Budget Rider Would Defund EPA's PFAS-in-Biosolids Rule

A single sentence tucked into a House appropriations bill would prevent the EPA from spending a single dollar to finalize, implement, or enforce its own risk assessment on PFAS chemicals in biosolids spread on American farmland — a document the agency took years to compile and released just this past January.

The rider appears in H.R. 4754, a 119th Congress budget bill. Its language is blunt: “None of the funds made available by this or any other Act may be used to finalize, implement, administer, or enforce” the EPA’s January 2025 risk assessment on PFAS in sewage sludge applied to agricultural land. No committee hearing. No floor debate. One sentence, inserted in the dark.

“These things often come in the dark of the night and you don’t necessarily know where it comes from,” Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) told ABC7’s I-Team. Pingree, whose state is ground zero for biosolids contamination, attempted an amendment to strip the language. It failed.

What the EPA’s assessment actually found

The EPA’s risk assessment, released in January 2025, documented what scientists have long suspected: the PFAS that concentrate in sewage treatment solids — biosolids — don’t stay put when those solids are spread on crop fields. They migrate into soil, groundwater, and crops. The EPA found risks to human health at exposure levels the agency described as serious even at small concentrations.

PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are synthetic compounds used in nonstick cookware, firefighting foam, food packaging, and industrial processes since the mid-20th century. They earn the “forever chemicals” label because they do not break down in the environment or the human body. The EPA links PFAS exposure to certain cancers, immune suppression, thyroid disruption, and developmental harm in children.

The risk assessment was a first step toward regulation. The rider would make it the last.

The numbers are not subtle

Maryland testing found PFAS in 100 percent of human-waste fertilizer samples the state collected. A 2025 peer-reviewed study found that 80 percent of downstream sites near biosolid application areas showed elevated PFAS levels — with some readings more than 5,000 percent above typical background concentrations.

Despite those numbers, no federal rule currently restricts how much PFAS can be present in biosolids applied to crop fields. The EPA’s risk assessment was the regulatory foundation that could change that. Without it, the agency has no legal basis to act.

Kyla Bennett of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility called the rider exactly what it is: a preemptive kill shot on rulemaking before the public can weigh in. “They’re trying to stop EPA from doing its job,” she told ABC7.

A problem the states can’t contain

Maine moved first. After testing revealed catastrophic PFAS levels on farms that had accepted biosolids for years — contaminated milk, ruined herds, growers with elevated PFAS in their own blood — the state became the first in the country to ban PFAS-containing biosolids from being spread on agricultural land.

Maryland has since put proactive rules in place of its own.

But state-by-state action creates its own problem: biosolids rejected in one state get trucked to the next. Virginia, which has enacted no comparable protections, sits directly adjacent to Maryland and could become a dumping ground for the sludge Maryland no longer allows. Mike Lightfoot, a Virginia waterman and fisheries advocate, has watched contamination move downstream. His concern is not hypothetical.

For a deeper look at how the biosolids pipeline has worked — and the farms it has already destroyed — see our explainer Forever Chemicals on the Farm.

The pattern: defund, not repeal

The rider is not a substantive policy argument. Congress is not debating whether PFAS is dangerous, or whether the risk assessment’s methodology is flawed, or what an appropriate federal standard should look like. The rider does not engage with the science at all. It simply starves the process of money.

That is a recognizable move. It bypasses the formal regulatory process — where the public can comment, where science gets litigated, where affected farmers can testify — and quietly buries the rulemaking before it generates a rule. No vote on the merits. No accountability. No record.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Bayer/Roundup case took a different but parallel path: federal preemption used to shield chemical companies from accountability. The biosolids rider achieves something similar through the appropriations process — not by changing the law, but by defunding the agency’s ability to enforce it.

Who farms are waiting on

The farmland contamination problem is not going away. Farms that accepted biosolids in good faith — following federal guidance, often paid to take the material — are sitting on contaminated ground with no federal remediation framework and, if this rider holds, no federal regulation on the horizon either.

The 119th Congress has not finished its appropriations work. H.R. 4754 still has to move through the Senate. Environmental groups and a small group of House members are pushing to strip the language. Whether that effort succeeds will determine whether the EPA gets to do the science-based rulemaking it started — or whether one anonymous sentence in a budget bill becomes the de facto national policy on PFAS and farms.

For now, there is no federal rule limiting PFAS in the sludge spread on American cropland. There may not be one anytime soon. And the people most exposed to that gap are the growers who never asked for any of this.

Priya Sundaram covers the poisoned-ground beat for Save US Farms. Tips and farm contacts: contact@saveusfarms.com.