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Arthur Douglas has been passionate about guns his entire life. He spent his childhood hunting, then amassed a treasured collection of firearms, including antique rifles he considers priceless. For years, he’s worked as a firearms instructor for the National Rifle Association and the U.S. Concealed Carry Association.
But the 61-year-old building contractor was incensed to learn from ProPublica that his name, age, New Hampshire address, phone number and registered voting status were in a database compiled by the gun industry’s chief lobbying group to help friendly politicians win elections.
Ingram holds one of his firearms. He was dismayed to learn his information was in a dataset that the National Shooting Sports Foundation gave to Cambridge Analytica in 2016. “I think it’s horrible that there is such a thing,” he said. (John Tully for ProPublica)Douglas said he never gave anyone permission to use his personal information for political purposes. He considers his privacy rights sacrosanct, like those bestowed by the Second Amendment. “I like the idea that they’re pro-gun advocates,” he said of the gun industry. “I don’t like the idea that they’re getting information, possibly illegally, to forward their agenda.”
Douglas is one of millions of people whose sensitive personal information was compiled over two decades by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, working with some of America’s most iconic gun-makers and retailers. As ProPublica previously reported, the industry group assembled data on this collection of gun owners and others without their knowledge or consent to persuade them to vote in the industry’s interests. The NSSF credited the campaign with landmark victories that vanquished gun control efforts.
What happened to Douglas’ data in the past decade has never before been revealed. It involves a transatlantic transfer to a now-disgraced political firm, questions of illegality and concerns from insiders about the repercussions should authorities discover the secret data sharing. This story, built on interviews and a new cache of internal documents obtained by ProPublica, details for the first time the sophisticated and invasive nature of the gun industry’s electioneering.
Arthur Douglas, a contractor by profession, is also a gun collector, a member of the National Rifle Association and a firearms instructor with years of experience. (John Tully for ProPublica)The NSSF, based in Shelton, Connecticut, represents thousands of firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors and retailers, along with publishers and shooting ranges. While not as well known as the NRA, the trade group is considered the voice of the industry and is a power broker in business and politics.
In 2016, as part of a push to get Donald Trump elected president for the first time and to help Republicans keep the Senate, the NSSF worked with the consultancy Cambridge Analytica to turbocharge the information it had on potential voters. The U.S. subsidiary of a London-based firm, which would later go out of business amid a global scandal over its handling of confidential consumer data, Cambridge matched up the people in the database with 5,000 additional facts about them that it drew from other sources.
The details were far-ranging and intimate. Along with the potential voters’ income, debts and religious affiliation, analysts learned whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.
Cambridge analysts ran the enhanced data through an algorithm to create psychological profiles that allowed for more incisive targeting. Potential voters were assigned one of five personality groups: risk-takers, carers, go-getters, individualists and supporters. Each got a tailored message. Risk-takers were viewed as highly neurotic and susceptible to ads that pricked their fears, Cambridge records show. Go-getters, on the other hand, would respond better to messages of optimism and the promise of a better future.
Privacy experts told ProPublica that companies that shared information with the NSSF may have violated federal and state prohibitions against deceptive and unfair business practices. Under federal law, companies must comply with their own privacy policies and be clear about how they will use consumers’ information, privacy experts said. A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from those gun-makers found that none of them informed buyers that their details would be used for political purposes.
“There’s a pretty clear argument that in some of these cases, there is deception and practices that go against the language in the privacy policy,” said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and global privacy specialist at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
As it did after the presidential election of George W. Bush, the NSSF credited itself with helping Trump win in 2016, paving the way for a radically different American and global era.
The NSSF declined to comment for this story. It previously defended its data collection, saying its “activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.”
ProPublica obtained a portion of the NSSF database that contains the names, addresses and other information of thousands of people. The list was created by Cambridge for a voter survey. ProPublica is not making the record public but reached out to 6,000 people on the list.
Almost all of the 38 people who responded expressed outrage, surprise or disappointment over learning they were in the database.
Alvin Ingram, a retired chemist in Virginia who worked in the aerospace industry and is an avid hunter, described himself as a stickler for “accuracy and precision,” especially in legal matters. Ingram was dismayed to learn he was in the NSSF data given to Cambridge. “I think it’s horrible that there is such a thing,” he said.
