Overview:
- The EPA's 2024 drinking water rule regulates only six of over 14,000 PFAS compounds — about 0.0429 — leaving thousands of harmful chemicals unaddressed.
- A proposed EPA rollback would reduce enforceable limits to just two PFAS compounds, covering only 0.0143% of the chemical class.
- PFAS reaches people through multiple pathways including drinking water, food, soil, and consumer products, making narrow compound-by-compound regulation ineffective, says groundwater expert Matthew Tunnell.
Sept. 21-25 is Michigan PFAS Awareness Week. Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large group of human-made chemicals that were first used in the 1940s for industry and manufacturing, are linked to harmful human health effects, and have been found in Michigan’s water, soil, air, fish, wildlife, and people.
PFAS is already in nearly all American bodies, yet federal drinking water law directly regulates only a microscopic fraction of the PFAS chemical class.
That fact should stop the public conversation from becoming a narrow debate about whether the latest federal rollback is good or bad. The rollback is bad. But the deeper problem is that the federal government never came close to regulating PFAS at the scale of the threat.
PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are a class of more than 14,000 synthetic chemicals used in industry and consumer products for more than 70 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s 2024 national drinking water rule established enforceable limits for only six PFAS compounds, according to the CDC and NIOSH. Six out of 14,000 is about 0.0429%. That means the country’s first enforceable federal PFAS drinking water rule directly regulated less than five-hundredths of 1% of the PFAS class.
The EPA proposes to make that gap even larger. On May 18, 2026, the EPA announced a proposed rule to rescind drinking water regulations for PFHxS, PFNA, HFPO-DA, and the Hazard Index mixture involving PFAS and PFBS.
If that proposal becomes final, enforceable federal drinking-water limits would remain for only PFOA and PFOS. Two out of 14,000 is about 0.0143%.
That is the point Americans need to understand: the issue is not only that federal PFAS protections may be rolled back. The issue is that even before the rollback, federal drinking water regulation addressed only a sliver of the PFAS problem. The public is being asked to feel protected by a rule that covers six compounds out of a chemical class numbering in the thousands.
That would be unacceptable even if PFAS were harmless. The EPA recognizes that exposure to certain PFAS is associated with reproductive effects, developmental effects or delays in children, increased risk of some cancers, reduced immune response, hormone interference, increased cholesterol, and liver effects. Many PFAS break down very slowly and can build up in people, animals, and the environment over time, according to the EPA.
This is why the compound-by-compound approach fails. PFAS does not stay in one place, and it does not stay neatly inside the small group of chemicals that federal law chooses to name. PFAS can reach people through drinking water, private wells, contaminated food, fish, wild game, soil, dust, food packaging, consumer products, biosolids, landfills, wastewater pathways, groundwater, and surface water.
Children show why the gap is especially serious. The EPA recognizes that children may be more sensitive to PFAS because they are still developing and may receive higher exposure per body weight than adults. Babies born to exposed mothers can be exposed before birth, during breastfeeding, or through formula mixed with PFAS-contaminated water, according to the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
PFAS policy is not just chemistry. It is public health, pregnancy, infancy, childhood, and the basic question of whether the law will act before the injury becomes obvious.
The rollback should be opposed, but restoring the 2024 rule is not enough. A rule that regulates 0.0429% of the PFAS class is not a complete answer to a class-wide contamination problem. A rollback that leaves only 0.0143% directly regulated makes the failure worse, but it does not create the failure. It exposes it.
The better policy is to regulate PFAS as a chemical class, stop ongoing releases, require broader testing, control landfill and leachate pathways, and stop pretending that two or six named PFAS can protect communities from thousands of related compounds.
Americans do not need a weaker PFAS rule. They need a more honest PFAS strategy. The fight is bigger than the rollback. The fight is whether the law will finally regulate PFAS at the scale of the problem.
Planet Detroit’s Voices column includes opinion pieces from our community of partners and readers. These pieces express the voices of the authors and not necessarily those of the publication.
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