The One-Sentence Version

There are five ways to make a rule stop mattering, running from withdrawing the agency’s authority to write it down to cutting the staff who enforce it, and all five have happened since 2025, with measurable effects in drinking water, food-safety tracing, coal ash cleanup, workplace enforcement, and fraud prosecutions.

What You Need to Know First

What a regulation actually is

Congress passes laws in general terms. A law might say drinking water must be safe, or workplaces must not expose people to unreasonable risk. It rarely says how many parts per trillion of a specific chemical is too many, because Congress does not have the technical capacity to set thousands of numbers like that and keep them updated.

So Congress delegates. It creates an agency, gives it authority, and the agency writes the specific rules. Those rules are regulations. They go through a public process: the agency proposes a rule, publishes it, takes comments from anyone who wants to weigh in including the affected industry, and then finalizes it. That process usually takes years.

Why deregulation is not automatically bad

This is the part worth getting right before anything else, because a lot of writing on this subject skips it.

Regulations impose real costs. Someone has to comply, someone has to document compliance, and both cost money that could have gone to wages or expansion. Some rules genuinely outlive their purpose. Some were written for an industry that no longer works the way it did. Some impose costs out of all proportion to the benefit, and cost-benefit analysis is a legitimate tool, used by administrations of both parties.

There is also a real democratic argument. Agency staff are not elected. When an agency writes a rule that carries the force of law, unelected officials are making policy, and people across the political spectrum have raised that objection for decades.

Every administration since Carter has removed regulations. The question this explainer asks is not whether removing rules is legitimate. It is what has been removed since 2025, through what mechanism, and what has happened since.

The five mechanisms

This is the distinction that makes the rest of the subject legible, and it is the one most coverage collapses. Arranged from the top of the system downward, there are five ways to make a rule stop mattering.

One: remove the authority. The agency announces it never had the power to write the rule at all. Nothing about the underlying problem changes. The legal foundation does.

Two: repeal the rule. The formal route. The agency proposes to rescind, takes comments, finalizes. It is public, it is on the record, and it can be challenged in court.

Three: keep the rule, move the deadline. The standard stays on the books exactly as written. The date it takes effect keeps receding, sometimes several times in a single year.

Four: keep the rule, stop enforcing it. Inspections do not happen, referrals are not prosecuted, penalties are not assessed, money Congress appropriated is not distributed. Nothing is published, because nothing formally changed.

Five: cut the agency. The rule stands and the enforcers are told to enforce it, but there are half as many of them. No policy is announced. Capacity just falls.

Only the second produces a document that shows up in a count of “regulations repealed.” The other four are harder to see and, in several cases below, have had larger measurable effects.

What Actually Happened

The largest one, and the one hardest to picture

In February 2026 the EPA did something with no close precedent. It did not repeal a rule. It withdrew the finding that gave it the power to write the rules in the first place.

The background is short. In 2007 the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and that the agency had to decide whether they endanger public health. In December 2009 the EPA answered that six greenhouse gases “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” That determination is the endangerment finding, and it became the basis for much of the federal government’s climate regulation, including rules on power plants, vehicles and oil and gas methane.[14][28]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said every federal greenhouse gas standard written since 2009 rested on the endangerment finding. It is the basis for much of federal climate regulation, not all of it.

On February 12, 2026, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin rescinded it, along with every federal greenhouse gas standard for vehicles and engines from model year 2012 forward. The agency put the savings at more than $1.3 trillion, about $2,400 per vehicle, and called it “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”[15]

The argument for it deserves a fair hearing, because it is a legal argument and not only a political one. The EPA’s position is that the section of the Clean Air Act it had been using, Section 202(a), covers “air pollution” in the sense Congress meant in 1970: smog and soot, the local and regional kind you can see hanging over a city. Greenhouse gases are global and diffuse. In the agency’s words, that section “does not provide EPA statutory authority to prescribe motor vehicle emission standards for the purpose of addressing global climate change concerns.” The EPA added that American vehicle rules cannot measurably change global temperatures on their own, which in its view makes them costly and futile.[14][16]

There is a democratic version of the argument too. Congress has never passed a law instructing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. The 2009 finding came from an agency interpreting a statute written in 1970, and plenty of people think a question this large belongs to elected legislators rather than to appointed staff.