Joseph LeForge, a self-described “privacy nut,” struggled to understand how it could’ve happened. The 74-year-old contractor has no Facebook account or email address and spoke to ProPublica on a flip phone. He wondered if he tripped a wire when he bought shotgun shells over a decade ago. “I don’t recall having to give them a driver’s license or anything,” he said, “but I might have.”
Kathy Gavin at her home in Keene, New Hampshire. Gavin, who works in sales and marketing, does not own firearms. (John Tully for ProPublica)Kathy Gavin, who briefly owned guns in the late 1980s, remembered that a dealer at the time had filled out and mailed a warranty card on her behalf. She shopped at Cabela’s, first in person and later online, for equipment for her father, an avid fisherman. ProPublica previously found that the sporting goods store was among those that shared information for the database.
For years, Gavin received loads of mail during election season, urging her to vote for pro-gun politicians. She threw it away without much thought. But now that she knows about the database, she wants answers from the NSSF: “Why is my information in there? Why did you need it or want it? Yes, you could use it to pummel me with postcards, but what else are you doing with it?”
A High-Stakes ElectionThe 2016 election was a critical crossroads for the gun industry.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, the industry fought repeated attempts to enact gun control legislation after a series of horrific killings.
In November 2009, a psychiatrist committed the deadliest mass shooting ever at an American military base, killing 13 people and injuring more than 30 others at Fort Hood in Texas. An attempted assassination of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 left six dead and more than a dozen wounded, including the Arizona Democrat.
The next year, during a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” a young man killed 12 and wounded 70 at a theatre in Aurora, Colorado. And five months later, less than three miles from the NSSF’s Connecticut headquarters at the time, another young man, armed with an assault rifle, slaughtered 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, including 20 children.
The Sandy Hook massacre prompted Obama to make gun control a priority. He announced 23 executive actions, but his most ambitious proposals, including an assault weapons ban and universal background checks, failed to win enough support in Congress amid fierce opposition from the NRA and the NSSF.
For the gun industry, a Democratic majority in the Senate and a Hillary Clinton presidency would have meant more legislative battles and a possible return to gun restrictions and loss of profits. Patrick O’Malley, the man who had been running the NSSF’s largely successful electioneering effort for more than a decade, realized it needed to modernize, according to Cambridge emails.
So in April 2016, O’Malley, an NSSF contractor and political consultant, hired Cambridge Analytica. The written agreement called for Cambridge to mobilize supporters of the Second Amendment in the battleground states of Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.
The aim, according to staffers on the project, was to help the GOP win the presidency and retain control of the Senate.
Since 2002, the NSSF had paid O’Malley millions to help oversee its voter outreach campaign, called GunVote, internal records show.
For the effort, the trade group had created a huge database of potential supporters. From the late 1990s on, at least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Olin Winchester and Mossberg, had handed over names, addresses and other private data on their customers, NSSF records show. (Most of the companies named in the NSSF documents declined to comment or did not respond to ProPublica. One denied sharing customer data, and the new parent company of another said it had no evidence of data sharing with the NSSF under prior ownership.)
By 2002, the database — filled with warranty card information and supplemented with names from voter rolls and hunting licenses — contained at least 5.5 million people.
In an interview with ProPublica, Larry Keane, senior vice president of the NSSF since 2000, downplayed the significance of the database and said the trade group’s 2016 campaign involved only commercially available data, not information from gun-makers’ warranty cards.
But an internal Cambridge email from before the work began said O’Malley had been “leveraging a database of firearms manufacturing warranty cards” over the years for the NSSF and that Cambridge would receive the trade group’s data. O’Malley signed the contract and Cambridge received the data in April 2016, records show.
A report by Cambridge said the files included 20 years of information about gun buyers harvested from manufacturer warranty cards along with a database of customers from Cabela’s, the outdoor and sporting goods store.
Questions of Privacy Douglas is among millions of people whose sensitive personal information was compiled over two decades by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, working with some of America’s most iconic gun-makers and retailers. (John Tully for ProPublica)For the 2016 campaign, records show, the NSSF attempted to acquire even more personal details about gun owners beyond the warranty card information obtained from gun-makers.
Keane and O’Malley launched talks with Gunbroker.com, the largest online firearms auction site in the U.S., and Bass Pro Shops, one of the nation’s largest sporting goods retailers.
During a June 13 conference call, O’Malley, Keane and Steve Urvan, Gunbroker.com’s founder and then-CEO, hashed out the details of a possible data transfer.
