Trump administration took over 500 actions weakening cancer protections, NRDC report says

The Trump administration has taken more than 500 actions to systematically dismantle protections against carcinogens across the US federal government, an October report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) alleges.

According to the report, the changes are taking effect at a time when some forms of early-onset cancer are spiking by about 30% per decade. Officials estimate there will be more than two million US cancer diagnoses this year.

Some of the changes have drawn widespread outrage, including the administration delaying new protections around asbestos and siding with Bayer in its fight to keep the carcinogenic pesticide glyphosate on the market.

But the report says most changes lie in the technical processes of the federal government. With minor adjustments to scientific processes that determine exposure risk, once-problematic levels of exposure to carcinogens such as formaldehyde are no longer considered a danger in the federal government's eyes.

NRDC lead author Erik Olson said he was 'surprised by the breadth of the whole government effort to undermine all the protections against cancer'. It is not just the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he said, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and many other entities.

Olson said: 'The vast majority of people have no idea that this is happening because the Trump administration is mostly doing it without a lot of fanfare, so it's hard to piece together this jigsaw puzzle, but we did and it shows a stark and shocking picture.'

The report states the Trump EPA has started implementing a 'threshold' approach, under which some exposure to carcinogens is determined to be safe. The change has already resulted in weaker protections against formaldehyde, and a similar approach appears to be under way for hexavalent chromium, a widespread water contaminant.

Nuclear regulators are also eliminating the obligation to reduce exposure to radioactive carcinogens to the lowest reasonably achievable level, despite decades of scientific evidence that any level of radiation poses a cancer risk, the report states.

David Fotouhi, the second in command at the EPA, wrote in an early 2026 memo that the agency had been too conservative in estimating toxic chemicals' health risks, including carcinogenicity, and suggested those values should be revisited and loosened.

The changes undermine work on 500 risk assessments done since 1985 by the Integrated Risk Information System (Iris), the small EPA office that determines chemical toxicity. Betsy Southerland, a former water office director at the agency, said the changes to risk assessments are among the most pernicious moves because the findings underpin regulations protecting people from carcinogens in air, water and consumer goods. The agency is also targeting a mechanism that protects children by factoring in their increased exposure risk.

The EPA has also quietly loosened guidance on the studies required to set regulations around carcinogens, the report alleges. Long-term human or animal studies are the norm, but the agency now uses short-term modelling studies called new approach methodologies, which are known to be unreliable and easy to manipulate. Such a study was used to weaken the risk assessment for p-DCB, a widely used consumer chemical most regulatory agencies label a carcinogen.

The agency has also delayed requirements for industry to provide cancer data for carcinogenic chemicals such as benzene, bisphenol A and vinyl chloride; when this will happen is unclear. The use of presidential exemptions for carcinogenic air pollution has also dramatically increased, which the report claims will increase exposure to arsenic, ethylene oxide and similar chemicals.

Olson likened the situation to someone 'dumping a huge dump truck full of termites on your house'. He said: 'It's not like any one termite is causing the house to collapse, but this is a totally intentional strategy of having innumerable termites eating away at the foundation of all our protections, and the house is going to collapse.'

The White House and the EPA have been contacted for comment.