Zeldin also made a smaller, more concrete pitch that got less coverage and probably landed harder with drivers. The rescission ended the regulatory credit for automatic start-stop, the feature that shuts your engine off at red lights. “Not only do many people find start-stop annoying,” he said, “but it kills the battery of your car without any significant benefit to the environment.”[15]

The counter-argument is that the Supreme Court already considered a version of the “not really air pollution” reading and rejected it, holding in 2007 that greenhouse gases are unambiguously air pollutants under the Act. Carrie Jenks and Sara Dewey of Harvard Law School’s environmental policy program add two points: the statute requires the EPA to make this call on scientific judgment without weighing cost, which the agency did not do here, and Congress has had seventeen years to strip the EPA of this authority and has declined to.[16]

One procedural detail belongs in the record without embellishment. The EPA did not publish a technical support document with the rescission. The 2009 finding came with one.[14]

Two sets of challenges are now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. On February 18, 2026, a coalition including the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club filed suit. On March 20, two dozen states along with more than a dozen cities and counties filed their own. Both are pending.[17]

One clarification, because coverage of this action has often blurred it: the rescission does not end air pollution regulation generally. Ozone, nitrogen oxides and the other conventional pollutants are governed by different provisions of the Clean Air Act and are unaffected.[17]

Drinking water

In April 2024 the EPA finalized the first national drinking water limits for PFAS, the “forever chemicals” that do not break down in the environment or the body. The standards had been in development for more than a decade.[1]

Those standards were rolled back. PFAS compounds are present in the drinking water of roughly 100 million Americans, and exposure is linked to kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disease, and other conditions.[1]

That is mechanism two, the formal route, and it is the kind of action that is straightforward to point at.

Lead is the other half of the drinking water story, and it runs on mechanism four. The 2024 Lead and Copper Rule Improvements requires water systems to replace every lead service line within ten years, and it is still on the books. Congress appropriated $15 billion for the work through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The administration sought delays in the litigation over the rule, and as of November 2025 the FY25 replacement funding allocations still had not been published.[18]

How many lead lines remain is genuinely disputed, and the range deserves to be given in full. The EPA’s initial 2024 estimate was 9.2 million, revised down to roughly 4 million after water systems inventoried their own networks. The NRDC puts it at 9.7 to 12.8 million once unverified lines are counted. What is not disputed is the health science. There is no safe level of lead exposure, and the damage it does to a developing brain does not heal.[18]

Coal ash, and the receding deadline

Coal ash is what remains after coal is burned for electricity. It contains arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium and chromium, and a great deal of it sits in unlined ponds and landfills where it can reach groundwater. A 2024 rule set deadlines for evaluating older sites, monitoring the groundwater around them, and cleaning them up.

Since then those deadlines have moved repeatedly, without the rule being repealed.

In July 2025 the EPA issued a direct final rule pushing the groundwater monitoring deadline to August 2029. It withdrew that rule in September after adverse comments and continued through the ordinary proposal route instead. In November 2025 it proposed giving eleven coal plants three additional years to keep using unlined ponds larger than 40 acres, past the dates those plants were scheduled to retire. In February 2026 it finalized a rule moving groundwater monitoring at legacy sites from May 2028 to February 2031, and cleanup to February 2032, a delay of 33 months covering roughly 110 generating units and 189 disposal sites. The agency said the new dates reflect “the Agency’s assessment of the time required to complete the groundwater monitoring requirements and to provide time for unforeseen and facility-specific delay.”[19]

In April 2026 it proposed going further: weakening the 2024 standards themselves, allowing monitoring wells to sit 150 meters or more from a dump’s edge, and removing cleanup deadlines for more than 100 legacy sites. Zeldin framed that proposal as part of restoring American energy dominance.[19]

Lisa Evans of Earthjustice, which opposes the changes, made the practical objection: “The longer industry delays, the more toxic waste enters our water, and the more difficult cleanup becomes.”[19]

None of that sequence would appear in a tally of regulations repealed. The 2024 rule is still there.

The people who do the measuring

The FDA and CDC staffing numbers appear below, in the food safety section. The EPA’s are their own story.

