Washington, D.C. – On Friday, the national advocacy organization Food & Water Watch sued the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), demanding it release records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) related to its apparent scuttling of a long-awaited nitrate human health assessment first initiated in 2017. The lawsuit comes amidst a worsening nitrate pollution crisis in drinking water nationwide.

Food & Water Watch Senior Staff Attorney Tyler Lobdell issued the following statement:

“The American people deserve an EPA that protects them from pervasive, dangerous pollutants like nitrate in their drinking water. Instead, the Trump administration appears hell bent not only on throwing public health under the bus, but on doing it behind closed doors. EPA’s refusal to release these public documents for almost a year shows how far the Trump administration will go to hide its attacks on public health and the environment.”

Food & Water Watch initially requested the records in August 2025, following significant staffing cuts at EPA, including elimination of its Office of Research and Development where the Integrated Risk Information System used to be housed. These offices have long conducted the human health assessments that inform the environmental and public health regulations that protect Americans from dangerous pollutants.

The FOIA request concerns EPA’s multi-year assessment for nitrate and nitrite, pollutants that are linked to increased risk of certain cancers; thyroid disease; birth and infant defects including “blue baby syndrome”; and other serious health effects. The first Trump administration suspended the assessment in 2019, and the Biden EPA restarted it in 2023. With the status of the nitrate assessment in question due to EPA’s elimination of key research offices, Food & Water Watch is seeking records to shed light on whether EPA has abandoned the assessment altogether.

Meanwhile, a large and growing body of scientific research makes clear that EPA’s current drinking water standard for nitrate and nitrite is far too lax to protect against its health threats. The apparently scuttled assessment stood to provide EPA with the research needed to reevaluate and update its nitrate standards to protect public health. 

Nitrates have become a pervasive contaminant in drinking water in communities across the country, largely due to factory farms and other industrial agriculture operations dumping their waste into the environment year after year. These operations are largely unregulated, despite their overwhelming contributions to nitrate and other nutrient pollution in the country’s waterways. Communities in at least five states have petitioned EPA to take emergency action to address pervasive groundwater nitrate contamination, and just last month, 83 groups called on EPA and the Department of Health & Human Services to take emergency action on industrial agriculture’s nationwide nitrate water pollution crisis. 

Food & Water Watch is represented in this matter by the public interest law firm Eubanks & Associates, PLLC, and in-house counsel.