Congress Must Stop This Assault on Clean Air

I am writing to urge Congress to do everything within its power to support the Environmental Protection Agency’s public-health mission and stop the ongoing dismantling of clean-air protections. This is not a symbolic concern. 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. Earth Day was never meant to be a branding exercise. It helped build the EPA and the modern clean-air protections that millions of Americans depend on. If Congress truly wishes to honor that legacy, it must defend the institutions that made it real. Instead, this administration has been hollowing out the very agency created to protect the air our children breathe and the water our communities drink. 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. Dirty air is linked to asthma, respiratory illness, missed school, emergency room visits, and long-term harm to health. Communities of color are also disproportionately burdened. The Lung Association found that people of color are significantly more likely than white Americans to live in communities that fail all three major pollution measures. At exactly the wrong moment, the Trump administration has initiated at least 70 actions to roll back environmental and climate protections. These moves include weakening pollution standards, loosening rules on major pollution sources, disbanding advisory structures, and undercutting the methods used to account for the lives saved by cleaner air. Congress cannot pretend this is normal agency management. It is sabotage of a public-health mission. And this is not abstract. In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, 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. One of the major coke plants contributing to that burden is among 13 coke plants the Trump administration exempted from key emissions regulations. That is what rollback looks like in real life: more illness, more risk, and more medical costs forced onto communities. Congress cannot control every decision made inside the executive branch, but it is not powerless. 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. You can make clear that the EPA exists to protect the public, not to accommodate polluters. Pollution is not a matter of individual consumer choices or private coping strategies. It is a matter of whether government is willing to enforce strong laws against known harms. Clean air should not depend on a child’s ZIP code, race, or family income. Congress must use every oversight and legislative tool available to support the EPA’s real mission, stop these reckless rollbacks, and protect the health of the people you serve.