An Inside Climate News analysis of federal workforce data found the agency down to 12,849 employees by early 2026, a level not seen since the Reagan administration, after losing more than 4,000 people in the first year of the second term. That is a 24 percent reduction, more than double the rate of loss across the federal workforce as a whole.[20]

The composition of the loss matters as much as its size. Almost 2,000 staff left the rolls at year-end, in a wave of voluntary and early retirements. Their median length of service was 30.3 years. For the staff who remain, it is 10.8.[20]

That gap is the part that does not reverse on a schedule. A rule can be rewritten in a year. An inspector with thirty years of judgment about which facilities to look at, and what a borderline reading actually means, takes thirty years.

Food safety

Here the mechanism was staffing, and the effect shows up in a single number.

In 2024 the FDA investigated 26 foodborne outbreaks and identified the source in 20 of them, about 77 percent. In 2025 it closed 11 investigations and identified the source in four, about 36 percent.[2]

Finding the source is the step that makes a recall useful. If investigators know it was a specific lot from a specific facility, that product comes off shelves and the outbreak stops. If they never find it, contaminated food stays out there while people keep getting sick, and the recall, when it comes, is broader and later than it needed to be.

What changed: in March 2025, HHS announced the removal of 3,500 FDA staff, about 20 percent of the agency, including more than 170 people from the Office of Inspections and Investigations. The FDA lost 3,859 employees over 2025 and 473 more in 2026. The CDC lost about a quarter of its staff. FoodNet, the network that tracks foodborne illness, cut the number of microbes and parasites it monitors from eight to two. Inspections of foreign food facilities fell to historic lows.[2]

One honest caveat about that headline figure: the 2025 number rests on 11 closed investigations, which is a small sample, and one unusual year could move it. The staffing cuts, the surveillance reduction and the drop in foreign inspections are documented separately and do not depend on it.[2]

Then one of the dropped pathogens arrived

Cyclospora was one of the six microbes FoodNet stopped tracking routinely. In July 2026, a cyclosporiasis outbreak began spreading. By mid-month it had reached at least 17 states, and by late July researchers put it near 11,000 cases with roughly 98 hospitalizations. Reported state counts ranged from nine to more than 40 depending on the outlet, which is itself a measure of how little anyone could see. DOGE had eliminated 8 of the 11 positions at the CDC’s cyclospora laboratory, leaving three people. Dan Jernigan, a former CDC center director, put it plainly: “there were fewer people to respond to the cyclospora outbreak when it was first detected.”[10]

The CDC declared the outbreak over on September 11, 2026. The final count reported at its close was 12,883 people sickened in 21 states, 570 hospitalized and two deaths, the largest cyclospora outbreak on record in the United States. The CDC linked it to processed iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico, and the FDA was still investigating how the lettuce became contaminated.[22]

The causal claim has to be made carefully, because surveillance does not prevent outbreaks. It detects and measures them. What is documented is that a pathogen dropped from routine monitoring produced the largest outbreak of its kind on record, and that the agency could not track it in real time. Whether tracking it would have contained it is not something the record shows.

Who the reprieve went to

The outbreak also produced the clearest example in this article of the question in its title.

Federal investigators traced infections to restaurants including Taco Bell, which sources lettuce from Taylor Farms. The company gave $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. in 2025. On July 16, 2026, Taylor Farms executives met with White House and FDA officials. On July 17, the company issued a voluntary recall of central-Mexico iceberg lettuce after an FDA test came back positive. On July 19, Taylor Farms announced that the FDA had told it the test was a “false positive,” and said the agency apologized.[11]

Several things complicate any simple reading, and they belong here. False positives are real and do occur in food testing. The administration denied any collusion, calling the reporting “FAKE NEWS.” And Taylor Farms later removed its claim that the FDA had apologized as scrutiny grew. NPR reported that the FDA remained focused on Taylor Farms lettuce as the likely source despite the retracted test.[11]

No document has been published showing that the meeting caused the retraction. What is on the record is the sequence: a major donor’s product was implicated, its executives met with the agency investigating it, and three days later the finding against it was withdrawn while the agency’s own investigators kept pointing at the same product.

Fraud enforcement

Two federal data series moved in opposite directions over the same period.