“At a minimum,” O’Malley wrote in an email to Urvan later that day, “we’re keenly interested in the buy/sell records of your users, specifically rifle, shotgun or handgun and sale/purchase frequency.”
The next day, Urvan said he could provide data on about 1.1 million registered users of the website in the states Cambridge planned to target.
He also sent a link to the company’s privacy policy, which said: “We hire contractors to provide certain services on our behalf, including trend and statistical analysis, marketing campaigns, information processing and storage, and development of new products and services.”
The policy did not mention using customer information for political purposes.
“This project,” Urvan wrote, “would fall under trend and statistical analysis.”
He asked that Cambridge certify that it would destroy the records once the analysis was done.
“In an era where a large part of the population posts every tidbit of personal info about themselves online for anyone to see, the [Federal Trade Commission] has backed down from privacy substantially,” Urvan said in an email sent on June 15. “Still I don’t want the FTC or some state agency to come knocking on our door saying we violated the privacy of our users.”
Cambridge pushed back, saying destroying the records after conducting its analysis would be like “an engineer shredding his blueprints after handing over designs to the client: counterintuitive, counterproductive and detrimental to the knowledge accumulation process.”
Urvan refused to back down, and the talks fizzled.
“Much of this data is HIGHLY sensitive,” Urvan said. “If you have it, it can be leaked, subpoenaed, or misused, and under any of those cases the data would point back to our company. Those are substantial business risks we are not willing to take.”
O’Malley and Urvan did not respond to requests for comment. During an interview in September, Keane said he didn’t remember discussions with Gunbroker.com and Cambridge about turning over customer information. He said Gunbroker.com worked with the NSSF to send election-related messages to customers but that the company didn’t provide names and addresses to his organization.
Unlike in Great Britain, France, Italy and other major democracies, the U.S. has no federal or state laws that require companies to notify consumers and gain clear, specific informed consent before their data is shared, privacy experts said. And since 1995, the European Union and its member countries have allowed individuals to object to using their information for direct marketing purposes. Only a handful of states, such as California, have in recent years adopted privacy laws that give consumers the ability to opt out of their information being shared.
Despite those weaknesses in American privacy protections, several experts who reviewed the emails at ProPublica’s request concluded that if the deal had actually been done, Gunbroker.com would have broken its privacy agreement with customers and possibly violated federal and state laws. Under the Federal Trade Commission Act’s prohibition against deceptive or unfair business practices, companies must follow their privacy policies and be clear with consumers about how their information will be used. Many states have adopted similar legal requirements.
Matt Schwartz, privacy analyst at Consumer Reports, said the NSSF and Cambridge would have had to provide “trend and statistical analysis” directly to Gunbroker.com, rather than using it for their own political purposes, for the information exchange to comply with the company’s policy.
“It seems like a stretch,” Schwartz said.
Jon Leibowitz, who was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission by George W. Bush and served as chair under Obama, said even if Gunbroker.com’s CEO truly believed Cambridge and the NSSF would do a trend or statistical analysis, it would not justify giving customer information to Cambridge.
“Here, consumers believed their data would be used for commercial purposes and for high level trends, not for political purposes of convincing individual voters,” Leibowitz said, adding that the deal would have involved “an element of either deception or unfairness by Gunbroker.”
Like Gunbroker.com, Bass Pro Shops demanded secrecy and the destruction of its data, but it also had other conditions.
Instead of sending its customer databases directly to Cambridge, Bass Pro wanted to direct the files to the credit reporting company Experian — and for Cambridge to work through Experian to retrieve the information about its customers, emails show.
Cambridge’s decision to do the data analysis in London also meant Bass Pro attorneys would have to “verify we have appropriate rights” from customers before the retailer could send the dataset overseas. They were concerned that they might otherwise run afoul of the United Kingdom’s tougher privacy laws.
“To avoid this, is there a U.S.-based alternative?” emailed Marsha Green, paralegal to Larry Wilcher, Bass Pro’s vice president and general counsel at the time.
The final sticking point was Bass Pro’s demand that Cambridge purchase insurance to protect the transfer, which Bass Pro insisted was standard for all its data recipients.
Cambridge decided the cost was too onerous and quit the pursuit.
