What The Hell America!

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just hid data that mapped out the locations of thousands of dangerous chemical facilities, after chemical industry lobbyists demanded that the Trump administration take down the public records.

The webpage was quietly shut down late Friday, according to records viewed by the Lever — stripping away what advocates say was critical information on the secretive chemical plants at highest risk of disaster across the United States.

The data was made public last year through the EPA’s Risk Management Program, which oversees the country’s highest-risk chemical facilities. These chemical plants deal with dangerous, volatile chemicals — like those used to make pesticides, fertilizers, and plastics — and are responsible for dozens of chemical disasters every year.

A spokesperson for Coming Clean, an environmental health group focusing on the chemical industry, told the Lever that the organization was “surprised” to see the webpage taken down and that its staff had accessed the data as recently as Friday morning.

“We know that industry had suggested it, so it seems like [regulators] are following industry’s lead,” the spokesperson added.

In a statement to the Lever, EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said that the agency “is re-evaluating the [public data] tool” and its chemical accident prevention regulations “to boost safety and competitiveness of American businesses.”

The communities near these chemical facilities suffer high rates of pollution and harmful chemical exposure. They frequently face evacuation orders from chemical fires, like the one that engulfed an Atlanta suburb in a cloud of toxic chlorine gas last fall. They also tend to be poorer and more under-resourced, making it even more difficult for residents to hold powerful industry actors in their neighborhood accountable — especially if residents don’t know where their facilities are.

There are nearly 12,000 Risk Management Program facilities across the country. For decades, it was difficult to find public data on where the high-risk facilities were located, not to mention information on the plants’ safety records and the chemicals they were processing.

But under mounting pressure from environmentalists, in March 2024, former president Joe Biden’s EPA launched a public website that allowed users to search for chemical facilities in their neighborhood. The tool also provided information about the chemicals each facility used and the operations’ safety records.

“This is information that the public deserves to know — what the facilities are that are near them, what types of chemicals they deal with,” Adam Kron, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy group, told the Lever in February.

It was “really vital information, but also very basic information,” he said.

But the chemical lobby fiercely opposed making the data public — and has been fighting for the EPA to take it down.

After President Donald Trump’s victory in November, chemical companies donated generously to his inauguration fund. Oil giant ExxonMobil, which is a member of the American Chemistry Council, the industry’s main lobbying arm, donated $1 million. The multinational chemical company DuPont donated $250,000.

Then, on January 30, the American Chemistry Council and a host of other chemical interests wrote a letter to the Trump administration’s new EPA chief, Lee Zeldin, requesting that he take down the website.

“We ask that EPA . . . immediately shut down and remove the Risk Management Public Data Tool from EPA’s website,” the groups wrote, arguing that it presented “security risks” for chemical facilities.

The American Chemistry Council did respond to questions from the Lever on Monday.

The lobbyists also asked for a laundry list of other rollbacks to the EPA’s chemical facility regulations, including a new rulemaking to “correct” environmental reforms implemented by the Biden administration, which imposed new disclosure requirements on chemical facilities and directed them to consider implementing safer chemical processing technologies.

Under Trump, the chemical lobby has new allies in the EPA. The American Chemistry Council enthusiastically supported Zeldin’s nomination. And one of the council’s former lobbyists is now running the EPA branch that approves new chemicals.

The agency now appears to be granting the chemical lobby’s requests. In March, the EPA said it was launching a new rulemaking initiative targeting the Risk Management Program, just as chemical lobbyists had asked.

Now, the agency has conceded to its other demand: strip away public information about dangerous chemical facilities.

As of Friday, the EPA’s website now says that members of the public can go to a federal reading room or submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the agency to obtain the chemical facility data — both arduous processes that, advocates say, will make the information far more inaccessible.

The shutdown of the chemical facility tracking website comes amid a widespread purge of public environmental data by Trump’s EPA and other environmental authorities. Other data tools that were recently removed include an EPA tracker of pollution in underserved communities and a Department of Energy tool that mapped energy costs for low-income households. The EPA has even been scrubbing mentions of “climate change” from its website.

Last week, several environmental groups sued the Trump administration, arguing that the sudden information purges, carried out without public notice, were illegal.