Federal prosecutors now pursue 24 percent of white-collar criminal referrals, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. That is the lowest rate since TRAC began tracking in 1986. Three of every four fraud and financial-crime referrals are closed without prosecution. Prosecutions fell from 10,269 in fiscal 1994 to a projected 3,862 in fiscal 2025.[3]

Meanwhile the Federal Trade Commission reported that consumers lost a record $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025, up from $12.5 billion in 2024. Reported losses are up roughly 430 percent since 2020. The FTC received 3 million fraud reports. People aged 50 and older reported $4.3 billion in losses.[4]

It is tempting to connect those two directly, and the connection may well be real. But the evidence does not establish it yet. White-collar prosecution rates have been declining across administrations for three decades, and fraud reporting is affected by awareness campaigns and by how easy it is to file a report. What is documented is narrower and still striking: federal fraud enforcement reached its lowest recorded rate in the same period that reported consumer fraud losses reached their highest.

Who owns a company

In 2021 Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act as part of a defense spending package. It required most corporations and LLCs to report who actually owns them, meaning anyone holding 25 percent or more or exercising substantial control. The purpose was to make anonymous shell companies harder to use for moving money.[5]

In August 2026 the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network permanently ended that requirement. It also announced it will delete the ownership records Americans had already filed.[5]

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department is “eliminating a burdensome reporting requirement for millions of law-abiding business owners without compromising our national security.” Senator Elizabeth Warren called it a “gift to cartels, criminals and U.S. adversaries that exploit shell companies to move millions through our financial system.”[5]

Both of those are worth reading as stated. The reporting requirement did fall on millions of small businesses that have nothing to hide, and complying with it cost them time and money. That is a real burden and not an imaginary one.

The part that is different in kind is the deletion. A reporting requirement can be reinstated by a later Congress or administration. Records that have been destroyed cannot be recovered, and the ownership history they documented goes with them.

Data centers

Three EPA actions in mid-2026, at different stages, together removed most federal environmental oversight of the data center buildout.

Proposed: a rule making it voluntary, at the discretion of state and some local officials, for data centers to publicly disclose their air pollution. Announced: the EPA will not set any national environmental standard for data centers, leaving water use, cooling design and air quality to states. Announced: power plants that serve only data centers, and do not connect to the public grid, are exempt from the pollution limits meant to prevent acid rain.[6]

The strongest objection here is not “no disclosure.” It is about who ends up making the call. State and local governments competed to attract these facilities with tax incentives and hold business agreements with their operators. Giving those same governments discretion over whether the facilities disclose their pollution puts the decision with parties that have a financial interest in the answer.[6]

Refrigerants, and a rule that says out loud what it may cost

In May 2026 the EPA finalized a rule weakening the phasedown of hydrofluorocarbons, the potent greenhouse gases used as refrigerants, under the AIM Act that Congress passed with bipartisan support in 2020. The cold-storage warehouse deadline moved six years, from 2026 to 2032. The semiconductor deadline moved to 2030, and a deadline for installing certain legacy residential and light-commercial air conditioning systems was removed. EPA projected about $976 million in engineering savings, mostly for supermarkets, with a further $1.5 billion proposed.[12]

This one is useful because the government stated the trade-off itself. The final rule acknowledges the change “may result in increased demand for HFCs… and higher HFC prices for downstream consumers.” Supermarkets save on engineering costs; the people buying refrigerant may pay more. That is a distributional choice made in the open, and readers can judge it on its own terms rather than through anyone’s characterization.[12]

Roundup, and a case that split the coalition

On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 for Monsanto, owned by Bayer, holding that the federal pesticide law preempts state-law claims that the company failed to warn consumers that Roundup could cause cancer. Other kinds of claims, such as design-defect and negligent-testing claims, can still proceed. The Trump White House had urged the Court to side with the company, and Trump had signed a 2026 executive order promoting domestic glyphosate production.[13][29]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said the ruling shields Monsanto from Roundup cancer suits. It bars state failure-to-warn claims; other claims can still proceed.

