Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 15, 2026
CONTACT: Charissee Ridgeway, Senior Communications Advisor
(859) 771-5568 | epn-press@environmentalprotectionnetwork.org
EPN Responds to EPA Claims on Children’s Health
After Nearly Two Years Weakening Safeguards That Protect Kids, EPA Issues “100 Actions” List Obscuring Its Record
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In response to EPA’s release today touting “100 actions” to protect children’s health, the Environmental Protection Network (EPN) said the list includes worthwhile work, but ignores the agency’s much bigger decisions to weaken protections, leaving children more exposed to harmful pollution.
“EPA’s list of 100 actions for Children’s Health Month is a remarkable exercise in counting activities while ignoring the bigger picture: EPA’s most consequential decisions are leaving children less protected, not more,” said Dr. Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician and former EPA assistant administrator. “A hundred activities have little meaning if EPA is weakening the safeguards that protect kids.”
Newsletters, webinars, technical assistance and other resources can have value. But parents cannot educate or shop their way out of pollution. They can’t filter a smokestack, monitor an industrial discharge or regulate a pesticide. That is why strong EPA safeguards exist.
“EPA should continue the work that genuinely reduces lead exposure, cleans up contamination and helps communities,” Goldman said. “But Americans should judge EPA’s commitment to children’s health by the pollution it prevents and the protections it enforces, not by how many activities it can put on a list.”
Just last week, EPN released Children’s Health at Risk as the EPA Retreats on Harmful Pollution, a report documenting EPA actions weakening safeguards against harmful air pollution, PFAS and pesticides while declining to apply its own children’s-health policy in a major PFAS decision.
EPA is promoting information about children’s unique vulnerability while declining to apply its own children’s-health policy in a major PFAS decision.
- EPA’s March 2026 policy calls for considering early-life exposures and lifelong health impacts, yet when EPA proposed removing several PFAS drinking-water protections, it said health risks, including disproportionate risks to children, were outside the scope of the action and that the policy did not apply.
EPA is touting asthma education while fighting and repealing safeguards that reduce harmful air pollution.
- EPA touts its efforts to protect children’s health even while taking specific actions that increase children’s exposure to mercury and other air toxics. EPA repealed stronger mercury and air-toxics protections for coal plants despite its own 2024 finding that tighter limits were achievable with available pollution controls. States challenging the repeal argue that EPA ignored evidence about the effectiveness and cost of those controls, discounted health benefits, and reversed course without the justification the Clean Air Act requires.
- EPA is also changing how it counts health benefits. In recent air-pollution analyses, the agency has continued putting a dollar value on industry compliance costs while declining to provide primary dollar estimates for some of the health benefits of reducing soot and smog, calling those estimates too uncertain. That leaves industry’s compliance costs in EPA’s primary dollar accounting while the often immense health benefits to families are not monetized.
- EPA is also asking the Supreme Court to overturn the stronger 2024 soot standard and has repealed most of the 2024 power-plant carbon standards, even though EPA’s own analyses projected substantial health benefits from those protections, including thousands of avoided premature deaths and tens of thousands of avoided school absences.
EPA is touting PFAS outreach while weakening enforceable PFAS protections.
- EPA has proposed eliminating several PFAS drinking-water limits and allowing some water systems up to two additional years to comply with others. It has also rescinded guidance and delayed planned regulations aimed at reducing industrial PFAS pollution at its source.
- EPA also counts its PFAS sewage-sludge guidance among its “100 actions,” even though this guidance is a retreat from the regulatory path EPA laid out in January 2025. Instead of finalizing its health risk assessment and moving toward enforceable limits if unacceptable risks were confirmed, EPA has issued voluntary guidance that itself recommends avoiding sewage sludge where young children may be exposed.
EPA is celebrating children’s-health expertise while its independent Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC) remains inactive.
- Administrator Lee Zeldin said this week that he expects to approve new CHPAC members by October 26 and suggested that EPA’s roughly 10,000 employees serve as a kind of children’s-health advisory council. But EPA needs independent advice from outside children’s-health experts who do not report to agency leadership. That is precisely why CHPAC exists.
- That distinction is particularly important after EPA employees who publicly challenged agency policy faced disciplinary action last year. Moreover, the EPA significantly reduced its research workforce, including eliminating the Office of Research and Development as a standalone research office.
EPN’s Safer, Not Sicker reports throughout 2026 have documented the same underlying problem from different angles: families cannot prevent many toxic exposures on their own, and information cannot substitute for pollution prevention. Mothers, Babies, and Children showed why careful choices by parents cannot eliminate risks from pollution in air, water, food and homes. Terrible Toxics documented the need to stop harmful exposures before children become sick or communities become contaminated. And The Hidden Health Costs of AI Data Centers documented at least 30 federal actions that, taken together, increase pollution-related health risks as data-center electricity demand grows.
Read EPN’s latest report, Children’s Health at Risk as the EPA Retreats on Harmful Pollution.
###
ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION NETWORK
The Environmental Protection Network is a nonpartisan organization comprising more than 800 former EPA scientists, toxicologists, chemists, biologists, engineers, and policy analysts— many of whom spent decades as career experts inside the agency. They assessed cancer and developmental risks, studied links between pollution and fertility and chronic disease, investigated contaminated communities, and brought enforcement actions to hold corporate polluters accountable. EPN was founded in 2017 to serve as an independent voice promoting science-based policies that protect families’ health.