule in April. He declined repeated requests for an interview with The Associated Press. The EPA declined to make an official with its radiation-protection program available.

The regulation change is now out for public comment, with no specific date for adoption.

Radiation is everywhere, from potassium in bananas to the microwaves popping our popcorn. Most of it is benign. But what's of concern is the higher-energy, shorter-wave radiation, like X-rays, that can penetrate and disrupt living cells, sometimes causing cancer.

As recently as this March, the EPA's online guidelines for radiation effects advised: "Current science suggests there is some cancer risk from any exposure to radiation."

"Even exposures below 100 millisieverts"— an amount roughly equivalent to 25 chest X-rays or about 14 CT chest scans — "slightly increase the risk of getting cancer in the future," the agency's guidance said.

But that online guidance — separate from the rule-change proposal — was edited in July to add a section emphasizing the low individual odds of cancer: "According to radiation safety experts, radiation exposures of ...100 millisieverts usually result in no harmful health effects, because radiation below these levels is a minor contributor to our overall cancer risk," the revised policy says.

Calabrese and his supporters argue that smaller exposures of cell-damaging radiation and other carcinogens can serve as stressors that activate the body's repair mechanisms and can make people healthier. They compare it to physical exercise or sunlight.

Mainstream scientific consensus on radiation is based on deceptive science, says Calabrese, who argued in a 2014 essay for "righting the past deceptions and correcting the ongoing errors in environmental regulation."

EPA spokesman John Konkus said in an email that the proposed rule change is about "increasing transparency on assumptions" about how the body responds to different doses of dangerous substances and that the agency "acknowledges uncertainty regarding health effects at low doses" and supports more research on that.

The radiation regulation is supported by Steven Milloy, a Trump transition team member for the EPA who is known for challenging widely accepted ideas about manmade climate change and the health risks of tobacco. He has been promoting Calabrese's theory of healthy radiation on his blog.

But Jan Beyea, a physicist whose work includes research with the National Academies of Science on the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, said the EPA proposal on radiation and other health threats represents voices "generally dismissed by the great bulk of scientists."

The EPA proposal would lead to "increases in chemical and radiation exposures in the workplace, home, and outdoor environment, including the vicinity of Superfund sites," Beyea wrote.

At the level the EPA website talks about, any one person's risk of cancer from radiation exposure is perhaps 1%, Beyea said.

"The individual risk will likely be low, but not the cumulative social risk," Beyea said.

"If they even look at that — no, no, no," said Terrie Barrie, a resident of Craig, Colorado, and an advocate for her husband and other workers at the now-closed Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant, where the US government is compensating certain cancer victims regardless of their history of exposure.

"There's no reason not to protect people as much as possible," said Barrie.

US agencies for decades have followed a policy that there is no threshold of radiation exposure that is risk-free.

The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements reaffirmed that principle this year after a review of 29 public health studies on cancer rates among people exposed to low-dose radiation, via the US atomic bombing of Japan in World War II, leak-prone Soviet nuclear installations, medical treatments and other sources.

Twenty of the 29 studies directly support the principle that even low-dose exposures cause a significant increase in cancer rates, said Roy Shore, chief of research at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, a joint project of the United States and Japan. Scientists found most of the other studies were inconclusive and decided one was flawed.

None supported the theory there is some safe threshold for radiation, said Shore, who chaired the review.

If there were a threshold that it's safe to go below, "those who profess that would have to come up with some data," Shore said in an interview.

"Certainly the evidence did not point that way," he said.

The US Food and Drug Administration, which regulates electronic devices that emit radiation, advises, broadly, that a single CT scan with a dose of 10 millisieverts may increase risks of a fatal cancer by about 1 chance in 2,000.

The EPA tucked its proposed relaxation of radiation guidelines into its "transparency in science" proposal in April. The proposal would require regulators to consider "various threshold models across the exposure range" when it comes to dangerous substances.

While the EPA rule change doesn't specify that it's addressing radiation and chemicals, the EPA's official press release announcing the change does.

Supporters of the proposal say it's time to rethink radiation regulation.

"Right now we spend an enormous effort trying to minimize low doses" at nuclear power plants, for example, said Brant Ulsh, a physicist with the California-based consulting firm M.H. Chew and Associates. "Instead, let's spend the resources on minimizing the effect of a really big event."

SEE ALSO: San Francisco is so expensive that people are spending $1 million to live next to a former nuclear-testing site — now some residents are freaking out after learning the surrounding area may still be radioactive

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• The Trump administration on Friday said limits on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants were unnecessary as they were too costly.
• Those remarks have sparked an outcry from environmentalists who feared the next step would be looser rules favoring the coal industry at the expense of public health.
• Under the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, or MATS, enacted under former President Barack Obama, coal-burning power plants were required to install expensive equipment to cut output of mercury.
• Those emissions can harm pregnant women and put infants and children at risk of developmental problems.
• The EPA has been thinking about a rule change since August, but a group of electric utilities said looser rules were not needed since they have already invested billions of dollars in technology to cut emissions of the pollutant and comply.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration on Friday said limits on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants were unnecessary as they were too costly, sparking an outcry from environmentalists who feared the next step would be looser rules favoring the coal industry at the expense of public health.

Under the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, or MATS, enacted under former President Barack Obama, coal-burning power plants were required to install expensive equipment to cut output of mercury, which can harm pregnant women and put infants and children at risk of developmental problems.

The Environmental Protection Agency left the 2011 emission standards in place but proposed using a different cost analysis to evaluate whether the regulation is needed, a move that paves the way for looser rules going forward. Its statement was issued on Friday during a partial government shutdown.

Since August, the Environmental Protection Agency has been reconsidering the justification for the rule. A coalition of electric utilities had said the looser rules were not needed since they have already invested billions of dollars in technology to cut emissions of the pollutant and comply.

EPA said it was "proposing that it is not 'appropriate and necessary' to regulate HAP (Hazardous Air Pollution) emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants... because the costs of such regulation grossly outweigh the quantified HAP benefits."

It said its reassessment showed the cost of compliance with MATS was between $7.4 billion to $9.6 billion annually, while the monetized benefits were between $4 million to $6 million.

It also said the identification of unquantified benefits was not enough to support the standards. Among such benefits, environmentalists say are reduced healthcare costs, breathing cleaner air and drinking cleaner water.

"The policy (Acting EPA Administrator) Andrew Wheeler and (President) Donald Trump proposed today means more pregnant women, young children, and the elderly will be exposed to deadly neurotoxins and poisons, just so wealthy coal and oil barons can make a few extra bucks," Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign Director Mary Anne Hitt said in a statement. Wheeler is a former coal industry lobbyist.

"Virtually every coal plant in the U.S. has already met this lifesaving standard, and now Trump is recklessly trying to roll it back," she said.

A study published this month by Harvard University's School of Public Health said coal-fired power plants are the top source of mercury in the United States, accounting for nearly half of mercury emissions in 2015. It said the standards have markedly reduced mercury in the environment and improved public health.

