PFAS Amid a Change in Federal Administration: What is the Outlook Moving Forward for Water and Wastewater?

Scott A. Grieco, PhD, PE, Vice President, National PFAS Lead, Kleinfelder

On January 20, 2025, immediately following the presidential inauguration, a number of executive orders were signed — including one for a Regulatory Freeze Pending Review. This directly impacted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) proposed rule focused on wastewater discharge limits for the Organic Chemicals, Plastics, and Synthetic Fibers (OCPSF) industrial category, which includes PFAS manufacturers. 

Given this executive order, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) withdrew EPA’s proposed rule from further review and approval. Developed under the Clean Water Act Effluent Limitations Guidelines (ELG), this proposed regulation would have established a federally issued numerical discharge limit for the affected industries. 

What Does This Mean (And Not Mean) Moving Forward? 
That can be a complicated answer.  

In broad terms, regulating those discharges will need to happen at the state level through State or National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit modifications to either the receiving municipality or direct discharge manufacturer. In turn, municipalities can utilize their Industrial Pretreatment Program to enforce manufacturing discharge limits. 

Streamlined? No. More complicated and burdensome? Yes.

Clearing Up Miscommunication 
To add more confusion to the resulting regulatory freeze described above, several news outlets conflated the final National Primary Drinking Water Standards for PFAS (i.e., PFAS Maximum Contaminant Levels — or MCLs) with the withdrawal of the Wastewater PFAS ELG. 

To be clear, the Drinking Water MCLs are finalized in the Federal Register and not subject to the Regulatory Freeze Executive Order. The drinking water compliance has not changed and requires compliance by April 26, 2025.

Polluter-pays Principle
Looking at the withdrawal through the lens of public utilities, it was a missed opportunity by the previous administration to have federal regulations place costs onto industrial discharges, rather than taxpayer-funded Publicly Owned Treatment Works (POTWs). The proposal was sent to OMB in early 2024, and rules are supposed to be reviewed in 90 days. However, the proposal remained unreviewed for nearly 220 days until the executive order was signed.

On the bright side, a new Water Systems PFAS Liability Act of 2025 has bipartisan sponsorship (Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez [D-Wash] and Celeste Maloy [R-Utah]) identical to the previous proposed legislation and would provide statutory liability protections for water utilities under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) for PFAS, ensuring that polluters — not the public — pay for PFAS cleanup. 

Without this legislation, EPA's designation of PFAS as hazardous substances under CERCLA would expose drinking water and wastewater utilities to litigation from the manufacturers of PFAS, which can unjustly include water systems as defendants in litigation to reduce their own clean-up costs.

A Flurry of Activity in the EPA
The EPA issued several items in the months leading up to the January 20th change in administration, including aquatic life criteria, human health ambient water quality criteria (which largely flew under the radar), and of course the biosolids risk assessment, which multiple news outlets provided information on:

• September 2024: The EPA finalized national recommended water quality criteria, including acute and chronic freshwater exposure criteria and acute saltwater benchmarks. These recommended water quality criteria and benchmarks are for the protection of aquatic life and represent the highest concentrations in which fish and other aquatic species can live, grow, and reproduce. They are for the protection of the organism itself and do not consider values related to reducing food-chain biomagnification or protection of human health via direct consumption. As a result, the published values are in parts per million (mg/L) and suggest that aquatic life are not the most sensitive compared to human health values in parts per billion (ng/L). Thus, it is likely that these water quality criteria will not be driving future wastewater or stormwater discharge criteria.

• December 2024: The EPA published draft national recommended human health ambient water quality criteria for three PFAS — PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid), PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonate), and PFBS (perfluorobutane sulfonate) — intended to provide information for states and authorized tribes to consider when developing their own water quality standards. The draft criteria identify ambient concentrations for PFOA, PFOS, or PFBS in surface water, which the EPA believes will protect the general population from adverse health effects due to ingesting water, fish, and shellfish from inland and nearshore water bodies. The values derived for PFOA and PFOS (0.0009 to 0.07 ng/L) are well below current analytical detection methods, whereas values for PFBS are 400 to 500 ng/L, but still lower than the health-based drinking water criteria of 2000 ng/L.
• January 2025: The EPA released its draft biosolids risk assessment, the values of which are not to be considered as guidance values. Also, they represent a very limited site-specific or, in the case of the EPA publication, hypothetical condition of a farmer’s family living off the local food produced on site and/or adjacent surface water. Conversely, the risk assessment did not consider occasionally consuming products from the target property, nor having a diverse selection of food. For example, most Americans consume food from the grocery store, which is sourced from multiple locations. (Read my full assessment of this here.)

Looking Forward
As EPA indicated, the draft biosolids risk assessment lays the foundation for sludge-related regulations. However, with the current administration focused on deregulation, it is not likely that the EPA would be authorized to take the necessary next steps of cost/benefit analysis and feasibility assessment. Furthermore, the draft risk assessment as it stands now does not apply to most Americans, which may limit the occurrence or meaningful opportunity evaluation criteria. With that said, given the growing public concern regarding land application of biosolids containing PFAS, it is likely that the EPA will need to take action. 

