Mark Ruffalo presses Biden to act fast on 'forever chemicals' before Trump takes office

Actor and activist Mark Ruffalo is urging the Biden administration to take decisive regulatory action on "forever chemicals," as the return of President-elect Trump to the White House looms near.

"The EPA has worked their butts off, against all odds, to get a drinking water standard on this particular chemical class," Ruffalo said at a Monday webinar, hosted by the Environmental Working Group.

"Now the Biden administration just has to close the loop and hold the people responsible who have killed people," he added.

Ruffalo was referring to the producers of the thousands of types of synthetic compounds known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

Notorious for their ability to persist in the human body and in the environment, these chemicals are found in certain types of firefighting foam, industrial discharge and a long list of household items. They have been linked to many serious illnesses, including thyroid disease, testicular cancer and kidney cancer.

"We've been to the White House with families who've lost children from these diseases, and they continue to compile in our bodies," Ruffalo said.

"The problem now is they still are protecting these companies from accountability," he added, referring to the federal government.

The Biden administration has already taken several decisive steps in the long-term mission to regulate and clean up the decades of PFAS pollution caused by companies and military institutions across America.

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designated two types of PFAS as hazardous substances under the country's legacy "Superfund" law — making it easier to force polluters to pay for their actions. That decision occurred just days after the EPA issued a separate rule setting limits for several PFAS in drinking water.

And just last week, the agency published a new regulation preventing PFAS from being approved through "Low Volume Exemptions" — abbreviated reviews granted to chemicals that will be created in small quantities.

But Ruffalo and his fellow activists are pressing the Biden administration to take further decisive action aimed at strengthening PFAS-related oversight before Trump takes office.

In particular, they referred to a potential proposed rule about PFAS-containing wastewater discharges — which have been under consideration in the White House's Office of Management and Budget for review since June.

Those possible plans have been in the works since 2021, when the EPA first announced that it would propose a rule setting limits on these releases.

"The Biden administration has finally done the right thing, more than any other administration in the United States in the decades that have passed," Ruffalo said on Monday, referring to the PFAS-related action the EPA has taken over the past four years.

But Ruffalo also pointed out what he described as "the bad news" — the fact that the potential discharge proposal is "getting hung up right now in the Biden administration."

"It's been sitting there for a long time, and it is the taxpayers and the communities downstream who are still repeatedly paying the price for this," Ruffalo said.

Melanie Benesh, a legislative attorney for the Environmental Working Group, offered a similar perspective, noting that "polluters already have the tools needed to stop dumping PFAS into water."

"The longer that we delay addressing industrial discharges and really getting to PFAS at the source, the more illnesses and even deaths that we risk," Benesh said.

Speaking on behalf of an area stricken by such tragedies, Brenda Hampton, from northern Alabama, said that she and her neighbors "have had so many deaths in this area that [it's] unreal."

In Hampton's region, numerous companies near Decatur, Ala., were for decades dumping PFAS-laden discharge into the Tennessee River, which flows downstream toward her community. 

"I'm hoping that this administration can put a law out that will be there permanently, so that the incoming administration can't overturn it," Hampton said. "Drinking water is a right. It is not a privilege; it is a right."

Nonetheless, even if the EPA does officially propose this PFAS-laden discharge rule — which at this point is still in review — it would be practically impossible to finalize before Trump takes office, due to set-in-stone deadlines of the federal regulatory process.

Such rules, which are governed by the Administrative Procedure Act, typically take at least a year to go from the proposal to finalized stages. Following a proposal, most rules require a 30 to 60 day comment period, after which the agency needs to review all of these submissions.

The Hill has reached out to the Office of Management and Budget for comment.

But at the webinar on Monday, Hampton emphasized the need to provide Americans with "clean and safe drinking water," expressing her hope that "this administration can really do something to really help us, because we are dying out here."

Emily Donovan, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear in North Carolina, echoed Hampton's sentiments and noted that her region's PFAS crisis "is massive and contaminates public water systems servicing over half a million residents across three counties."

Donovan credited the current president for finalizing the PFAS drinking water standard, but at the same time, she said she is "begging the Biden administration to allow the EPA to propose a rule to limit PFAS discharges."

"Please do not fail us," she said. "Do it for the children in my region who no longer have their moms or dads."

As PFAS activists around the country grapple with the uncertainty of a future Trump administration, both Hampton and Donovan stressed that they would continue their local- and regional-level fights.

For her part, Hampton said she will be pressing Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) to rescind permits of the polluting companies, while Donovan emphasized a need to keep her area's fight alive in the state and local governments.

"We are leaving the door open for the possibility, maybe of movement with this Trump 2.0," Donovan said. "But if history is any indication, the hopes are not that high."

Ruffalo likewise stressed the importance of focusing on "the regional politicians who will be held accountable for this, and who will have activists and people who have been harmed constantly dogging them."

He also expressed support for getting philanthropists to invest money into this fight, so that these environmental justice communities have ample resources on the ground.

Ruffalo also pointed to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's pick for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, as someone who has done extensive work on water contamination — and called upon him to take this issue seriously.

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr., if you are who you say you are, we are reaching out to you to do what you know better than anybody in that administration,” Ruffalo said.

Asked by The Hill whether he believes Kennedy would have power to make such change — given that he would be in Health and Human Services rather than the EPA — Ruffalo said that "there'll be no other expert in the administration that knows water more than Robert."

"I'm hoping that he uses whatever position he has, expertise, to actually influence the policy of the EPA," the actor-activist continued.

"If this is a populist administration, like we're being told, there's nothing that transcends policy and ideologies and parties more than water," Ruffalo added. "I know that every Republican wants clean water. I know that every working-class person wants clean water."