'Please stop helping'

Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has targeted rolling back Obama-era environmental and climate protections to maximize production of domestic fossil fuels, including crude oil. U.S. oil production is the highest in the world, above Saudi Arabia and Russia, after a boom that was triggered more than a decade ago by improved drilling technology.

The coal industry had challenged a 2016 conclusion by Obama's EPA that the rule was justified because savings to U.S. consumers on healthcare costs would exceed compliance costs. The calculations accounted for how pollution-control equipment would reduce emissions of other harmful substances in addition to mercury.

Trump's industry allies, including Robert Murray, CEO of private coal mining giant Murray Energy Corp, had complained that the MATS rule contributed to the demise of the coal business by triggering hundreds of coal-fired power plant shutdowns and driving coal demand to its lowest in decades.

U.S. coal-fired power generation has fallen more than 40 percent since a peak in 2007, while natural gas-fired generation soared by about the same amount, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Utilities' demand for U.S. coal is projected to fall further this year, by around 2.5 percent to 648.2 million short tons, the lowest in 35 years, according to the EIA.

In July, electric utilities and utility groups favoring the rule asked the administration to keep it in place. They noted that billions of dollars in investments for anti-pollution equipment have already been made, and costs are being recovered from electricity customers through regulated pricing.

"This is like when your four-year-old kid tries to clean up your kitchen – it actually makes things worse. Please stop helping," said a utility industry lobbyist based in Washington, who asked not to be named. "The rule itself forced coal plant shutdowns, but they aren’t coming back."

EPA said it will take comment for the proposal for 60 days and will hold at least one public hearing.

(Additional reporting by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by David Gregorio)

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NOW WATCH: 7 science-backed ways to a happier and healthier 2019 that you can do the first week of the new year

• Nearly 780 million people worldwide do not have access to a source of clean water (water that flows through a household connection, borehole, well, or protected spring).
• In the US, 99.2% of the country has access to clean tap water, but many Americans chose to drink bottled water instead due to concerns about poor taste and contamination. 
• Bottled water and clean tap water are virtually identical in terms of purity and taste. In a 2011 study, only one-third of blind taste-testers could correctly identify tap versus bottled water.
• Unlike tap water, however, producing bottled water is an expensive, resource-heavy process that requires crude oil and extra water. 

There's nothing quite like the feeling of a pure, ice-cold drink of water.

While some Americans get water from the tap, the rest pay for the bottled variety — at a cost of $100 billion a year.

The average cost of a gallon’s worth of single-serve bottled water in the US is nearly $9.50, according to FoodandWaterWatch. That's nearly three times more expensive than the average price for a gallon of milk, and almost four times the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline. Bottled water costs nearly 2,000 times more than tap water, which costs less than a cent per gallon.

Many people assume that the higher price tag is justified by the health benefits of bottled water, but in most cases, that's not true.

This year's World Water Day falls on March 22 — the day is meant to draw attention to disparities in clean-water access around the globe. Worldwide; 780 million people don't have access to a source of clean water.

But for the vast majority of Americans, tap water and bottled water are comparable in terms of healthiness and quality. In some cases, publicly sourced tap water may actually be safer, since it is usually tested more frequently, Plus, bottled water is more likely to be contaminated by microplastic particles than tap water.

"It is wrong to assume that bottled water is somehow cleaner, healthier, or safer than tap water in the US," Peter Gleick, an environmental scientist and the co-founder of the Pacific Institute, told Business Insider.

There are exceptions, however: Water that comes from people's private wells do not see the same rigorous testing as those whose water comes from public sources. And, as was the case Flint, Michigan, some public sources are not properly screened.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of reasons for most people to stop shelling out for bottled water. Here's what to know.

SEE ALSO: Bottled water is a scam for most Americans, but a new report reveals some surprising places where it's dangerous to drink the tap

The first documented case of bottled water being sold was in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1760s. A company called Jackson's Spa bottled and sold mineral water for "therapeutic" uses.

Companies in Saratoga Springs and Albany also packaged and sold water.

Americans consume more packaged water overall than people in any other country in the world except China.

Across the globe, people drink roughly 10% more bottled water every year. On a per-capita basis, the US ranks number six in bottled water consumption.

Today, Americans today drink more bottled water than milk or beer. Each person consumes roughly 39 gallons of bottled water annually.

Source: Beverage Marketing Corp.

In 2016, Americans drank more bottled water than soda for the first time ever.

"Bottled water effectively reshaped the beverage marketplace," Michael Bellas, chairman and CEO Beverage Marketing's , said in a statement the following year.

It costs 2,000 times more to drink bottled water than it does to drink from the tap.

But that number could be even higher, some analysts have pointed out, because most sales are for single bottles.

Soda companies are aware of how lucrative bottled water can be — corporations like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have been investing in it.

In 2017, Pepsi bought a 30-second Super Bowl ad to debut its premium bottled water brand LIFEWTR.

"The worst is the false claims made by some 'specialty' bottled waters that claim magical benefits from adding oxygen, or magically rearranging crystals, or various other water voodoo," Gleick said.

He added that "even the mainstream companies have occasionally had ad campaigns that directly or indirectly malign tap water."

Research suggests that for most Americans, water in a bottle is not better than the stuff from your tap. In fact, one report found that almost half of all bottled water is derived from the tap, though it may be further processed or tested.

In 2007, Pepsi (Aquafina) and Nestle (Pure Life) had to change their labels to more accurately reflect this.

"Bottled water is no better regulated, tested, or monitored than tap water, and often less well monitored," Gleick said.

"When there are problems with tap water, the solution is to invest in updating and fixing our water systems, not to turn to bottled water," he added.

In fact, tap water is typically tested for quality and contamination more frequently than bottled water.

 The Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for conducting those tests. 

Still, the quality of your tap water can vary considerably based on where you live. According to EPA law, you should receive an annual drinking-water quality report, or Consumer Confidence Report, that details where your water comes from and what's in it. You can use the link below to find yours.

Source: Environmental Protection Agency

However, if you live in one of the 15 million (mostly rural) US households that get drinking water from a private well, the EPA isn't keeping an eye on your water quality.

"It is the responsibility of the homeowner to maintain the safety of their water,"the agency says on its website. 

The water from some of these wells may not be safe to drink. In a 2011 report, 13% of the private wells that geologists tested contained at least one element (like arsenic or uranium) at a concentration above national guidelines.

Sources: Scientific American, US Geological Survey

Here's what should — and shouldn't — be in your tap water.

Bottled water's recent popularity may be due to rising concerns about the purity of tap water. A 2017 Gallup poll found that 63% of Americans worried a "great deal" about the pollution in drinking water.

That was the highest percentage of concern reported since 2001.

"Trust in our urban water systems is declining because of preventable disasters like Flint, Michigan," Gleick said.