What makes this worth including is that the objection did not come from the president’s opponents. It came from the Make America Healthy Again movement that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought into the coalition, which has campaigned against glyphosate for years. Vani Hari said she was “literally sick.” Alex Clark asked “What happened to America First?” about protecting what she called a foreign chemical company. Deregulation is often described as a left-right dispute. This is a case where the sharpest criticism came from inside the president’s own base, over whose interests the decision served.[13]

Workplaces

OSHA enforcement was cut and the heat stress rule, which would have set the first federal standard for working in extreme heat, was killed. Worker injury reporting requirements were rolled back.[7]

The Mine Safety and Health Administration’s silica rule, finalized in 2024 after more than 50 years of regulatory delay and the strongest federal tool for limiting coal miners’ exposure to the dust that causes black lung, was delayed indefinitely.[8]

Wage and hour enforcement cases declined 97 percent.[7]

And if someone sues anyway

All five mechanisms assume the federal government is the only enforcer that matters. It never has been.

Most of the major environmental statutes, going back to the 1970s, contain a citizen-suit provision. If the government will not enforce the law, ordinary people and the organizations they belong to can go to court and enforce it themselves. Congress wrote that backstop in deliberately, with bipartisan support, on the expectation that some future administration might choose not to act.

In April 2026 the NAACP used it. Represented by Earthjustice and the Southern Environmental Law Center, it sued Elon Musk’s xAI in federal court in northern Mississippi, alleging the company was running dozens of gas turbines near Memphis and Southaven without the permits the Clean Air Act requires.[21]

That June the Justice Department intervened. It did not take a position on whether the turbines were permitted. It argued that the executive branch holds a “right of dismissal” letting it shut down a citizen suit against a polluter even when the government has no intention of bringing the case itself, grounding the claim in Trump’s executive orders declaring a national energy emergency and prioritizing American leadership in AI. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. stated the principle directly: “Ultimate responsibility for enforcing federal law belongs to the Executive Branch, not private interest groups.”[21]

Environmental lawyers describe the position as the first of its kind. Tom Mariani, who ran environmental enforcement at the Justice Department, characterized it as the government intervening in a case “for the purpose of not” prosecuting it.[21]

The case is pending before Chief Judge Debra Brown. What it decides reaches well past one company’s turbines. Citizen suits are how the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act have been enforced against non-compliant facilities for fifty years, and a ruling for the department’s position would let any administration, of either party, switch that enforcement off.

Common Claims and What the Evidence Shows

“Regulations were strangling the economy and cutting them frees up growth.”

There is a serious version of this argument. Compliance costs are real, they fall hardest on smaller firms that cannot spread them across a large operation, and some rules do impose costs out of proportion to their benefit. Economists across the spectrum accept that regulatory burden is a genuine variable.

What the argument does not tell you is which rules were cut. The case for removing an outdated paperwork requirement is not the case for removing drinking water limits, and treating them as the same category obscures more than it explains. The specific actions above were not selected by an independent review that found them unnecessary. Several were finalized after a decade or more of study, and several have identifiable beneficiaries who lobbied for their removal.

“Repealing the endangerment finding saves Americans $1.3 trillion.”

That is the EPA’s own figure, and reading it accurately means reading it as what it is: a projection of compliance costs avoided over the lifetime of standards that no longer exist. It is not money returned to anyone, and it is not a net figure. Projections of that kind are contested in both directions, and always have been. The people who wrote the 2009 finding produced benefit projections using the same style of modeling, which skeptics disputed on the same grounds.

The per-vehicle number, about $2,400, is the one a reader can actually check against their own life, and for someone buying a car it is real money. Whether the spending it represents would have bought something worth having is the actual disagreement here. The dollar figure does not settle it, in either direction.[15]

“These are just paused, not gone. A future administration can restore them.”

Mostly true, and worth saying. Rules can be rewritten, and several of these actions are already being challenged in court, with some blocked. The childhood immunization schedule change was stayed by a federal court in March 2026.[9]

Two things do not come back on their own. Deleted records are gone; there is no version of reinstating the Corporate Transparency Act that recovers the ownership filings that were destroyed. And institutional capacity takes years to rebuild, because experienced inspectors and investigators who leave do not queue up to return.

“Fraud is up because enforcement collapsed.”

The two facts are documented. The causal link between them is not established, for the reasons in the fraud section above. Stated as two series that hit their recorded extremes in the same period, the claim is solid. Stated as cause and effect, it goes further than the evidence.

“Nobody has actually been hurt yet.”

