EPA claims ‘major win’ on drinking water safety, but regulations may be years away

(CNN) — How do microplastics and pharmaceutical medications affect the safety of the nation’s tap water? It’s a question the US Environmental Protection Agency says it will try to answer for the first time.

Officials are calling it a “major win” for the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement championed by US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yet it could take years for any regulations to take effect – if they’re proposed at all.

“With this effort, the Trump EPA is advancing gold standard science to inform policy and ensure the best possible outcomes so parents can feel confident filling their children’s glasses at the kitchen sink,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said at a news briefing Thursday.

Kennedy also announced a $144 million effort to better measure, understand and remove microplastics that may be in human blood, tissues and organs.

A lengthy process

The agency has added microplastics and pharmaceutical medications to the drinking water Contaminant Candidate List, or CCL, a list of potential contaminants in public water systems that are not currently regulated. As part of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA must update the CCL with any emerging public health threats every five years.

The new CCL draft includes four contaminant groups: microplastics, pharmaceuticals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and byproducts created by disinfectants. Another 75 chemicals and nine microbes found in drinking water will also be investigated.

Placing a substance such as pharmaceuticals on the CCL, however, doesn’t mean the government or public water systems have to take immediate action. The EPA has five years to decide whether to regulate at least five contaminants from the list. If it does move forward, that’s another long regulatory process that, on occasion, has taken more than 20 years.

The proposed action appears to be a step in the right direction, said pediatrician and biology professor Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good and the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College, in an email.

“But given recent rollbacks of health-protective standards limiting levels of toxic pollutants in air and water, let’s see if it actually translates into regulatory action,” said Landrigan, lead author of a 2023 report that found plastics are associated with harms to human health at every stage of the plastic life cycle.

In its 2026 budget request, the Trump administration proposed cutting funding for state and local public water systems by 90%, “reducing federal support from $2.8 billion to just $305 million,” said Jessica Hernandez, legislative director for the Environmental Working Group, a health and environmental advocacy group.

Congress rejected the proposal. Still, Thursday’s announcement feels like a “classic bait and switch,” Hernandez said.

“The bottom line is that the EPA must review a list of contaminants every five years, but it does not actually have to regulate them,” she said. “The administration has tried to cut established, effective programs only to announce new initiatives that lack funding or enforcement teeth.”

Each of the four areas that will be added to the CCL has its own set of challenges, experts say.

Microplastics

Microplastics are fragments that can range from less than 0.2 inch (5 millimeters) — about the size of a pencil eraser — to 1/25,000th of an inch (1 micrometer). Anything smaller than 1 micrometer is a nanoplastic that must be measured in billionths of a meter.

A 2024 study found microplastics in 83% of tap water tested around the world. The concentration in tap water, however, is dramatically lower than in single-use bottled water.

One liter of water — the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters bought at the store — contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles from seven types of plastics, of which 90% were identified as nanoplastics, according to another 2024 study.

Researchers estimate that people who drink only bottled sources may be ingesting an additional 90,000 microplastics annually, compared with 4,000 microplastics for those who consume only tap water.

Scientists have detected micro- and nanoplastics in human testes and the penis, human blood, lung and liver tissues, urine and feces, breast milk and the placenta. A 2025 study found nearly a spoon’s worth of microplastics in human brain tissue.

However, only one study has linked microplastics with direct harm to human health: People with microplastics or nanoplastics in the arteries of their necks were twice as likely to have a heart attack or a stroke or die from any cause over the next three years than people who had none, a 2024 study found.

‘Systematic Targeting of Microplastics’

The fight against microplastics is getting a major monetary boost outside the inclusion in the new CLL list.

A new plan Kennedy unveiled – called STOMP, or Systematic Targeting of Microplastics – will involve building tools that can see and quantify micro- and nanoplastics. At this time, experts say, only a handful of laboratories in the United States have a way to detect the infinitesimally tiny particles.

“We can’t treat what we cannot measure. We cannot regulate what we don’t understand,” Kennedy said Thursday. “Together, we’re going to define the risk, build the tools and act on the evidence regarding microplastics.”

STOMP will also standardize methods of mapping how the plastic shards move through the body, ultimately developing ways of removing microplastics from human tissues that contain them, Kennedy said.

“We need the knowledge now to protect human health, because all of those actions from a public environmental health policy standpoint will take a long, long time to turn that corner,” Dr. Matthew Campen, a regents’ professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, said at the briefing.

“It could be 30, 40 years before we start to realize change that’s relevant.”

The American Chemistry Council, which represents the chemical manufacturing industry, said it supports science-driven monitoring of microplastics in drinking water and research to better understand potential health impacts.

“People want clear answers on microplastics, and any drinking water monitoring program must address several existing hurdles, including developing clear definitions, ensuring adequate lab capacity, and standardizing sampling and testing methods to be used consistently across the country,” Kimberly Wise White, the group’s vice president of regulatory and scientific affairs, said in an email.

In addition, the council “continues to call on Congress to pass the Plastic Health Research Act, which would establish a coordinated federal agency approach to microplastics research and support sound science-based policymaking,” she said.

Pharmaceuticals in drinking water

The presence in drinking water of antidepressants, hormones, antibiotics and other medications from human waste and improper disposal is also being prioritized as a group for the first time, Zeldin said.

The EPA has previously flagged the potential for significant reproductive effects in fish and other aquatic life at very low levels of exposure. In addition, antibiotics in water add to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, a major global health threat.

Although pharmaceuticals have been found in rivers around the world, it’s not known whether the current low levels of exposure can harm human health. Worry persists, however, about the impact of long-term exposure and whether combinations of various drugs in the water might increase risk.

In addition to adding phamaceuticals to the CCL, the EPA is releasing human health benchmarks for nearly 400 medications, said Colleen Flaherty, division director at the EPA’s Health & Ecological Criteria, Office of Water.

“The benchmarks were developed for any [US Food and Drug Administration] approved prescription and over-the-counter drugs that are known to or have the potential to occur in drinking water sources like reservoirs and rivers or treated drinking water,” Flaherty said.

PFAS flip-flops

Manufactured since the 1940s to make products nonstick, stain-resistant and water-repellent, PFAS chemicals have been linked to cancer, obesity, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, decreased fertility, liver damage, hormone disruption and damage to the immune system, according to the EPA. Several of these chemicals can cause harm at levels of a billionth of a gram.

There have been calls for the EPA to regulate PFAS in drinking water for decades, but the first federal limits were set by the Biden administration in April 2024. Water utilities were required to filter out two of the most studied chemicals — perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, or PFOS — as well as PFNA, PFHxS and HFPO-DA, also known as GenX.

However, the Trump administration rolled back some of those protections in May 2025. Limits on levels of PFHxS, PFNA, GenX and PFBS in drinking water were scrapped. Restrictions on PFOA and PFOS were kept, but the compliance deadline for companies to comply was moved from 2029 to 2031.

Byproducts of disinfectants

Called DBPs for short, disinfectant byproducts occur in water at public treatment plants when disinfectants such as chlorine or ozone react with decomposing plant material, human waste, pesticides and other matter already in the water.

The most common byproducts from the use of chlorine as a disinfectant are trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids, which have been linked to cancer and other health problems. There are possible but not yet proven links to developmental and reproductive issues, the EPA website says.

“Chlorinating tap water is critical to protect the public from disease-causing microorganisms,” the website says. “Drinking water is chlorinated to kill bacteria and viruses that cause serious illnesses and, in some cases, death. Chlorination of drinking water has benefited public health enormously by lowering the rates of infectious diseases (for example, typhoid, hepatitis and cholera).”

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