Though some people complain about the taste of tap water, most of us probably can't tell the difference. In a blind taste test done by students at Boston University, only a third of taste-testers identified a tap water sample correctly.

Source: Boston University

Making bottled water is also an expensive, resource-heavy process.

Like other sources of plastic, the material in bottled water is produced from the byproducts of crude oil. A 2009 study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters revealed that the plastic that went into the bottled water Americans consumed in the year 2007 came from the byproducts of between 32 million and 54 million barrels of oil.

Plus, more water goes into making a bottle of water than simply the contents: North American companies companies use 1.39 liters of water to make one liter of the bottled stuff.

Source: International Bottled Water Association

You might be thinking: "Hey, at least the bottles get recycled, right?" Wrong. For every six water bottles Americans use, only one makes it to the recycle bin.

Source: National Geographic

So think of these facts the next time you consider buying bottled water. To double-check that your local tap water is clean, look up your region's report with the link below.

Find out how clean your water is here. If you can't find your home area, contact your local representative.

• President Donald Trump has slashed a number of regulations aimed at protecting America's waterways, including many that affect the country's drinking water.
• Trump has contended the regulations he's rolled back — or sought to rescind — put unnecessary burdens on US industries.
• Research shows millions of Americans are exposed to unsafe drinking water every year, and environmental groups warn Trump's decisions could compound this issue.

Since entering the White House, President Donald Trump has rolled back a number of environmental regulations put in place by his predecessors that could make drinking water less safe for people across the US. 

Trump has faced some legal hurdles in attempting to repeal such regulations, but he's been fairly successful in this effort as he's argued that such rules are burdensome to farmers and businesses. 

The rules Trump has slashed have made it easier for corporations to dump pollutants into water systems, which in turn has the potential to seep into drinking water.

According to the US Geological Survey, in 2005 roughly 43 million Americans— approximately 15 percent of the population — supplied their own drinking water and 99 percent of that came from groundwater.

In short, when ponds, streams, rivers, and lakes are polluted, it can seep into groundwater and has the potential to negatively affect a significant number of Americans who get their water from wells. 

Studies have shown that millions of Americans are exposed to unsafe drinking water every year. This issue goes well beyond the highly publicized stories like the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. 

Here are the environmental rules Trump has repealed — or is fighting to repeal — that could affect drinking water in the US:

SEE ALSO: The Trump administration admitted the lowest number of refugees the US has accepted 40 years — here's what people go through to make it to the US

Ended regulation to protect streams and waterways from coal mining waste.

In February 2017, Trump repealed an Obama-era environmental regulation aimed at protecting streams and waterways from coal mining waste — the Stream Protection Rule.

The rule required surface mining activities to be kept at least 100 feet away from streams, which including the dumping of mining waste. By repealing the rule, Trump made it easier for coal mining companies to dump mining debris in streams. 

Trump contended the rule placed unnecessary burdens on the coal mining industry, but environmental groups said its repeal increased health risks for rural communities by disregarding "basic clean water safeguards."

Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, a state with a long history of coal mining, was staunchly opposed to the rule's repeal. 

He brought polluted well water from his district and challenged his GOP colleagues to try it, stating he'd vote in favor of rolling the regulation back if one of them did. Ultimately, no Republican lawmakers accepted Yarmuth's offer, USA Today reported. 

At the time, Yarmuth said, "This came from the drinking well of the Urias family's home in Pike County, Kentucky."

Yarmuth contended the rule was "one of the only safety measures that would protect these families from poisoned drinking water, higher rates of cancer, lung disease, respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, birth defects and the countless negative health effects that plague this region."

Delayed a regulation on the level of toxic pollutants released by steam electric power plants

The Trump administration has delayed the Power Plant Water Pollution Rule, which was finalized in 2015 under the Obama administration and regulated the level of toxic pollutants released by steam electric power plants. 

"Among all industries regulated under the Clean Water Act, steam electric power plants contribute the greatest amount of toxic pollutants discharged to surface waters,"according to the Brookings Institution.

While Scott Pruitt was still administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he moved to postpone compliance dates for aspects of the rule.

The rule is partially in effect, but the EPA under Trump has been sued by environmental groups over its efforts to delay portions of the regulation. 

Ended a rule that required companies to disclose the chemicals used in fracking

The Oil and Gas Fracking Rule, finalized under the Obama administration in March 2015, was rescinded by the Department of the Interior under Trump in late 2017. 

The Obama-era rule required companies to disclose the chemicals used in fracking, the practice of pumping fluids into the ground at high pressure to free up oil or natural gas for extraction.

Fracking is a controversial practice that environmental groups and researchers have warned can contaminate groundwater, drinking water, and adversely impact people's health. 

Rolled back rules on the disposal of toxic coal ash

In July 2018, the Trump administration rolled back Obama-era regulations on the disposal of coal ash.

Coal ash is a toxic substance leftover from burning coal, containing contaminants such as mercury, cadmium, and arsenic. Arsenic is known to cause cancer.

The Trump administration did not completely scrap the Coal Ash Rule, but added an amendment giving power plants an extension of 18 months to use unlined coal ash ponds and sites near groundwater for dumping. Environmental groups said the rollback could negatively affect drinking water near the sites and threaten the safety of US families.

"The Trump administration is turning a blind eye to damage done to our drinking water," Lisa Evans, senior counsel for the environmental law organization Earthjustice, told NBC News in July 2018. "This is aimed at saving industry money instead of protecting the public."

Trump's EPA justified the move by contending it would save utility companies up to $31.4 million per year in regulatory costs. 

A joint study from the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice, released in March 2019, found 91 percent of US coal-fired power plants are contaminating groundwater with "unsafe levels of one or more of the pollutants in coal ash."

"This is a wake-up call for the nation. Using industry's own data, our report proves that coal plants are poisoning groundwater nearly everywhere they operate," Evans said in a statement in early March. "The Trump Administration insists on hurting communities across the US by gutting federal protections. They are making a dire situation much worse.”

Scrapped a proposal to protect groundwater near uranium mines

The Trump administration in October 2018 scrapped a regulation proposed by the Obama administration in its final days to strengthen protections for groundwater near uranium mines.

The primary method for uranium extraction, known as in-situ recovery, "can contaminate groundwater if water containing uranium extraction byproducts flows into nearby aquifers,"according to Harvard Law School's Environmental & Energy Law Program.

A 2012 study from Thomas Borch, an environmental chemistry professor at Colorado State University, found that uranium levels in a well in Wyoming were over 70 times higher after mining.

Borch found the uranium concentration in the well was 3.53 milligrams per liter. The EPA says 0.03 milligrams per liter is the acceptable maximum contaminant level of uranium in drinking water.

Research shows elevated levels of uranium in drinking water can increase risk of kidney damage, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ongoing exposure to uranium in drinking water can also increase a person's estimated lifetime risk of cancer.