Some harms are measurable now: the outbreak source-tracing rate, the fraud losses, the enforcement figures. Some are the kind that take years to surface, which is the nature of exposure-based harm. Black lung takes decades to develop. PFAS-linked cancers do too.

That cuts both ways honestly. It means the full effect of these changes is not yet visible, and it also means anyone claiming to know the final toll is guessing.

Where Things Stand Now

  • The endangerment finding: rescinded on February 12, 2026, along with federal greenhouse gas standards for vehicles from model year 2012 forward. Two consolidated challenges are pending before the D.C. Circuit, one from public health and environmental groups and one from two dozen states. Conventional air pollutants such as ozone are unaffected.[14][15][17]

  • PFAS drinking water standards: rolled back. Roughly 100 million Americans have PFAS in their water.[1]

  • Lead pipes: the replacement rule stands and the $15 billion is appropriated, but the administration sought litigation delays and FY25 allocations were still unpublished as of November 2025.[18]

  • Coal ash: groundwater monitoring at legacy sites is pushed from May 2028 to February 2031 and cleanup to February 2032, across roughly 189 disposal sites. A further rollback of the 2024 standards was proposed in April 2026.[19]

  • EPA staffing: 12,849 employees, a 40-year low, down about 24 percent in the second term’s first year. The year-end retirement wave had a median 30.3 years of service against 10.8 for the staff who remain.[20]

  • Citizen suits: the Justice Department has asked a federal court to recognize a “right of dismissal” over citizen enforcement suits it does not intend to prosecute. The case is pending.[21]

  • Food safety: the FDA identified the source in 36 percent of outbreak investigations closed in 2025, down from 77 percent in 2024. FoodNet tracks two pathogens, down from eight. One of the six it dropped, cyclospora, produced an outbreak in July 2026 that the agency could not track in real time. When the CDC declared it over on September 11, it was the largest on record: 12,883 sickened, 570 hospitalized and two deaths.[2][10][22]

  • Power plants: on September 14, 2026, the EPA finalized a repeal of most of the 2024 carbon standards for coal and gas power plants and proposed repealing the rest. The agency’s legal case is that 90 percent carbon capture “has not been adequately demonstrated” and that its costs are not reasonable, and it estimates savings of up to $310 billion. When the 2024 rule was announced, the EPA projected it would prevent 1,200 premature deaths in 2035 alone; the administration’s own 2025 estimate put a full repeal at 123 million more metric tons of carbon dioxide that year. The Natural Resources Defense Council said it will challenge the repeal in court.[23]

  • The Taylor Farms sequence: a $1 million donor to a pro-Trump super PAC was implicated in that outbreak, met with White House and FDA officials, and saw the FDA’s positive test withdrawn as a “false positive” three days later, while FDA investigators continued to treat its lettuce as the likely source. The administration denies collusion.[11]

  • Refrigerants: the HFC phasedown is delayed up to six years, in a rule whose own text says it may mean “higher HFC prices for downstream consumers.”[12]

  • Endangered species: on September 14, 2026, a rule rescinding the Endangered Species Act’s definition of “harm” took effect. Since the 1970s that definition had included “significant habitat modification or degradation which actually kills or injures fish or wildlife,” and the Supreme Court upheld it in 1995. The Interior Department says “Actions that directly injure or kill listed wildlife will continue to be prohibited.” Twenty states and D.C. sued on September 9, calling the change “a reversal of staggering proportions.”[24]

  • Broadband: the Commerce Department’s grant terms for the $42 billion broadband program now require states that accept the money to stop enforcing net neutrality and rate rules against funded internet providers. California, with an award of about $1.42 billion, faces an end-of-September deadline to accept; advocates say that would sideline its 2018 net neutrality law for up to 14 years.[25]

  • Roundup: the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that federal law preempts state failure-to-warn claims against Monsanto (other claims can proceed) after the White House backed the company, drawing objections from the MAHA wing of the president’s own coalition.[13][29] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said the Court shielded Monsanto, which overstated the ruling’s reach.

  • Fraud enforcement: 24 percent of white-collar referrals prosecuted, the lowest since 1986. Reported consumer fraud losses hit a record $15.9 billion in 2025.[3][4]

  • Shell companies: the ownership registry is repealed and filed records are being deleted.[5]

  • Data centers: the disclosure rule is proposed and its comment period closed in August 2026; the national-standard decision and the acid rain exemption are announced.[6]

  • Workplace: the heat rule is dead, the silica rule is delayed indefinitely, and wage and hour enforcement cases are down 97 percent.[7][8]

  • Courts: several of these actions are being challenged, and some have been blocked or stayed.[9]

Two more actions in September 2026, both taken without a public comment period.

