A landmark Environmental Protection Agency rule enacted at the end of last year sought to address the lead crisis—which threatens the health of millions of Americans—by tightening limitations on toxic lead and copper in drinking water. But that might not be the final word.
U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) introduced a resolution last month to block it and forever bar the EPA from writing a substantially similar rule again. To do so, he’s relying on the Congressional Review Act, a mechanism that allows Congress to vote to permanently reverse a rule finalized late in a previous session. On Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) introduced the same resolution, alongside a dozen other CRA resolutions.
EPA’s action, finalized last October, lowered the allowance for lead in drinking water and beefed up requirements for lead service line replacement.
Medical and public health experts have found that there is no safe amount of lead in the human body. Lead services lines have been recognized as a main cause of lead poisoning since the late 1800s, but today, an estimated 9 million lead services lines still deliver drinking water to more than 22 million Americans.
The House resolutions have not yet advanced beyond introduction, but advocates are taking them seriously because of the Congressional Review Act’s far-reaching effects.
“We are very worried that that could be interpreted that the EPA could never mandate all lead service line replacement again,” said Mary Grant, Public Water for All director at Food & Water Watch.
Exposing more generations of Americans to lead would have disastrous implications for public health, she and others said.
“You’re going from a much stronger [drinking water] regulation to a weaker one and as a result, lots and lots of children and adults and fetuses are all going to be threatened with really irreversible health harms,” said Julian Gonzalez, senior legislative counsel and lead lobbyist on water policy for Earthjustice.
In a statement about his CRA resolutions, Clyde said: “This past November, the American people overwhelmingly rejected the Biden-Harris Administration’s destructive policies. As President Trump works rapidly to get our country back on track, Congress must do the same by swiftly overturning costly, misguided Biden-era regulations.”
Palmer’s office did not respond to requests for comment about his resolution.
Lead in drinking water can lead to cardiovascular problems, including high blood pressure and hypertension, decreased kidney function and damage to reproductive health. Lead is particularly dangerous to children and infants, for whom even low levels of lead exposure have been linked to nervous system damage, learning disabilities, cognitive impairment, shortened attention span and impaired hearing. Severe lead poisoning can cause fatigue, vomiting, coma, convulsions and even death in children and babies, and lead exposure during pregnancy can hinder fetus development and lead to premature birth.
Experts fear that climate change is exacerbating the dangers: Lead levels in children peak during hotter periods, in part because warmer temperatures more effectively release lead from pipes into water. As climate change brings more frequent heat waves to many parts of the U.S., risk of lead exposure may grow.
Regulatory efforts to eliminate lead from everyday sources like gasoline and paint have contributed to significantly decreased levels of lead in children in recent decades, but exposure is still an acute problem: A 2021 study found that about half of the U.S. population was exposed to high levels of lead contamination during their childhood.
Yanna Lambrinidou, a medical ethnographer and affiliate faculty at Virginia Tech, remembers living in Washington, D.C., with her child—then an infant—during the peak of the D.C. lead crisis in the early 2000s.
“I think it’s almost impossible to be living in a community with a lead-in-drinking-water crisis and to be 100 percent protecting your child from exposure,” said Lambrinidou, who has long worked to reduce the toxic metal in drinking water.
Given the severe implications for human health, government efforts to prioritize safe drinking water are broadly popular across party lines. A National Resources Defense Council poll from 2022 found that 91 percent of Americans support requiring lead pipe replacement within 10 years, a key anchor of the Biden-era rule.
“It’s an issue that, I think, resonates with everyone,” said Grant, with Food & Water Watch. “Everyone wants safe, lead-free water.”
Because service lines are the main source of lead in drinking water, “the best and most effective way to go about reducing lead in water is through those lead service lines,” Grant added.