Pushing for a plan that would end a rule that protects roughly 60% of America's bodies of water, including much of its drinking water

In December 2018, the EPA announced a proposal that would gut Obama-era clean water regulation from 2015 known as the Clean Water Rule.

The regulation, also known as Waters of the US (WOTUS), defined which streams and wetlands are protected under the Clean Water Act. 

The Obama administration established a broader definition of which waterways are protected to make streams and wetlands less vulnerable to pollution from an array of sources, including industrial facilities.

The Trump administration is seeking to narrow that definition, opening the door for ephemeral/intermittent or seasonal waterways to be contaminated with pollutants. "Ephemeral and intermittent streams make up approximately 59% of all streams in the United States," according to a November 2008 study from the EPA.

Environmental groups have warned that Trump's plan could affect the drinking water of over 115 million people.

David M. Uhlmann, chief of the environmental crimes section at the Justice Department from 2000 to 2007, said the Trump administration's move disregards "basic science" and threatens "drinking-water supplies across the country."

"This is a thinly veiled effort to slash water pollution protections that have long been embraced by both Republican and Democratic administrations," Uhlmann wrote in a December 2018 op-ed for The New York Times.

Uhlmann added, "President Trump is once more playing to his base, this time to rural communities fearing greater regulation of the agricultural runoff that each year creates worsening dead zones in the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico."

• The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created in 1970. One of its objectives was to regulate pollution in America's waterways.
• Following its founding, the EPA dispatched photographers to catalogue the state of the country's pollution. 
• Those photographs reveal polluted rivers and garbage-choked coastlines.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Just over 50 years ago, Ohio's Cuyahoga river caught fire.

The disaster prompted a public outcry that in part led to the formation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. The EPA was charged with regulating the country's polluted air and waterways, among other environmental objectives.

Soon after its founding, the agency dispatched 100 photographers to capture the US' environmental issues as part of a photo project called Documerica. The photographers took about 81,000 images, more than 20,000 of which were archived. At least 15,000 have been digitized by the National Archives, and the images now function as a kind of time capsule, revealing what states from California to New York looked like between 1971 and 1977. 

Read More:Photos reveal what New York City looked like before the US regulated pollution

Many of the photos were taken before the implementation of rules meant to keep water and air free of contamination.

The images of polluted waterways are especially striking. The following Documerica photos reveal what US rivers, streams, and coastlines looked like before the EPA started regulating pollution.

SEE ALSO: The Cuyahoga River caught fire 50 years ago. These stomach-churning photos highlight why the EPA exists.

The Cuyahoga river, which flows through Cleveland, was once one of the most polluted in the country, with nearly black water because of oil pollution.

The image above, as well as the following two, were taken before the Documerica photo project got underway.

Its banks were rimmed with abandoned cars in some areas.

Then for 20 minutes on June 22, 1969, the Cuyahoga became a fiery inferno.

No one knows for sure what started the blaze, but it's possible that sparks from a passing train lit the oil in the water on fire.

The EPA's Clean Water Act now prohibits companies from contaminating waterways.

But before the law was enacted in 1972, factories often released untreated wastewater into nearby waters.

Rivers that flowed through industrial areas, like the Androscoggin in Maine, wound up functioning as dumping grounds.

Liquid waste, called effluent, choked waterways across the country.

The Anacostia river — which flows between Maryland and Washington DC — took on a brown color due to sewage and other pollutants.

In addition to industrial waste, oil spills also polluted many waterways. In October 1972, 285,000 gallons of crude oil flowed into the San Juan river in southeastern Utah.

Even river off-shoots, like this stream outside Telluride, Colorado, were murky.

Sometimes waterways and lakes would turn a hazy green color due to colonies of algae on the surface.

Algal blooms can wreak havoc on local ecosystems, killing flora and fauna.

US territories like Puerto Rico also struggled with pollution in the years leading up to and following the EPA's inception.

Puerto Rico's beaches were strewn with plastic and garbage in the early 1970s.

The practice of dumping waste into local rivers caused some water sources to so contaminated that they were unsafe for human consumption.

In some areas, the pollution was so bad that it prevented local residents from swimming in or drinking fresh water near their homes.

In its first year, the EPA referred 152 pollution cases — most of them water-related — to the Department of Justice for prosecution.

Source: EPA Archive

In 1973, Ohio resident Mary Workman filed a lawsuit against the Hanna Coal company, accusing it of polluting her drinking water. She holds a jar of dark-colored water from her well in this photo.

Urban areas like New York struggled with illegal garbage dumping in local waterways, in addition to industrial waste and oil pollution.

In the first six months of 1973, more than 300 oil spills from ships and tankers occurred in the Atlantic Ocean around the New York City area.

More than 800 oil spills happened throughout the larger mid-Atlantic region during the same time period, according to a 1973 Coast Guard survey.

New York City didn't stop discarding sewage into the ocean until 1992.

Today, the EPA regulates pollution from landfills and auto salvage yards, but illegal dumping still happens.

When President Richard Nixon proposed creating the EPA in 1970, he said: "The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called."

After the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire, the water remained polluted for decades. In this 1973 photo, the water's discoloration is a result of sewage. But the EPA recently announced that people can finally safely eat fish caught on the river between Gorge Dam and Lake Erie.

"We still think of air as free," Nixon said in his 1970 State of the Union address. "But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water."

• President Donald Trump said his administration will soon charge the city of San Francisco with violating environmental regulations over ocean pollution he claimed is caused by the city's homeless population. 
• Returning from his first visit to the Bay Area since his election, the president claimed that "tremendous" pollution, including used needles, are flowing into storm sewers and into the Pacific. 
• "They're in total violation — we're going to be giving them a notice very soon," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Wednesday.  "They have to clean it up. We can't have our cities going to hell."
• San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, dismissed Trump's claims and said that the city has one of the US's "most effective" waste disposal systems that filters out debris.
• "In San Francisco we are focused on advancing solutions to meet the challenges on our streets, not throwing off ridiculous assertions as we board an airplane to leave the state," Breed said. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump said his administration will soon charge the city of San Francisco with violating environmental regulations over ocean pollution he claimed is caused by the city's homeless population.

Returning from his first visit to the Bay Area since his election, the president claimed that "tremendous" pollution, including used needles, are flowing into storm sewers and into the Pacific. 

"They're in total violation — we're going to be giving them a notice very soon,"Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Wednesday evening.  "They have to clean it up. We can't have our cities going to hell."

The administration hasn't indicated what regulation the Environmental Protection Agency would enforce. 

San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, dismissed Trump's claims and said that the city has one of the "most effective" waste disposal systems in the US. 

"To be clear, San Francisco has a combined sewer system, one of the best and most effective in the country, that ensures that all debris that flow into storm drains are filtered out at the city's wastewater treatment plants," Breed said in a Wednesday night statement. "No debris flow out into the bay or the ocean."

She added, "In San Francisco we are focused on advancing solutions to meet the challenges on our streets, not throwing off ridiculous assertions as we board an airplane to leave the state." 