In response to questions from ProPublica, Bass Pro’s general counsel, Colby Irving, stressed that “safeguarding our customers’ privacy is something we take very seriously.” Irving provided a 2016 email from Bass Pro’s legal office that emphasized any agreement with Cambridge had to be “consistent with our privacy policy,” and he said none of the Bass Pro employees in the emails obtained by ProPublica had the authority to finalize a deal with Cambridge. Irving said Bass Pro, which acquired Cabela’s in 2017, had been unable to find evidence of Cabela’s “sharing customer information that was not compliant with their privacy policies at or prior to the time of acquisition.”
Turbocharged Targeting Ingram, a retired chemist, at his home in Virginia. (John Tully for ProPublica)The Cambridge alchemy had three phases.
First, the company compared the NSSF and Cabela’s data with information about consumer purchases, supplied by data broker companies L2 and Infogroup. That produced more than 1.3 million matches.
Included were details about whether people donated to children’s causes and international aid, had retail store cards, owned antiques or were interested in wine, smoking, audiobooks, board games, camping, scuba diving or cars and auto parts.
Next, analysts used an algorithm to score each person’s behavioral traits based on their habits and shopping history. From those scores, Cambridge placed each of the potential voters into one of the five personality groups.
The third phase involved reaching out to potential voters. Lists and maps were generated and given to NSSF contractors responsible for mailings. Cambridge also found the targeted people on Facebook.
A sample of the NSSF database, containing more than 6,300 people in the 10 battleground states, was given to the Tarrance Group, a Republican research firm, for the first of many polls, conducted over the phone.
The survey included a critical question asking if people would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported nominating a new Supreme Court justice “who would uphold our Constitutional gun rights.” An overwhelming majority, 86%, indicated they would be much more likely to vote for such a candidate.
The response drove the first set of Facebook ads aimed at voters in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. Each pop-up ad said it came from the NSSF’s GunVote page, but they were crafted by Cambridge. The ads used the Supreme Court to promote support for Republican Sens. Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt, Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte and Ron Johnson.
They were sent to potential voters in key states from June 21, 2016, through July 1, 2016, tailored to the leanings of each personality group. The ads highlighted the role that the senators played in blocking the appointment of Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court.
The fear-susceptible risk-takers were targeted with ads that introduced negative scenarios before providing a reassuring and authoritative tone. In Missouri, risk-takers were told, “Senator Blunt is working hard to keep Obama from turning the Supreme Court into an enemy to your gun rights.”
The forward-focused go-getters, however, were shown what appeared to be a father and his son hunting together. In North Carolina, they were told, “Join us in thanking Senator Burr for opposing Obama’s Supreme Court nominee to protect your future and your gun rights.”
Nearly 817,000 people saw the ads, according to Cambridge’s internal metric reports. For the next three months, Cambridge blasted other ads and videos across social media. All together, they garnered nearly 378 million views and drove more than 60 million visitors to the NSSF’s website.
“Make America 2nd Amendmentable Again”The evening of Nov. 8, 2016, was triumphant for the NSSF.
Republicans maintained control of the Senate, which guaranteed continued protection from gun proposals opposed by the industry. Surveys indicate 62% of gun owners voted for Trump over Clinton.
Political observers widely credited Cambridge Analytica’s data work on behalf of the Trump campaign for the historic victory, but the firm’s work for the NSSF to reach gun owners and others sympathetic to the Second Amendment wasn’t publicly known.
In a report titled “Make America 2nd Amendmentable Again,” Cambridge concluded that its campaign for the NSSF had encouraged nearly 10,000 more voters to turn out in Missouri, 7,744 more voters in Ohio, 6,979 more in North Carolina and 4,743 more in Pennsylvania. The numbers weren’t pivotal, but they contributed to victory for the NSSF’s preferred senatorial candidates in all those states. The back page of the report featured the cartoon character Yosemite Sam holding a six-shooter in each hand.
At 9:17 the morning after the election, Keane, the NSSF vice president, fired off an email of praise to Cambridge’s project managers.
“Thank you for all your hard work on an incredibly successful #GUNVOTE campaign. NSSF and our 13,000 members are grateful to you all for your efforts,” Keane wrote.
Throughout the organization, there was a collective sense of relief.
“After a long eight years of President Obama,” an NSSF report reviewing 2016 said, “the firearms industry can finally operate without daily attacks from the Oval Office thanks to the election of Donald J. Trump.
“Furthermore, thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate.”
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Janet Eastham of The Telegraph contributed research.