  • A memo narrowing what counts as harming an endangered species (September 14, 2026). The director of the Fish and Wildlife Service signed an internal memorandum telling staff that the Endangered Species Act’s ban on “take” applies only when an animal is deliberately targeted. Its own examples are the clearest statement of what changes: “Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them,” and “A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it, because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale.” The Interior Department confirmed the memo is authentic and says the prohibition still covers hunting, shooting, wounding and killing protected wildlife. Because this is internal guidance rather than a rule, there was no comment period. Dan Ashe, who ran the agency under President Obama, said it “creates a huge loophole.”[26]

  • Revoking the Chesapeake Bay cleanup order (September 16, 2026). Trump signed an executive order whose second section reads, “Executive Order 13508 is hereby revoked,” ending the 2009 framework that coordinated Chesapeake Bay restoration across federal agencies and six states. The new order objects to local stormwater fees, which it calls “rain taxes,” and directs the EPA to “take measures to encourage the repeal or rescission” of them. On its face it revokes a coordination framework and redirects agency priorities rather than cutting appropriated money. Maryland’s entire congressional delegation, including its only Republican, called the revocation “shortsighted and harmful to our communities.”[27]

The question of whether any individual rule should exist is a policy judgment, and reasonable people land in different places on most of them. The question this explainer tries to answer is narrower and factual: what was removed, by which of the five mechanisms, and what the measurable effects have been so far.

Sources

1. EPA: Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) under the Safe Drinking Water Act and NPR: The EPA delays limits on PFAS in drinking water and The Guardian: Trump administration EPA and PFAS in water (May 18, 2026) and Environmental Working Group: PFAS contamination map

2. ProPublica: Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low After Trump Cuts and San Francisco Chronicle: Food safety experts fear next outbreak could be deadlier as Trump cuts weaken oversight and FoodNavigator: FDA and USDA staff cuts under Trump raise food safety risks (February 16, 2026)

3. TRAC (Syracuse University): Federal Prosecution of White-Collar Crimes Receiving Less and Less Attention and Stanford Law School: U.S. Justice Department White-Collar Criminal Prosecutions Fall To Their Lowest Level On Record and TRAC: White Collar Crime Prosecutions for March 2026

4. Federal Trade Commission: FTC Data Show People Reported Losing $3.5 Billion to Imposter Scams in 2025 and The Spokesman-Review: Americans lost a record $15.9 billion to scams in 2025, FTC says and AARP: FBI Report — Internet Crime Losses Hit $20.9 Billion

5. U.S. Department of the Treasury: FinCEN Permanently Ends Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirements for Millions of Small Business Owners and Accounting Today: FinCEN ends beneficial ownership reporting and PYMNTS: FinCEN Killed the Beneficial Ownership Database but Banks Still Need the Data

6. Sierra Club: EPA Proposes Air Pollution Exemption “Deal” for Data Centers (July 2026) and The Register: EPA to drop requirement for public notice of polluting datacenters (August 25, 2026) and National Ground Water Association: EPA announces it won’t set nationwide standards for data centers

7. Good Jobs First: Worker Protections in Freefall — The Collapse of Federal Labor Enforcement Under the Second Trump Administration and NPR: Trump cuts NIOSH, the agency studying toxic chemicals and workplace hazards and Bureau of Labor Statistics: Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries

8. Kentucky Lantern: Federal regulators indefinitely delay rule to protect coal miners from black lung (April 9, 2026) and KFF Health News: Black lung, coal miners, silica dust and the federal rule rollback and Mother Jones: Black lung resurgence in Appalachia as silica regulations are delayed (May 2026)

9. Congressional Research Service: Changes to CDC Vaccine Recommendations in 2025 and 2026 (IN12684)

10. Newsweek: CDC FoodNet monitoring cut as cyclospora parasite spreads and New Republic: DOGE gutted the office that responds to this parasite and Democracy Now: Cyclosporiasis outbreak (July 29, 2026)