San Francisco already collects tens of thousands of hypodermic needles off of its streets every month, and the administration has not said what else it would ask the city to do to clean up its streets. 

Read more: Trump says homeless people are living in 'our best highways' and building entrances and people have told him they want to 'leave the country' over it

Trump has regularly attacked Democratic lawmakers from progressive cities, including San Francisco, over issues of homelessness and has rarely expressed concern for Americans who've found themselves without homes. Instead, he's argued that poverty in American cities is an embarrassment for the country and a nuisance for residents. 

On Tuesday, Trump told reporters that homeless people are ruining "our best highways and our best streets," and claimed that "foreign tenants" want to leave the country because of it. 

"We have people living in our … best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings, where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige,"Trump said. 

And Trump claimed during a July interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson that police officers in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, and California are "getting sick just by walking the beat." 

Homelessness is on the rise in California, which has the largest homeless population of any state in the country. San Francisco's homeless population has jumped 17% since 2017 and has risen 16% over the last year in the city of Los Angeles. The homeless population has grown 43% since 2017 in Alameda County, which includes Oakland. 

Some Democrats have agreed with Trump that California must address its homelessness problem.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, said the president is "right that homelessness is a big problem in California." She added, "But how he explains the situation is wrong and raises significant concerns that his so-called solutions will only make matters worse."

SEE ALSO: Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren are pulling ahead of the Democratic field, but voters don't think they can beat Trump

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NOW WATCH: 7 secrets about Washington, DC landmarks you probably didn't know

• The Environmental Protection Agency suspended enforcement of its civil environmental regulations Thursday, citing the coronavirus outbreak. 
• The move, according to the former head of its Office of Enforcement, is "unprecedented" and could be in effect for the "indefinite future." 
• The EPA said its rules would strain companies trying to "protect workers and the public from COVID-19," the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday it has stopped enforcing a host of environmental regulations because of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Facilities must comply with regulations "where reasonably practicable,"the EPA said in a statement. But the agency will not "seek penalties for noncompliance with routine monitoring and reporting obligations."

The agency's normal regulations would unnecessarily hamper companies that emit pollutants, said Administrator Andrew Wheeler, since the companies are also trying to "protect workers and the public from COVID-19," the disease caused by the virus.

The policy applies to civil violations, according to the statement, but "does not provide leniency for intentional criminal violations of law."

Cynthia Giles, head of the EPA's Office of Enforcement under Barack Obama, told the Hill that the move was a troubling one.

"This EPA statement is essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future," Giles said. "It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way 'caused' by the virus pandemic. And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was." 

The policy, which the EPA said is "temporary," will be backdated to March 13. The agency did not say how long the suspension would last.

In recent weeks, American Petroleum Institute, a lobbying group for fossil fuel companies, has asked President Donald Trump and the EPA to loosen environmental regulations and waive-record keeping, according to The Hill.

Giles said the EPA suspension is unprecedented.

"I am not aware of any instance when EPA ever relinquished this fundamental authority as it does in this memo,"she told The Hill. 

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• The Environmental Protection Agency issued an emergency authorization for American Airlines to use a new anti-microbial product to protect against COVID-19 on aircraft surfaces.
• The new product is effective for up to seven days, making it the longest-lasting surface protection approved by the EPA.
• While 'SurfaceWise2' protects against surface transmission, the virus is thought to spread mainly through close contact directly between individuals.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

American Airlines just added a new weapon to its arsenal for the ongoing fight against the pandemic: a disinfectant that kills COVID-19 on surfaces for a full week after it's applied.

The US Environmental Protection Agency announced on Monday that it had issued an emergency authorization to the state of Texas, allowing the state to clear American Airlines (which is headquartered in Fort Worth) to use the new disinfectant. 

The product, known as SurfaceWise2, can kill viruses and bacteria for up to seven days after being applied, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said during a press conference on Monday. Allied BioScience, which manufactures the stuff, is pushing for its permanent approval, Wheeler said. 

American Airlines plans to use SurfaceWise 2 for additional protection on its planes, part of an effort to increase consumer confidence and boost demand for air travel, said David Seymour, American Airlines' chief operating officer. Seymour said that the product would be applied to planes via an electrostatic spraying process, similar to what most US airlines are currently using to disinfect planes, as aircraft cycle through the airline's Dallas-Fort Worth hub. The disinfectant's use won't replace regular cleaning.

Although COVID-19 is thought to be able to spread from surface contact, Wheeler admitted that SurfaceWise 2 would not protect against the main way the virus is believed to be transmitted: respiratory droplets and aerosols. "The virus is thought to spread mainly through close contact between individuals," he said.

The emergency authorization was granted only to Texas because no other states applied for it, Wheeler said. Texas-based Total Orthopedics Sports & Spine will also be cleared to use the disinfectant.

"We assume with today's announcement that other states are going to start looking to see if they could apply," Wheeler said. "We can't just give a blanket exemption for another use of the product. We would have to check to see, for example, on the impact on ... different surfaces."

Wheeler said that SurfaceWise 2 was the only product approved by the EPA to last as long as a week.

US airlines have added new cleaning and disinfection procedures as the coronavirus pandemic has shattered demand for air travel. Airlines have previously suggested that the single applications of the disinfectant they currently use could inactivate COVID-19 virus for days, although most airlines carry out the spraying, or fogging, at least daily.

Southwest Airlines, for instance, said that it applies a disinfectant followed by an anti-microbial material every 30 days, which the manufacturer says remains effective for up to three months. The airline also uses a disinfectant nightly and between flights. A spokesperson for the airline said that the technique is certified by the EPA and by Boeing.

"Southwest is confident in our current approach to cleaning but will always monitor the marketplace for approved and emerging innovations that support the well-being and comfort of our Employees and Customers," Southwest said in a statement.

SEE ALSO: US airlines are banning vented masks, which the CDC says don't stop COVID-19

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NOW WATCH: What living on Earth would be like without the moon

Transition documents months in the making are gathering dust across federal agencies, and government officials in charge tell Insider they're growing frustrated with the wait.

In May, senior officials from every major government agency started regular virtual meetups to prepare for a presidential handover expected shortly after Election Day if Joe Biden had won.

Career officials at the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and other agencies worked for months to compile several-hundred-page briefing books highlighting everything a new team needs to know. They prepared details about how massive agencies are organized, phone numbers for key staff, and a rundown of which issues the incoming administration would need to deal with during its first 100 days in office.

They worked alongside White House officials and Trump appointees to meet the deadlines laid out in a federal law that spells out how transitions work. 

The problem now is the Trump administration won't let the agency officials give their books to the Biden team. 

As the files gather dust on desks across Washington while President Donald Trump refuses to concede the election, senior career government officials who planned for a transition are worried that the delay will cause extensive damage, including to national security, economic-recovery efforts, and the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

"Those books have now been prepared by all of these agencies, and we can't get them into the hands of the Biden team," a senior federal career employee who participated in the transition process told Insider this week. That person spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. 