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Donate NowIf one of the new resolutions becomes law, it would reverse the 2024 Lead and Copper Rule Improvements (LCRI)—the latest iteration of the first lead and copper drinking water regulations, enacted in 1991—and reinstate the revisions enacted at the end of Trump’s first term. Many environmental advocates said the Trump-era rule weakened safe water protections. NRDC, Earthjustice and attorneys general from nine states and Washington, D.C., sued in response, claiming it would violate the anti-backsliding provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The LCRI, finalized in October 2024, was heralded by environmentalists as a step forward, although it came with limitations: The law does not require water utilities to pay in full for lead service line replacements, which could lead to unaffordable costs for low-income homeowners or neglect from landlords. The rule also made exceptions for certain cities like Chicago, which has the most lead service lines of any city in the country, allowing it about 20 years to replace all its lead service lines, a timeline that disproportionately impacts the city’s Black and brown residents.
“It’s not a perfect regulation by any means, and it would not put an end to routine lead-in-drinking-water exposures, but it would very significantly reduce those exposures,” Lambrinidou said.
Still, the LCRI faced some pushback from water utilities that expressed concern over the costs associated with faster replacement of service lines.
The American Water Works Association, a lobbying group for water utilities, filed a legal petition in federal court challenging the rule in December, arguing that although it supports the goal of replacing all lead service lines, the implementation of the LCRI is “not feasible.” AWWA cited logistical and financial concerns, and said that the cost of replacing lead service lines nationwide could pose affordability challenges to low-income households.
AWWA declined to comment on Palmer’s resolution.
“No community should have to choose between safe water and affordable water.”
— Mary Grant, Food & Water Watch
States and water utilities looking to comply with the new regulations can seek support from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which opened up more than $26 billion to assist with lead line replacements, including $15 billion specifically allocated for replacing the service lines that connect directly to homes and other buildings. But the Trump administration has attempted to freeze these funds, part of a wide-ranging pause on spending that experts have called unconstitutional and federal judges have issued orders to halt.
“For now, federal courts have prohibited federal agencies from pausing or terminating payment of federal financial assistance funds unless authorized by the applicable authorizing statutes, regulations and terms,” Ailene Voisin with the California State Water Resources Control Board—a recipient of lead service line replacement funding—wrote in an emailed statement. “We are coordinating with our federal counterparts and remain confident in our ability to continue serving Californians as we work to carry out the board’s mission.”
The NRDC and other proponents of expedited lead service line replacement have argued that affordability and swift action don’t have to be mutually exclusive, advocating for the use of federal and state funds and utility rate structures that spread costs across all customers, rather than saddling low-income communities with more than they can afford.
“No community should have to choose between safe water and affordable water,” Grant said. “Congress has the responsibility and they have the means to provide funding to replace all of these lead service lines.”
Reversing the EPA rule could also pose challenges for utilities: In a newsletter sent to its members on Jan. 20, another utility group, the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, said the reversal would reinstate the compliance date of Oct. 16, 2024, from the first Trump administration’s lead requirements. That would leave “water systems across the country immediately out of compliance with a rule that was put on hold four years ago,” wrote the group, which has not taken a position on Palmer’s resolution.
“Based on our conversations with multiple congressional staff, there are no indications at this time that leadership has any plans to bring it to the floor for a vote,” the group’s chief policy officer, Dan Hartnett, wrote in an email. “But I also understand that no final decisions have been made, so we plan to continue monitoring the bill closely.”
Advocates have pressed several Republican lawmakers who’ve previously supported lead reduction initiatives, including Rep. Thomas Kean (R-N.J.), Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pa.) and Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), to publicly confirm that they will not vote for Palmer’s resolution.
Lawler’s office said the congressman does not support the resolution. Mackenzie’s office declined to comment and Kean’s did not respond.
Forever barring a similar rule would have lasting consequences, said Virginia Tech’s Lambrinidou, who also served on the EPA’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council working group on a lead-rule update in 2015.
“What we’ll be looking at is essentially state-mandated lead-in-water exposures that occur routinely, are both low-level and acute, and are exceedingly difficult to detect [and] by extension, difficult to address and hold anyone accountable for,” Lambrinidou said.
This story was updated Feb. 13, 2025, to include information about an additional resolution in Congress.
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Keerti Gopal covers intersections between climate change, public health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. Previously, she covered climate activism and movement repression. She is a National Geographic Explorer and has received fellowships from Fulbright, the Solutions Journalism Network, The Lever, and the National Press Foundation.
