If you wanted to understand the state of American environmental regulation in mid-July 2026, you could read the Federal Register. Or you could just watch the contradictions pile up.
On June 30, days after President Trump signed an executive order supporting regenerative agriculture and pledging to "reduce overall use" of chemical pesticides, his EPA approved three new herbicides that qualify as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances under the OECD definition. On July 1, the same agency released voluntary, non-binding guidance for reducing PFAS in sewage sludge spread on farmland. On July 3, it published a Unified Agenda confirming plans to create new industrial discharge limits for PFAS manufacturers. On July 9, it proposed rolling back heavy-duty truck emission standards. And on July 15, Chemours settled with more than 2,600 North Carolina residents who had been suing the company over PFAS contamination since 2018.
All of this is real. All of it happened in the same two weeks. If it feels incoherent, that is because it is.
The Fayetteville Settlement
Start with the story that matters most to the people living it. On July 15, court records confirmed that Chemours had reached a settlement with the plaintiffs in a mass tort case stemming from decades of PFAS discharges at the Fayetteville Works facility in Bladen County, North Carolina. DuPont and its spinoff Chemours released GenX and other forever chemicals from the site since the 1980s. The contamination reached surface water, groundwater, and the wells of surrounding communities.
The settlement came just two days before the first six plaintiffs — John and Annie Stevens, Pat and Richard Davis, Allison Pini, and Sandra Branch — were scheduled to go to trial. They had alleged property damage, nuisance, and the loss of the ability to garden, drink, and cook with their own water. They described family members visiting less because of contamination fears. They described the slow erosion of what home is supposed to mean.
Mike Watters, a Gray's Creek resident and co-founder of a local anti-PFAS advocacy group, was at the courthouse when the settlement was announced. He survived a full cardiac arrest in 2023 and a COVID hospitalization with blood clots in 2025. "I've always said I wanted to see it settled before I died," he told the Fayetteville Observer.
Terms are confidential. Other lawsuits — including one from Cumberland County and others from environmental groups — remain pending. But the signal is clear: eight years of litigation, more than 2,600 plaintiffs, and the case never reached a jury. For the affected residents, closure is partial at best. For industry watchers, it is another data point in the mounting cost of PFAS liabilities.
Three New Forever-Chemical Herbicides
Now consider what happened at the other end of the pipeline. On June 30, EPA gave final approval to three herbicides — trifludimoxazin (for wheat, oats, oranges, apples, and almonds), diflufenican (for corn and soybeans), and epyrifenacil. All three qualify as PFAS under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's widely used definition. Farm groups, particularly the National Corn Growers Association, celebrated the approvals. Weed resistance to glyphosate is real, and growers need alternatives.
But the timing was, to put it gently, conspicuous. President Trump signed his regenerative agriculture executive order on June 24. The pesticide approvals came six days later. Nathan Donley of the Center for Biological Diversity called it "the single biggest mass approval of pesticides I've ever seen." Environmental Working Group president Ken Cook called the executive order "a cheap political play" with "no new money, no regulatory direction, no guardrails."
Scientists note these newer PFAS herbicides are not the same as legacy compounds like PFOA or PFOS. They may be less acutely toxic. But "less toxic" is not "safe," and the defining characteristic of PFAS — environmental persistence — applies to all of them. These chemicals do not break down. They accumulate in soil. They migrate into groundwater. The science on their degradation byproducts is incomplete.
And here is the contradiction that should bother everyone, regardless of political affiliation: the same federal government that is spending billions through Superfund and state revolving funds to clean PFAS out of drinking water is simultaneously approving the application of new PFAS compounds to cropland. We are remediating with one hand and contaminating with the other.
Voluntary Guidance, Mandatory Problem
On July 1, EPA released draft guidance for reducing risk from PFOA and PFOS in biosolids — the treated sewage sludge that is widely applied to agricultural land as fertilizer. The guidance is voluntary. It is non-binding. It recommends monitoring, source identification, and industrial pretreatment to reduce PFAS entering wastewater systems. It acknowledges that technologies like reverse osmosis can remove PFAS from biosolids streams. Public comments are open through September 4.
Voluntary guidance is not nothing. It signals that EPA recognizes the problem and is willing to describe potential solutions. But in Maine, where PFAS-contaminated biosolids have already devastated farms, forcing some to shut down entirely, "voluntary" is a word that arrives about a decade too late. As state legislator and organic farmer Bill Pluecker told Civil Eats, the approach "gives the appearance that they're working hand in hand with these folks who are making millions of dollars from poisoning us and poisoning our farms."
Maine has already enacted its own restrictions. Other states are following. The federal guidance, in the absence of federal enforcement, functions more as a permission structure for inaction than as a tool for protection.
The Unified Agenda: A Complicated Signal
Amid the rollbacks and voluntary measures, the EPA's 2026 Unified Agenda — published July 3 — contains some genuinely constructive PFAS rulemakings. The agency plans to propose new Clean Water Act effluent limitations for PFAS manufacturers by the end of this month. It is working on PFAS monitoring requirements for NPDES discharge permits, the first update to those application forms since 1987. And it is developing discharge limits for chromium electroplating facilities, a known PFAS source.
These are industrial controls — aimed at stopping PFAS before they enter waterways, rather than filtering them out after the fact. That is the right approach. Source control is always cheaper, more effective, and more durable than end-of-pipe treatment.
But the same Unified Agenda also confirms EPA's intent to finalize the rescission of drinking water limits for GenX, PFHxS, PFNA, and the Hazard Index mixture by September 2026, and to extend the PFOA/PFOS compliance deadline. The agency is tightening the spigot on one side and loosening it on the other.
What the Contradiction Engine Produces
We are not in the business of scoring political points. The question is not whether this administration or the last one is "right" on PFAS. The question is whether the overall system — the combination of federal rules, state laws, court settlements, voluntary guidance, and market forces — is actually reducing the amount of PFAS in American water, soil, and bodies.
Right now, the answer is: in some places, for some compounds, if you are lucky enough to live in a state that acts independently. That is not a system. That is a lottery.
The Chemours settlement will compensate some residents for some of the damage. The new effluent guidelines, if finalized, will slow some industrial discharges. The biosolids guidance may nudge some wastewater utilities to test more frequently. But three new PFAS pesticides are heading to fields across the country, the drinking water limits for four compounds are being withdrawn, and the federal framework continues to study what it has not yet decided to regulate.
At EPR Foundation, we track this not to alarm, but to clarify. The machinery of environmental protection is running. It is producing rules, guidance, data, and settlements. What it is not yet producing — consistently, nationally — is less contamination. Until it does, the work continues.