Government employees, such as national security and public health experts including the infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci, are barred from discussing the transition with the president-elect's team. That's because the General Services Administration, a little-known agency tasked with helping the federal government operate smoothly, hasn't officially acknowledged Biden as the winner. 

The GSA administrator has to sign a document to kick off the formal government transition. 

"We are prohibited from communicating with them," the career employee said. "There's nothing that we can do." 

The implications could be severe, particularly for national security issues, that person added, saying: "Our enemies out there are looking at the transition for one of the soft points where the US government can trip up." 

Already, 16 of the 78 days the new administration would have had to prepare between Election Day and January 20 have passed. 

"The federal government is a very, very complex organization, and if an incoming president has just a few days for their team to get on top of the thousands of critical issues that are necessary to be aware of in the first few days of an administration, that is really quite dangerous," the career employee, who has worked on the transition, said. "I just can't see how anyone, let alone a president, would not want this to be successful."

'More people may die' 

Emily Murphy, the Trump-appointed leader of GSA, is now at the center of a political firestorm for waiting to formally "ascertain" that Biden has won. A decision from her would unlock millions of dollars in federal transition funding and allow agency officials to send over their briefing books to Biden's team. Without Murphy's signature, Biden's transition officials also can't start interviewing government staff about what they need to know in advance of Inauguration Day on January 20. 

The Biden team is also pushing for GSA to officially launch the transition process, saying that national security and the government's response to the pandemic that has now killed 250,000 people in the US will be imperiled. 

"More people may die," Biden said earlier this week when asked about the consequences of a transition delay.

The president-elect said Thursday at a news conference that until GSA declared Biden the likely winner, "we don't have access to all the information that we need to get from all the various agencies." That includes information about coronavirus testing, health guidance, and details about planning for vaccine distribution, he said. He added he wasn't ruling out legal action against GSA but that he hoped to avoid such a situation. 

GSA said earlier this month the agency "does not pick the winner" of the election and that it was abiding by the precedent established by the Clinton administration during the contested 2000 election where "the GSA Administrator ascertains the apparent successful candidate once a winner is clear based on the process laid out in the Constitution." 

Biden said on Wednesday that GSA didn't need to wait until he was certified as the official winner. He added that the law says the agency can recognize him now as the "apparent" winner. 

But a GSA spokesperson told Insider on Thursday that the agency's position hadn't changed. 

"There will be an impact," a former senior GSA official told Insider in an interview. "After the election of 2000, you saw the impact of that delay in terms of the lack of readiness for [the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks], and every day that goes by is critical in terms of losing ground on the pandemic, losing ground on national security issues."

Biden's team has also not yet received details about succession plans within the agencies. Those arrangements lay out which career officials will step into leadership roles when Trump appointees step down on or before Inauguration Day. Those plans were due to be finalized by agency heads in September but have not been released publicly. 

Trump aides 'don't want any talk about transition'

Meanwhile, the Biden team says it's doing everything it can to get ready for its administration without the help of Trump officials. It has launched agency-review teams packed with former government employees who are talking to experts outside the executive branch. 

That includes interviews with congressional committees, The Wall Street Journal reported, and conversations with current and former Trump officials, according to CNN. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris still sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, so she has access to intelligence briefings that Biden can't get directly.

Current and former government officials said they also suspected that back-channel conversations were occurring between Biden's team and federal-agency insiders.

Government workers who want to speak out about the importance of quickly starting the transition process said they were worried about consequences to their careers if they did so. Trump's team has recently fired political appointees deemed insufficiently loyal to the president.

Career employees have civil-service protections that make them harder to dismiss, but Trump in October signed an executive order that would make it easier to fire federal workers, and many government employees are worried that the administration could relocate them or take other steps to complicate their jobs.

Career staff at federal agencies told Insider in recent interviews that Trump-appointed officials weren't acknowledging or planning for an upcoming shift to a Biden administration. 

The president, meanwhile, continues to make baseless allegations of voter fraud and is challenging election results in court. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week that he was still expecting "a smooth transition" to a second Trump administration. 

It's awkward for federal employees who are trying to prepare for Biden's team but can't talk about it when Trump-appointed officials are around.

"The elephant in the room is this transition and what everybody needs to do, or what happens at noon on January 20, and yet no one can talk about it," the career employee who worked on the transition said. "The politicals don't want any talk about transition ... if there's a political on that call, we can't go there and talk about that." 

A senior career employee at the Environmental Protection Agency said employees there had been oddly quiet about the election results and what it means heading into 2021.

"Everyone is pretending nothing has happened," that person told Insider in a recent interview. "I'm a little worried that we are unprepared to do our jobs."

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NOW WATCH: July 15 is Tax Day — here's what it's like to do your own taxes for the very first time

Democrats are considering using an obscure but powerful law to obliterate federal regulations the Trump administration hustled to get on the books before leaving office. 

It's the same law President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans used to wipe away rules put in place by the Obama administration. 

Get ready to hear a lot about the Congressional Review Act. It's a little-known law dating back to 1996 that gets fresh attention in Washington every time the White House changes hands. Prior to the Trump administration, it was only used once to wipe away an existing regulation. 

But Trump and the Republicans who controlled both chambers of Congress used the CRA an unprecedented 16 times to obliterate federal rules, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service. They repealed Obama policies like a rule aimed at protecting streams from coal mine runoff and regulation and worker safety rules. 

The CRA allows Congress to kill rules finalized within the last 60 legislative days of the prior session. That means Trump's regulations issued on or after August 21 could be in peril, according to George Washington University's Regulatory Studies Center.

The Democrats' narrow control of the Senate means they're a lot more likely to ax some of Trump's more controversial regulations like an Interior Department rule that eases protections for migratory birds and air pollution rules from the Environmental Protection Agency. It requires only a simple majority vote and incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says Democrats will consider using every tool they have.

Policy insiders think Democrats are likely to use the CRA to repeal at least a few of the more contentious rules that Trump and his allies finalized on their way out the door. 

"I would say you'll see a handful of targeted CRA actions," said Matt Kent, a regulatory policy associate at the watchdog group Public Citizen. The Coalition for Sensible Safeguards keeps a tracker of recent Trump rules, including some that could be CRA targets. 

Here are seven Trump administration rules that policy experts told Insider are top targets for Democrats to repeal using the CRA: 

EPA science rule

One of the Trump Environmental Protection Agency's most controversial policies is one finalized earlier this month that restricts which scientific studies the agency can use when it's drafting regulations. It requires EPA to only use studies where the underlying data is available to the public. Supporters of the policy say it boosts transparency, but scientists and other opponents say it's an attempt to water down rules and will prohibit the agency from using relevant data. 

