In May 2025, the EPA enraged environmentalists and public health experts when it rolled back Biden-era regulations on so-called forever chemicals, exposing the public once again to an array of the ubiquitous, toxic chemicals in drinking water, little more than a year after the Biden administration published the first set of national PFAS regulations.
The Trump EPA delayed a compliance deadline for PFOA and PFOS, both commonly found in water systems, and rescinded earlier limits on four other PFAS chemicals. Critics said the new administration was granting the wishes of the water industry, which didn’t want to pay the high cost of installing filters to remove PFAS.
The agency rejected charges that it was risking public health by cutting restrictions on the chemicals, and said instead that it is providing millions of dollars to help communities remove PFAS from their water systems.
In May this year, EPA awarded $10.1 million to Delaware’s small communities, drinking water systems, and private well owners for PFAS cleanup, focusing on stopping the pollution at its source, and setting enforceable standards for the chemicals’ presence in drinking water.
"They want to invest in other ways aside from treatment, such as monitoring and public education, to avoid the cost of treatment somewhere down the line."
The grant is part of $1 billion nationwide in the Emerging Contaminants in Small or Disadvantaged Communities program. The money is designed to help pay for testing, planning, and building infrastructure projects.
“Sustained investment of this scale helps drive down the per-system cost of treatment, generates real-world performance data that better informs utility decision making, accelerates innovation in destruction and disposal technologies and helps mitigate PFAS across the many forms in which it appears in source water,” the agency said.
In Delaware, the new money has been paid to the Division of Public Health, which said it will provide “subawards” to small communities for testing, treatment and infrastructure improvements.
While the $10.1 million is an “important investment” in PFAS mitigation, “the need significantly exceeds currently available resources,” the DPH said in a statement.
The persistence of PFAS throughout the Delaware River Basin was highlighted by a report in late May from the Delaware River Basin Commission, an interstate regulator, which found the chemicals in surface water, sediment, fish and blue crab tissues collected over three years at 21 sites in the basin
“The new research confirms PFAS contamination is both widespread and persistent in the Delaware River and selected tributaries. Surface water concentrations are increasing at a faster rate than water volume as the river moves downstream into Delaware Bay, suggesting there are ongoing inputs from unknown sources like industrial facilities, wastewater discharges and stormwater,” the DRBC said.
The lead author, Dr. Jeremy Conkle, called the basin a “global hotspot” for PFAS pollution. "This study adds more data showing that these chemicals are widely present in water, fish, crabs and sediment, demonstrating that we are in the early stages of what will be a long-term effort to reduce their loading and protect ecosystem and human health,” he said in a statement.
The presence of two kinds of PFAS chemicals was especially high near Delaware’s Pea Patch Island, home of Fort Delaware, and around Wilmington and the Christina River, the report said.
“Within this stretch of the Delaware River are numerous industrial sites, wastewater treatment facilities, the City of Wilmington, and the Christina River—a known hotspot for PFAS pollution,” the report said.
On the EPA’s new funding, Dr. Jerry Kauffman, director of the University of Delaware’s Water Center, said the $10.1 million will help but does not represent a significant step toward ridding Delaware of the chemicals.
It costs $2-$5 million to install filtration for a water system supplying 1 million gallons a day (MGD), which would serve around 10,000 people. So even two or three times that amount doesn’t come close to protecting a state of some 1 million people, Kauffman said.
The Newark South wellfield, for example, installed carbon filtration for its PFAS problem about a year ago, and serves about a third of the city’s population of about 35,000, he said.
“$10 million is a lot but it’s not going to go far enough to clean up the PFAS problem that we have,” he said. “Nationwide, $1 billion would get you started.”
But Kauffman said the EPA’s announcement contains signs that the agency is focusing on preventing PFAS sources getting into public water systems in the first place, rather than on the more costly cleanup.
That’s the right approach because it aims at cutting the source of the problem before it becomes a public-health hazard, Kauffman said.
“They want to invest in other ways aside from treatment, such as monitoring and public education, to avoid the cost of treatment somewhere down the line. They are suggesting, I think, that there are other ways to tackle this beyond treatment. Certainly, that’s valid,” he said.
Kauffman said he has identified two industrial plants as the source of PFAS contamination in Red Clay Creek in New Castle County. ”The long-range solution to that is cleaning up the source. If that’s what the EPA is suggesting, that’s a valid approach in my mind. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said.
And he said the Trump administration, and implicitly the water industry, seems to be maintaining the Biden EPA’s very strict level of 4 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS in drinking water systems, signaling that even an administration as wedded to deregulation as the second Trump government recognizes that just tiny concentrations of those chemicals can endanger public health.
“Even the Trump administration is sticking with the 4 and 4, apparently with the concurrence of the water purveyors and the manufacturers of the technology on their expert panel,” Kauffman said.
PFAS, synthetic chemicals that have been used since the 1940s in a wide range of consumer products such as flame-retardant fabrics and non-stick cookware, have been linked to many serious illnesses including some cancers, ulcerative colitis, decreased response to vaccines, and developmental problems in young children.
Meanwhile, EPA firmly rejected a suggestion that its PFAS policy represents a weakening of the Biden-era rules. The Trump EPA has preserved the monitoring and reporting deadlines set by the original PFAS policy in April 2024, although some compliance deadlines have been extended, the agency said.
“We are making the standard workable, not weaker, by extending some compliance deadlines so water utilities can actually achieve results without risking costly violations that punish communities without removing a single part per trillion of PFAS from anyone's tap,” it said in a statement.
The EPA also said it is investing $4 billion in state revolving funds that address PFAS and other emerging contaminants, and provides some $6.5 billion in low-interest financing that can be used for PFAS mitigation.
At the Delaware Nature Society, Director of Advocacy Mark Nardone said there appears to be a difference in approach between the EPA awarding money to help local PFAS cleanup, and its changes to Biden-era PFAS rules.
“The funding could, in theory, subsidize upgrades to treatment plants, such as installing carbon filters, even as EPA lowers the standard for treatment of PFAS,” Nardone said. “That appears to be a contradiction, but there may be some strategy that isn't immediately apparent. The bottom line is that no matter the EPA's rationale, federal money that can be used to help the state understand and address the issue is a good thing.”