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More than three years ago, ProPublica spotlighted America’s “sacrifice zones,” where communities in the shadow of industrial facilities were being exposed to unacceptable amounts of toxic air pollution. Life in these places was an endless stream of burning eyes and suspicious smells, cancer diagnoses and unanswered pleas for help.
The Biden administration took action in the years that followed, doling out fines, stepping up air monitoring and tightening emissions rules for one of the most extreme carcinogens. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency requested a significant budget increase in part to issue scores of hazardous air pollution rules and fulfill its obligations under the Clean Air Act. Had the effort been successful, experts said, it could have made a meaningful difference.
President Donald Trump threatens to dismantle the steps his predecessor took to curb pollution. In just over two weeks, the Trump administration has ordered a halt to proposed regulations, fired the EPA’s inspector general, frozen federal funding for community projects and launched a process that could force thousands of EPA employees from their jobs.
So ProPublica set out to understand what modest reforms are now under threat and who will be left to safeguard these communities.
Weaknesses of State EnforcementThe first Trump administration told EPA staff to defer more to state agencies on environmental enforcement. But ProPublica has documented a long history of state failures to hold polluters accountable — mostly in areas where support for Trump is strong.
“States generally do not have the resources, experience, equipment, nor the political will to quickly and effectively respond” to serious pollution complaints, Scott Throwe, a former senior enforcement official at the EPA, said in an email.
In Pascagoula, Mississippi, complaints from residents rolled in to the state’s environmental agency for years as a nearby oil refinery, a shipbuilding plant and other facilities regularly released carcinogens like benzene and nickel, according to emissions reports the facilities sent to the EPA.
The futility of the complaints became apparent when the nonprofit Thriving Earth Exchange learned in early 2023 that the scientific instruments state contractors had used in the neighborhood to investigate recent complaints weren’t sensitive enough to detect some of the worst chemicals at levels that could pose health risks. The instruments were designed to protect industrial workers during eight-hour workdays, not children and medically vulnerable people who need greater protections at home.
“I don’t live in this house eight hours! I live here 24/7,” said resident Barbara Weckesser, who has complained to the state about the toxic air for more than a decade.
Jan Schaefer, communications director for the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, said the agency uses “scientifically sound methods and tools” to address complaints and that looking at just one episode omits “critical context and broader actions taken by the agency to address air quality concerns in Mississippi.”
Before Trump’s inauguration, the EPA’s regional office said the state agency had applied for a grant to install air monitors, and data collection should begin this spring. The $625,000 long-term air monitoring effort could finally determine the source and scale of the pollution, but the data it produces isn’t “going to trigger something magical to happen,” said Barbara Morin, an air pollution analyst who advises the environmental agencies of eight northeastern states. Either the state or Trump’s EPA will need to analyze the data to see what’s causing the pollution and how to stop it, Morin said.
Almost immediately after taking office, Trump ordered a freeze on all federal grants, including those at the EPA, sparking a legal battle. Nevertheless, Schaefer said the project’s schedule is on track.
The EPA confirmed that similar activities in the tiny city of Verona, Missouri, where the agency had been cracking down on an industrial plant spewing a dangerous carcinogen, remain ongoing.
While making an animal feed additive, the plant releases ethylene oxide, a colorless gas linked to leukemia and breast cancer.
In response to a request from the city’s then-mayor, Joseph Heck, the state conducted a cancer survey of residents in 2022 and determined there wasn’t enough data for detailed analysis. That same year, the plant, operated by BCP Ingredients, leaked nearly 1,300 pounds of ethylene oxide, the EPA reported.
The EPA intervened, setting up air monitoring in the town, fining the company $300,000 and ordering it to install equipment to remove 99.95% of the ethylene oxide coming out of a particular smokestack. (BCP Ingredients didn’t return a request for comment.) “The EPA has done a lot more than I think the state can ever do,” said Heck, whose partner died of cancer in 2022. Crystal Payne was in complete remission from breast cancer before they moved to Verona, Heck said, but within a year it came back and spread to her brain and her liver.
A spokesperson with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources said the EPA used its authority under the federal Clean Air Act to compel the company to update its pollution-cutting equipment after the spill. He said the state lacks the power to do that.
“Texas Is Extremely Industry Friendly”For years, a facility that sterilizes medical equipment in Laredo, Texas, released more ethylene oxide into the air than any other industrial plant in the country, according to emission reports the facility submitted to the EPA.