11. NPR: FDA focused on Taylor Farms lettuce as cyclospora source despite retracted test (July 20, 2026) and Daily Beast: Taylor Farms visited the White House before getting an outbreak reprieve and Newsweek: Trump administration denies colluding with Taylor Farms over the cyclospora outbreak

12. Chemical & Engineering News: EPA HFC phasedown delay could raise food costs (June 2026) and PBS NewsHour: Trump and Zeldin announce a looser rule on refrigerant greenhouse gases and Holland & Knight: EPA finalizes changes to technology transitions (May 2026)

13. New Republic: MAHA reactions to the Supreme Court’s Monsanto weed killer ruling (June 25, 2026)

14. Congressional Research Service R49024: Clean Air Act — EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Repeal (non-partisan analysis prepared for Congress; the 2009 finding, the 2026 rescission, EPA’s stated reasoning, and the litigation and Congressional Review Act options)

15. EPA press release: President Trump and Administrator Zeldin Deliver Single Largest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History (February 12, 2026) and Fox News: Obama-era greenhouse gas rules gone as EPA’s Zeldin signs “single largest deregulatory action” in history

16. Salata Institute, Harvard University: The legal reasoning behind the endangerment rescission (EPA’s three-part legal argument, with responses from Carrie Jenks and Sara Dewey of Harvard Law School)

17. Environmental Defense Fund: EPA Sued Over Illegal Repeal of Climate Protections (February 18, 2026) and World Resources Institute: EPA’s Endangerment Finding Repeal, Explained

18. EPA: Lead and Copper Rule Improvements — Final Rule (October 2024) and NRDC: EPA Now Says There Aren’t 9 Million Lead Pipes — Be Skeptical and Unleaded Kids: EPA Defends LCRI but Misses SRF Deadlines (November 2025)

19. Harvard Law School Environmental & Energy Law Program: Coal Ash Rule regulatory tracker (dated record of each 2025 and 2026 action) and Utility Dive: EPA extends coal ash landfill monitoring, cleanup deadlines and NRDC: EPA proposes to weaken safeguards against coal ash pollution in groundwater

20. Inside Climate News: EPA Hits 40-Year Lows in Staffing Under Trump (March 6, 2026)

21. E&E News / POLITICO: Trump DOJ wants to sideline citizens in pollution fights (June 17, 2026) and Earthjustice: Why Trump Is Going After Your Right to Take Polluters to Court (June 16, 2026) and The Conversation: Trump administration moves to block public from enforcing environmental protection laws (August 3, 2026)

22. CDC: Cyclospora Outbreak Linked to Iceberg Lettuce (final update, September 11, 2026) and Medical Daily: Iceberg Lettuce Cyclospora Outbreak Ends as the Largest on US Record with 12,883 Illnesses and Two Deaths

23. AP: EPA eliminates rule that limits planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants (September 14, 2026) and CNN: Trump administration removes climate pollution limits on power plants (September 14, 2026) and The Hill: Trump guts climate rules for coal and gas power plants and EPA: Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants

24. Federal Register: Rescinding the Definition of “Harm” Under the Endangered Species Act, 91 FR 43300 (July 14, 2026) and CNN: Trump administration’s endangered species habitat rule repeal takes effect (September 16, 2026)

25. Ars Technica: California may gut state net neutrality law to comply with Trump admin demand (September 16, 2026) and Benton Institute: BEAD General Terms and Conditions: Changes from April 2024 to November 2025

26. AP: Killing endangered wildlife is legal if they aren’t the target, new Trump rule says (September 17, 2026) and AFP via France 24: Trump admin makes major cut to endangered species protections (September 17, 2026)

27. The White House: Providing Meaningful Water Quality Improvements Through Collaboration and Oversight of Federal Support (September 16, 2026) and Maryland Matters: Maryland officials grapple with “bizarre” Trump executive order on Chesapeake Bay (September 17, 2026)

28. NPR: Trump’s EPA will end the basis for federal climate actions (February 11, 2026)

29. SCOTUSblog: Court rules for Roundup maker in dispute over cancer warnings on pesticide labels (June 25, 2026) and CBS News: Supreme Court sides with Monsanto in case over cancer risks from weedkiller Roundup (June 25, 2026)