A new report is out on the country’s air quality, and its author — the American Lung Association — is ringing the alarm over potential cuts to Environmental Protection Agency programs aimed at enforcing clean air standards. 

There would be no Environmental Protection Agency without the regulations it was tasked with enforcing. In 1970, the Clean Air Act, a sweeping suite of laws aimed at reducing pollution and monitoring the air, led to the creation of the EPA.

Columbia University Economics Professor Matthew Neidell said it has been very effective. “Air quality has been improving. Quite steadily and dramatically for the last 50 or so years,” said Neidell.

The American Lung Association has used EPA data since 2000 for its annual “State of the Air” reports. ALA’s Director of Clean Air Policy, Katherine Pruitt said in the last 10 years that progress has slowed.

“We're starting to see that the impacts of a changing climate are starting to reverse some of the progress that we've made,” said Pruitt. “So we have more wildfires. We have more extreme heat and drought. And those all contribute to increases in both particle pollution and ozone pollution.”

This year’s report reflects the impact of the 2023 deadly Texas heat wave, drought and the Canadian wildfires that blanketed the U.S. in smog. Those events pushed pollution to levels not seen in central and eastern states in decades. 

“This year, more than 156 million people, that's nearly half the US population, are living in places with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution,” said Pruitt.

When particle and ozone pollution increase to dangerous levels, there is a direct health impact.

“These are particles that are very fine particles. They go deep into our lungs. Where it becomes very easy to translocate, to go from the airway into the bloodstream. For instance, with the wildfires in LA, there were a lot of toxic chemicals that were burning metals, plasticizers. And so that makes the particles which are already toxic, even more toxic,” said Ana Navas-Acien, Environmental Health Sciences Chair at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Pollution can cause immediate respiratory issues for some, like asthma attacks, wheezing coughing, premature death, to more serious issues over time like lung cancer, heart attacks and stroke. Less dramatically, pollution can have a direct economic impact too.

“I've done some work looking at those impacts across a couple of different sectors of the economy,” said Neidell. “They're not going to the doctor, they are not going into the hospital, they go into their job, they work the same number of hours they normally work. But just at the end of the day, they've just produced less than if it were on a cleaner day.”

Neidell said his and other similar research found as much as a six percent drop in worker productivity on high pollution days. 

The EPA's new administrator, Lee Zeldin, has vowed to cut the agency's budget by 65%

The EPA’s new administrator, former congressman Lee Zeldin, has pledged to cut total spending at the agency by 65 percent. Leading to questions about whether the agency may soon stop enforcing clean air standards on the energy industry and monitoring the quality of the nation’s air.

“That is our primary call to action in “State of The Air" this year,” said Pruitt. "We know that the people and the programs at EPA are saving lives every day, and our environment. We urge everyone to do what they can to make sure that Congress knows that EPA's people and programs need to be saved in order to protect our health.”

An EPA spokesperson tells us the agency remains “committed to enhancing our ability to deliver clean air, water, and land for all Americans.” 

There is little detail to what extent pollution control programs will be part of Administrator Zeldin’s planned cuts. A spokesperson offered this response: “EPA is considering the guidance from OPM and the President and is evaluating our workforce optimization plans pursuant to recent guidance.”

Cuts to the EPA’s Environmental Justice Department have been announced.  There is concern that with fewer staff on hand focused on monitoring the sources of pollution particularly in areas where marginalized communities live, it may in turn lead to greater health disparities. 

"There is a direct connection between air pollution and income level. We also know that  people of color are more likely to live in communities that are disproportionately exposed to air pollution," said Pruitt,  “and of course there's some overlap. Both of those groups also tend to have higher rates of chronic conditions like asthma, like diabetes, and people with asthma and people with diabetes are also more vulnerable to the health impacts of air pollution." 

There is a silver lining in the face of potential EPA cuts. Neidell points out that cleaner energy and transmission standards are already in place and would simply be hard to dismantle.

“We've got to a point where we've shifted away from some of the dirtiest sources of pollution. And it wouldn't be cost effective to switch back to them. Right?,” said Neidell. “So if you're running a power plant and now suddenly the regulations on coal have eased, you're not now suddenly going to say, well, I'm going to convert my natural gas plant. Or I’m gonna convert my solar farm into a coal plant instead. You’ve already made that transition. And that transition was costly.”

Neideel said EPA air monitoring is important for understanding how industrial decisions affect air quality. But he adds, less federal monitoring, may not lead to less information, because there is plenty of crowd-sourced data now coming in from personal air devices.

“Even if these residential monitors aren't being placed as strategically as government monitors, they're still going to give information that's probably relevant for most people,” said Neidell.

But not every household has the means to buy air monitors and HEPA air filters.

Environmental Scientist Ana Navas-Acien wants to see oversight and regulation enforcement remain a government priority. Cost cuts should be done with a scalpel approach, rather than a machete. 

“If we do it in such a quick, dramatic way, then all the talent, all the knowledge that has been acquired over decades is going to be lost overnight. And then that loss will take a long time to be recovered,” said Navas-Acien.

It was a bipartisan effort to create pollution control legislation. It will take a bipartisan work to continue to build upon that legacy.