EPA ozone rule

The Trump EPA issued an air pollution rule in late December that public health experts slammed as too weak. EPA, which is required to review and update the air pollution standards every five years, kept the current national ozone standards in place despite calls for stricter standards. The American Lung Association urged the administration to toughen the standards to protect vulnerable groups, including children, older adults, pregnant women, and communities of color. 

EPA cost-benefit rule

EPA issued a rule in December in line with Trump's deregulatory agenda that aims to make it tougher for the agency to write regulations. The rule lays out new requirements for EPA to measure the costs of regulations against the benefits. The Trump administration said it would boost transparency and consistency, but critics warned that it'll tip the scales against important regulations and they're pressing Biden's team to scrap the policy.  

EPA toxic air pollution rule

Another in-the-weeds but important EPA rule that could be on the chopping block is a rule that eases how facilities' toxic air pollution is regulated. The Trump EPA finalized a rule in November reversing course on a policy known as "once in, always in" that required large emission sources to maintain strict pollution controls. 

Migratory bird rule

The Trump Interior Department finalized a new rule in early January that eases protections for migratory birds. The regulation limits legal liability for companies that accidentally kill birds through oil spills, collisions with buildings, or other disasters. Under the new rule, companies won't face federal prosecution as long as they didn't intend to kill the birds. 

Grants for faith-based groups

The Trump administration published a final rule in December that cuts across nine government agencies and aims to make it easier for religious social service organizations to get access to federal grants. The Trump administration said it wanted to remove hurdles faced by faith-based groups, but civil rights advocates warned that the new policies won't protect against discrimination from religious organizations, and they hope Biden will reverse the Trump policy. 

Advice for investors

The Trump Labor Department finalized a rule in October stating that the managers of pension funds must prioritize investors' financial interests over interests like climate change and racial justice, Reuters reported. Trump's opponents slammed the move as politically driven and cautioned that it would hurt efforts to use investments to combat climate change and advance social justice. 

Dems could use the CRA then 'pull up the ladder' and repeal it 

Democrats have never used the CRA to abolish existing rules. Many Democrats and progressives loathe the law, which they view as inherently anti-regulatory. Democratic Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Tom Udall of New Mexico introduced legislation in 2017 that would have repealed the CRA entirely, but it fizzled in the GOP-controlled Senate. 

"Democrats have never used the CRA to repeal a rule and the second that they do it's automatically transformed into a bipartisan thing," said James Goodwin, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Center for Progressive Reform. 

Prior to Trump, the CRA was only used once. President George W. Bush signed off in 2001 on the repeal of Clinton administration ergonomics rules aimed at combating workplace injuries. 

But after Trump and his GOP allies used the law so widely, even some on the left who hate the CRA think the Democrats should use it to their advantage. 

"Some people take the view that the Trump administration was an unprecedented dumpster fire, and desperate times call for desperate measures, and therefore we will hold our nose and use the CRA," Goodwin said. 

Senate Democrats are committed "to working with the incoming Biden-Harris administration and looking at every tool in our toolbox, which includes using the Congressional Review Act, to find ways to prevent Trump's most egregious policies from becoming a reality," Schumer told Insider in a statement.  

One possibility is that Democrats will try to use the "pull up the ladder approach," said Kent of Public Citizen, meaning they use the CRA against Trump's rules and then abolish the CRA entirely. But while using the CRA only requires a majority of votes in the Senate, legislation to repeal it would be much more difficult and would require 60 Senate votes. 

Democrats will want to be selective. Their 50-50 majority — with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie breaking vote — is so slim that it'll require them to woo moderates in their own party or get Republican votes to scrap Trump rules. They'll also have other priorities like confirming Biden's nominees and passing COVID relief legislation that will take floor time in the Senate. 

"They will need all 50 votes to get these things over the finish line," said Goodwin. "If you need to go twist" moderate Senate Democrat Joe Manchin's "arm to provide that 50th vote, that's one less time you can twist his arm in the future." 

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NOW WATCH: Why Pikes Peak is the most dangerous racetrack in America

The vast majority of employees at the government agency that helped develop the coronavirus vaccine haven't been able to get the shot, internal emails obtained by Insider show. 

The National Institutes of Health has vaccinated just over 3,000 of its employees within its Maryland locations, according to the emails and state data. That is a small fraction of NIH's overall workforce, including 20,260 at its headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. It's unclear what arrangements the agency has for staffers in its other satellite offices across the US.

In the most recent email that Insider obtained dated February 5, the agency's top boss warned staff that its first supply of doses "has been exhausted."   

That followed three other earlier emails sent in January updating employees on the status of the agency's plans to get them inoculated. None bore good news.

"We continue to await additional doses of COVID-19 vaccine — and to be honest, this has been a frustrating experience," Francis Collins, the NIH director, wrote in a staff-wide email on January 29. 

The nation's leading health research agency has been at the forefront of the coronavirus vaccine work, including assisting and advising Operation Warp Speed, the program begun under former President Donald Trump to fast-track vaccine development.

The NIH — which employs Anthony Fauci, the federal government's top infectious diseases expert — conducts medical and public health research and provides billions of dollars in grants to fund medical research on cancer, addiction, Alzheimer's, infectious diseases, and other medical issues. 

The agency's 300-acre Bethesda campus also has a research hospital called the Clinical Center where doctors can examine and treat COVID-19 patients.

Hospitals in most states have received shipments of vaccines to administer to their healthcare workers. In December, Maryland officials provided 2,300 doses of the state's vaccine allocation to NIH's frontline healthcare workers.

'I do not have better news to share' 

Since the December allocation, the NIH has received about 4,000 additional vaccine doses, emails show. 

An email Collins sent to NIH staff on January 22 said that the agency received that one-time allocation of doses of the Moderna vaccine from Operation Warp Speed. 

With the 2,300-dose allocation that the Maryland governor's office announced in December and the 4,000-dose allocation described in the emails in January, there would have been enough vaccines for 3,150 people.

The January 22 email said that staff who had received the first shots would take priority with the new batch of vaccines to ensure they could get the second shot to complete the dosage. 

Collins also encouraged workers aged 65 and older to consider getting their shots through their local county programs where they live.

A week later on January 29, Collins sent another email to staff saying that he was working with the Maryland Department of Health and members of the Maryland congressional delegation on the issue.

Neither the NIH nor the White House responded to Insider's questions about why the agency was seeking vaccines from the state at that time rather than the federal government. A spokesperson at the Office of Management and Budget said that workers at most agencies were supposed to get vaccines when they became eligible under state and locality rules. States are providing the shots at different sites, including through pharmacies.

Collins's February 5 follow-up email informed staff that the agency only had enough vaccines left to make sure those who got the first dose could also get the second. He said Maryland wasn't sending more vaccines yet but that it was also working with federal agencies "to resolve this supply issue." 

"I'm disappointed that I do not have better news to share on vaccine availability for NIH staff," he wrote. 

It's not clear how many NIH workers who directly helped with the COVID-19 vaccine development have received a shot.