The EPA has developed a POTW Influent PFAS Study that will collect nationwide information and data on POTWs and associated PFAS industrial dischargers, with the program presumed to commence sometime this year (2025). As a first step, the EPA will issue a mandatory survey to 400 POTWs, prioritizing systems greater than 10 MGD and with a service population greater than 50,000 people. Based on the survey results, the EPA will select up to 300 POTWs for sampling of industrial users, domestic users, combined POTW influent, and POTW treated effluent.  

Along with completing the POTW study and finalizing both the Human Health Ambient Water Quality Criteria and Biosolids Risk Analysis, the EPA could be in a position to establish PFAS regulations under the Clean Water Act. But given the timeframe needed to finalize and complete these actions, along with the current administration’s focus on deregulation, it could be at least four years. If 2029 brings another party shift with more interest in accelerating PFAS regulations, the foundational framework will already be accomplished. 

What About Now?  
States will likely develop and issue additional PFAS regulations in the absence of federal regulatory action, as seen during the 2017-2021 and current administrations. This trend is well underway, with many states now focused on wastewater and biosolids.  

Several states have also begun, or are considering, regulating PFAS in biosolids:

• In 2022, Maine became the first state to ban the land application of all biosolids outright.
• Last year (2024), Connecticut followed suit, banning the sale and use of PFAS-containing biosolids and wastewater sludge as a soil amendment. 
• Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, and Colorado all have numerical-based strategies to reduce or eliminate biosolids applications based on measured concentration thresholds.  
• In 2024, Texas introduced a bill to establish PFAS limits for sludge at 0.9 ppb, essentially making any detections unallowable and make intentionally or knowingly selling or distributing noncompliant batches a Class A misdemeanor. 
• In January of this year (2025), both Oklahoma and Mississippi introduced a bill to ban land application of sewage sludge generated from municipal, commercial, and industrial wastewater treatment plants.

The landscape for biosolids regulations has crossed the political lines often present in other areas of environmental regulation. Many states with significant agricultural constituencies are increasingly scrutinizing biosolids due to concerns about the potential impacts of PFAS on soil, water, crops, and livestock.

Parting Word
The Drinking Water MCLs are finalized in the Federal Register and not subject to the Regulatory Freeze Executive Order. Compliance by 2029 is required per the rule.

Federal deregulation will be the theme for the next four years, which means that the PFAS regulation framework will likely continue to evolve on a state-by-state basis. Ultimately, this means more effort on everyone’s part to stay on top of the latest information with respect to wastewater and biosolids.  

Risk management and PFAS-focused litigation will continue, the science of PFAS toxicology and environmental transport will continue to mature, and technologies for PFAS mitigation will continue to evolve. So, although there may be some deceleration by the EPA in the short term, the overall focus on managing PFAS will likely not wane much — if at all. 

Dr. Grieco is a Vice President & National PFAS Lead for Kleinfelder. He has over 33 years of experience in the evaluation, design, and optimization of treatment & remediation systems across the public utility, remediation, and industrial sectors.  For the past 10 years, Scott has focused on evaluation and treatment of PFAS.  He has authored numerous publications on PFAS and is a contributing author to the WEF PFAS book. He currently serves as a WRF research Project Advisory Committee (PAC) member, Advisory Council member of NY State Healthy Water Solutions Center of Excellence (NYS COE), and is a member of the AWWA PFAS Technical Work Group.

Sources

• “Water Coalition Against PFAS Extends Support For Bipartisan Introduction of Water Systems PFAS Liability Protection Act.” February 12, 2025.  National Association of Water Companies. Water Coalition Against PFAS Extends Support For Bipartisan Introduction of Water Systems PFAS Liability Protection Act - National Association of Water Companies (NAWC). Accessed Feb 19, 2025.
• “PFAS Sewer Sludge Risk Exists Says EPA…But Will it Matter After Today?” National Law Review. Feb 19, 2025. Vol. XV. No. 50.  Written by J. Gardella, CMBG3 Law (originally posted Jan 20, 2025).  EPA Releases Draft PFAS Risk Assessment for Sewer Sludge. Accessed Feb 19, 2025.
• “OMB Withdraws EPA’s PFAS Effluent Limitation Guidelines and Standards Proposed Rule.” January 24, 2025. Association of State Drinking Water Administrators.  OMB Withdraws EPA’s PFAS Effluent Limitation Guidelines and Standards Proposed Rule - ASDWA. Accessed Feb 19, 2025.
• LinkedIn Post. Chris Moody – Chief, Water Supply & Treatment Programs Fairfax Water. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chrismoodyengineer_epa-withdraws-chemical-sector-pfas-effluent-activity-7287931214475272193-6ul5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&rcm=ACoAAALX1xkB6JmQTZT_cYlbBRy2ulIegy3NwMQ. Accessed Feb 19, 2025.
• “EPA, States Signal Interest in Regulating PF AS in Biosolids”.  Jessica K. Ferrell and Kameron E. Schroeder.  Marten Law Group. https://martenlaw.com/news/epa-states-signal-interest-in-regulating-pfas-in-biosolids. Accessed Feb 19, 2025.