Are There Forever Chemicals in Your Drinking Water?

Approximately 32,000 people drink the tap water in Moses Lake, Washington, an agricultural town in the Columbia River basin approximately 175 miles to the east of Seattle. If you were to sip that water over the course of a lifetime, you’d consume 7,457 times the recommended limit of perfluorooctane sulfonate and perfluorooctanoic acid — two chemicals that fall under the umbrella of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals.”

Moses Lake’s contaminated groundwater dates back to when the town was the site of the Larson Air Force Base, which was also used for years as a dump site for toxic waste. But its story is not unique: the city’s water utility is one of 563 in the Environmental Working Group’s newly updated tap water database to report unsafe levels of PFOA and PFOS. That’s not even to mention all the other possible PFAS contaminants that can be found in drinking water or the utilities that haven’t tested for PFAS at all.

Though the Environmental Protection Agency is required by a 1996 amendment to the Safe Water Drinking Act to report drinking water data, it’s never released a comprehensive database, and information can be hard to come by. EWG, a nonprofit that focuses on contaminants and toxins, synthesized reports from 50,000 individual water systems across the country, looking at more than 300 contaminants beyond PFAS. It also offers fairly conservative exposure recommendations for each, often based on California’s public health goals. “EWG is filling this need for people to have a national clearinghouse where they can easily access their drinking water data,” Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist with EWG, told me.

The United States Geological Survey estimates that as much as 20% of Americans drink, bathe, and brush their teeth with PFAS-contaminated water. But unless you know where to look — or bother to — you could be drinking the chemicals entirely unawares. “The first step is to find out about what’s in your drinking water,” Stoiber added. “Depending on where you are, the quality of your drinking water can vary.”

The obvious safeguard here is federal regulations. But despite PFAS being linked to a whole host of poor health outcomes, including kidney and testicular cancer, decreased fertility, and thyroid disease, the Environmental Protection Agency only announced legally enforceable limits for six PFAS chemicals in drinking water last year, under President Joe Biden. (The EPA has estimated that the quantifiable health benefits of those six regulations alone reach $1.5 billion annually.) At the same time, a Biden-era effort to limit PFAS discharged into industrial wastewater — which can subsequently spread to drinking water — stalled out in 2024, and never advanced past the notice phase of the rulemaking process. President Trump promptly scrapped the draft guidelines after taking office.

The future of PFAS regulation now hangs in a strange limbo. Though EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin previously voted for regulating some PFAS in drinking water while serving as a New York congressman, the deregulatory influences in the Trump administration seem poised to win out over the voices in the Make America Healthy Again camp epitomized by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s often conspiratorial emphasis on “wellness.” (While some concerns, like microplastics and PFAS, are backed by ample research, the right-wing health movement also expresses skepticism about long-proven health measures like pasteurization and vaccines.)

But as Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, the co-authors of the forthcoming book Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America, chorused to me, RFK Jr. “isn’t in charge of the EPA.” In fact, the Project 2025 blueprint for the Trump presidency — over a third of which has already been implemented — explicitly singles out a need to “revisit” a Biden-era designation of PFAS as hazardous.

In filling out his environmental team, Trump reappointed Nancy Beck, who has a history of opposing PFAS regulations, as a senior adviser to the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety. Lynn Ann Dekleva — who spent three decades at DuPont, the chemical manufacturer accused of concealing the dangers of PFAS by Ohio attorney Rob Bilott of Dark Waters fame — is also now the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator. In Congress, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works is chaired by Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who has argued that the dangers of PFAS have been overblown, and that the chemicals are too expensive to regulate. Widespread federal layoffs by Elon Musk’s efficiency team will also stymie efforts to curb PFAS, the regulation of which would require “scaling up — not scaling down — government bodies such as the EPA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and so on,” the International Chemical Secretariat, an environmental organization, has noted.

Though some states have begun implementing their own PFAS restrictions, “the more that we test for PFAS, the more places that we’re finding it,” Stoiber, the EWG scientist, told me. “It’s being addressed in a patchwork way.”

EWG recommends investing in a good water filtration system if you live in a place with PFAS contamination. But “we recognize that filtering water isn’t the solution to water contamination,” Sydney Evans, an EWG senior science analyst, added to me. “The burden should not be on the individual.”

Still, with clean water regulations in jeopardy, the onus nevertheless falls on individuals to assess their own risks. That’s long been the case with PFAS in particular, according to Udasin, the author. “It’s been like that from the beginning,” she told me. “Regulatory agencies kicked the can down the line; it was really the grassroots activists and scientists working together who raised awareness about this issue in terms of home filtration systems, which now some states have provided for people.”

Perhaps most alarming of all, though, is the fact that drinking water is only a part of the picture when it comes to PFAS exposure. “The water issue with PFAS is one that we often hear about because that’s the one that impacts a lot of people very acutely,” Frazin, Udasin’s co-author, told me. But people are also exposed to PFAS “in their personal care products, waterproof cosmetics, nonstick pans, and waterproof clothing. They’re also in a lot of stain-resistant sprays.” By the EPAs estimate, just 20% of PFAS exposure probably comes from contaminated drinking water.

The nasty truth about forever chemicals is contained in their name — they aren’t going away. The Larson Air Force Base in Lake Moses, Washington, closed in 1966, but the legacy of PFAS lingers in the groundwater to this day. Until a government steps up to regulate not just PFAS in drinking water, but production at the source, lives will be in danger. “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if PFAS wasn’t in the water to begin with,” Evans of EWG reminded me. “There is progress being made, but it’s looking upstream where we can solve a lot of these issues.”