Collins, who has been director at NIH since 2009, got his shot publicly on December 22, as did Fauci, who has served as one of the government's top spokespersons on the pandemic. Fauci oversees the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH. 

The lead scientist on the COVID vaccine project, Kizzmekia Corbett, received the vaccine and posted about it on Instagram on December 30.

Elsewhere in the federal government

Vaccines are still in short supply and states have given certain groups of people priority, including healthcare workers and people living in nursing homes. 

Fauci said on CNN Tuesday that vaccines wouldn't be widely available until early June as manufacturers ramp up their production. 

The government employs more than 4 million people including those in the military. Most haven't received a vaccine yet.

That includes healthcare workers who've been fighting the pandemic. According to The Washington Post, 6,000 healthcare workers in the Public Health Services Corps are still waiting to get their vaccines. Many have been deployed to care for COVID-19 patients and to administer vaccines. 

Over at the Environmental Protection Agency, the agency has not received federally allocated vaccines, but it has designated some of its workers as priority candidates for vaccines from states, according to an agency spokesperson. 

The agency has identified emergency response workers and others who can't socially-distance because of their jobs — such as people working in labs — for potential early vaccines. 

"EPA leadership is working with each state and the EPA's list of designated employees will be subject to that state's prioritization and rules," said the agency spokesperson. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided last year that the workers at the Bureau of Prisons, the Indian Health Service, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Department of Veteran's Affairs should be first to get vaccinated.  

A spokesman from the Office of Management and Budget said that federal agencies were asked to identify "a small subset of their workforce who are essential critical infrastructure workers and therefore might fit into categories that states and localities have prioritized." Those include emergency response and healthcare workers.

At the VA, 68% of workers were vaccinated as of February 10. The State Department had vaccinated 11,500 people both in the US and abroad as of January 28, according to an agency spokesperson. 

The State Department said that in the US workers "deemed essential for mission-critical operations" and those who couldn't work from home got priority. When considering workers abroad it looked primarily at coronavirus infection rates where workers were stationed. 

"Our goal is to offer the vaccine to 100% of department personnel as quickly as vaccine supply permits," the spokesperson said. 

President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris — their spouses — and members of Congress were among the first in line in the US to get vaccinated. Hundreds of White House officials and political appointees already got their vaccines as well, according to CNN. 

Insider previously reported that essential workers at the Capitol who clean, repair buildings, and provide food have not been eligible for vaccines.

Back at the NIH, Collins said in his email to staff that the goal was to have staff vaccinated as soon as possible.

"For some, this may be in your county," he wrote.

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NOW WATCH: What makes 'Parasite' so shocking is the twist that happens in a 10-minute sequence

Matt Gaetz prides himself on his attention-seeking antics. The Republican congressman from Florida regularly lashes out against his critics on Twitter, drops rhetorical bombs on cable news, and picks fights with his foes on the US House floor. 

Then the phones start ringing back in his congressional office, where staffers are often blindsided by angry constituents and media requests after the latest Gaetz controversy. 

And the drama is taking a toll on some of his staffers. 

Read more: Matt Gaetz's Florida sex game included a 'Harry Potter' challenge and 'extra points' for sleeping in sorority houses, a female Republican tells Insider

His communications director, Luke Ball, quit abruptly "out of principle,"NBC reported Friday. 

Insider reached out this week to 36 current and former Gaetz staffers about the culture in Gaetz's office. While the majority of them did not respond or declined to comment, two spoke on the record and two others spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve personal and professional relationships. They and others have described a sometimes uncomfortable environment.

Gaetz and his current and former aides have been bombarded this week as his latest — and biggest — controversy became public. Gaetz is the subject of a Justice Department investigation into whether he broke sex trafficking laws with a 17-year-old girl in 2019. Gaetz denies the allegations. 

'Hell for all of us'

Gaetz staffers have gotten used to being blindsided by their boss' attention-seeking controversies and the media fallout that comes with them. 

There was the stunt where he wore a gas mask on the House floor during a coronavirus relief vote. And the time he threatened former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. 

One of Gaetz's first acts of Congress — just a month into his tenure in 2017 — the freshman lawmaker unveiled a bill to abolish the US Environmental Protection Agency. The move instantly propelled Gaetz into national headlines, some of the office staff at the time had no idea it was coming. 

"That was hell for all of us," a former staffer said. But Gaetz "loved every second of it because it was very chaotic and it helped draw a lot of media attention to him."

Staffers in Gaetz's office are sometimes assigned to the congressman's hair and makeup, given his regular television appearances. That became an issue of concern for some of them who didn't want to do it, the former staffer told Insider. 

Gaetz had become an expert in putting on his own television makeup by 2020, he told the Washington Post— a skill he learned from his friend and fellow Fox News regular Ron DeSantis, who's now Florida's governor. 

Aides were also taken aback when Gaetz invited Chuck Johnson, a Holocaust denier, to be his guest at a State of the Union address. 

Similarly, Gaetz upset one aide in particular who worked on anti-trafficking issues when he was the sole House lawmaker to vote against an anti-human trafficking bill in 2017, said the other former staffer who spoke to Insider this week. "She was not too happy." 

That aide, Sara Lefevers, left Gaetz's office in 2019. She is now president and CEO of the NISSI Project, an anti-human trafficking organization.

"Thank you for contacting me. I will not be able to make any statement relating to Congressman Gaetz, the allegations against him, or my time serving the 1st Congressional District of Florida," Lefevers told Insider this week.

She then added: "I left my position to pursue my life calling and passion in advocacy to fight human trafficking in all of its forms. As we await more information regarding this investigation and the allegations made against Representative Gaetz, we will be pursuing our mission to fight human trafficking and support any investigation that seeks to protect innocent women, men and children from this heinous crime."

Gaetz's office did not respond to requests for comment for this story. 

Many remain loyal

Many of Gaetz's staffers remain loyal to him, and some former aides told Insider they enjoyed their stints in his office. 

"I have nothing but positive things to say about my experience working for him and the others in that office," one former intern said. "I hope this issue gets resolved for him in a fair manner," she added of the current DOJ investigation. 

But at least one former staffer was concerned about having Gaetz listed on their resume, given the controversies surrounding the congressman. 

Another former staffer appears to have locked down his LinkedIn account after receiving an inquiry from Insider. 

Read more: We asked 30 Republicans who know and have worked with Rep. Matt Gaetz if they've reached out to him as his sordid sex stories snowball. Their collective silence was deafening.

And Gaetz was known for sometimes snapping at his staff, the former aide said, in a way that sometimes seemed out of bounds. 

One example: If Gaetz wanted to be the star of a big public event and only a few people showed up, "he would be irate. … He was always about the optics of everything." 

Gaetz often held such events in high schools in his Florida congressional district, the former staffer recalled. 

This often involved Gaetz hugging students and snapping selfies with them. At least once, his staff advised him staff after an event, "You don't want to come across as too friendly with some of the students," the staffer said.

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