1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

Please do everything within your power to support the EPA’s public-health mission and stop the ongoing dismantling of clean-air protections by the Trump administration. Children are especially vulnerable to air pollution because their lungs are still developing, they breathe more air relative to their body size, and they spend more time active outdoors. The American Lung Association’s 2026 “State of the Air” report found that 33.5 million children in the United States — 46% of all children — live in areas that received a failing grade for at least one major measure of air pollution, and more than 7 million live in communities that failed all three. The administration has initiated at least 70 actions to roll back environmental and climate protections—loosening rules on major pollution sources, disbanding advisory structures, and undercutting the methods used to account for the lives saved by cleaner air. This constitutes sabotage of a public-health mission. And this is not abstract. One of the coke plants (Allegheny County, Pennsylvania) contributing to that burden is among 13 plants the Trump administration exempted from key emissions regulations. There researchers have linked industrial air pollution to increased deaths, chronic heart disease, and adverse birth outcomes. The county ranked in the top 1% nationwide for cancer risk from stationary industrial air pollutants in a 2018 EPA report, and received an F for particle pollution from the American Lung Association in 2025. You can hold hearings, demand records and testimony, protect funding for monitoring and enforcement, defend scientific staff and advisory capacity, and oppose any effort to weaken the Clean Air Act from within. Clean air should not depend on a child’s ZIP code, race, or family income. You, as members of Congress must use every oversight and legislative tool available to support the EPA’s real mission and protect the health of the people you serve.