Trump’s deregulatory order aims to facilitate rapid construction of new data centers and the fossil fuel infrastructure to power them
“The Trump administration is gutting health protections that are important to protecting children from toxins like mercury just to save the coal industry some money,” Nicholas Morales, a lawyer for the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, said today.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has completed its rollback of mercury and air toxicity standards that the Biden administration strengthened in 2024. The Trump administration is rolling the standards back to where they were in 2012, when the Obama administration originally put them in place. The loosening of regulations is expected to save $78 million annually starting in 2028, according to an EPA fact sheet.