Nearly 130,000 nearby residents, including more than 37,000 children, faced an elevated lifetime cancer risk, a ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation found. The parents of two children diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, a cancer linked to ethylene oxide exposure, recounted their ordeal and said they had no idea about the risks.
A statement from Midwest Sterilization Corporation, which operates the Laredo plant, said the company “meets or exceeds all federal and state law requirements” and performs the “important job” of sterilizing medical equipment, which “saves lives.”
After the EPA released a report in 2016 on the dangers of ethylene oxide, Texas’ environmental agency conducted its own review of the federal study. The state concluded that people could safely inhale the chemical at concentrations thousands of times higher than the EPA’s safe limit.
The state then passed a rule that meant that polluters didn’t need to lower their emissions.
Richard Richter, a spokesperson for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said the agency conducted an in-depth analysis that “led to the conclusion that there was inadequate evidence to support” a link between ethylene oxide and breast cancer.
Scientists told ProPublica that the state agency reached that verdict only after wrongfully excluding studies that linked ethylene oxide to breast cancer and using a flawed analysis of the data EPA relied on.
The state is the nation’s top ethylene oxide polluter and home to 26 facilities that emit ethylene oxide, according to ProPublica’s 2021 analysis of EPA data from 2014 through 2018.
“Texas is extremely industry friendly,” said Tricia Cortez, executive director of the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center.
Cortez said deferring more responsibility to the states “would be disastrous for normal everyday people. … Why should it matter how much you’re protected based on your state’s affiliation? People exposed to something so horrible and cancer-causing should have the same protection everywhere.”
Representatives for Trump’s transition team didn’t return a request for comment.
Hannah Perls, a senior staff attorney at Harvard’s Environmental & Energy Law Program, said giving states more control over how they implement and enforce federal laws enables “legal sacrifice zones,” reinforcing or creating disparities based on geography.
Federal Rules in DangerOne important reform that promises relief for the residents of Laredo is an updated rule adopted by the EPA last spring.
Prompted by a lawsuit brought by Cortez’s group, the federal agency’s rule will eventually require facilities nationwide, including those in Texas, to conduct air monitoring for ethylene oxide and add equipment to reduce emissions of the chemical by 90%.
Facilities have until 2026 to comply and can ask for extensions beyond that.
But the attorney reportedly nominated to lead the Trump EPA’s air pollution efforts is a friend of the industry that depends on the chemical. Aaron Szabo recently represented the Advanced Medical Technology Association, an industry trade group that includes commercial sterilizers that use ethylene oxide. (His work for the group was first reported by Politico.) Last year, according to his lobbying report, Szabo lobbied the EPA on its “regulations related to the use of ethylene oxide from commercial sterilizer facilities.”
Szabo didn’t return a request for comment.
Trump and his key picks for important positions in his government have made it clear they intend to roll back environmental protections that burden industry.
How far they go will have lasting consequences for residents in the more than 1,000 hot spots ProPublica’s 2021 analysis identified as having elevated and often unacceptable cancer risks from industrial air pollution.
Another rule issued by the EPA last year offers a new way to tackle pollution in Calvert City, Kentucky.
Last June, a local chemical plant operated by Westlake Vinyls leaked 153 pounds of ethylene dichloride, a dangerous carcinogen, according to EPA records.
It was the latest in a series of problems at the factory that state and federal fines had failed to stop. From 2020 to 2023, the EPA had found 46 instances when the facility didn’t correctly operate controls for the chemical. During one inspection, the concentration of dangerous gases coming from a tank was so high that it overwhelmed the EPA’s measuring instrument, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica. Westlake did not respond to requests for comment.
The EPA’s updated rule will require more than 100 facilities, including Westlake and the refinery in Pascagoula, to install air monitors along the fence line, or perimeter. The monitors will measure up to six toxic gases, and the data will be posted online. (It’s unclear exactly which chemicals these two facilities would monitor, though the requirement could cover ethylene dichloride.)
Michael Koerber, a former EPA air quality expert, said the rule could finally give residents some much-needed transparency. Koerber said an earlier EPA rule, which required oil refineries to install fence line monitoring for benzene, led to a significant decrease in benzene from those facilities.
But the new rule doesn’t fully take effect until next year.
That leaves its enforcement up to the Trump administration.
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