Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, September 24, 2026 CONTACT Kyla Bennett | Jeff Ruch | (510) 231-7028 | Agency Makes Grudging Admission That PFAS Are Still Being Manufactured and Imported Washington, DC — In a surprising development, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has agreed that its past claims that the two most widely-used forms of “forever chemicals” had been phased out of domestic production is clearly false and has corrected its websites in response to a complaint filed by...

The next installment in our How We Fight Back series takes us to our national forests. Our first post, “A Constitutional, Legal, and Moral Crisis,” laid out seven themes driving our work in these times of turmoil. Two of them, growing coalitions and defending what can be defended, are at the heart of how we’re fighting to protect national forests. I’m Chandra Rosenthal, PEER’s Western Lands and Rocky Mountain Advocate.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, September 23, 2026 CONTACT Kevin Hood, FSEEE | (541) 484-2692 | Chandra Rosenthal, PEER | (303) 898-0798 | Rollback Would Strip Wildlife and Watershed Safeguards from 193 Million Acres of Public Land as the Forest Service Faces an $11.44 Billion Maintenance Backlog and Plans to Cut Two-Thirds of Its Permanent Workforce Washington, DC — Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) today...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday, September 21, 2026 CONTACT Joanna Citron Day | (240) 247-3081 | Washington, DC — Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) today announced that Isabelle Dietz, a former U.S. Department of Justice trial attorney and law clerk for federal judges at both the district and appellate level, has joined PEER as Staff Counsel.

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere in the news. When we heard that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was starting to use AI to help assess the safety of chemicals, we wanted to learn more. In March, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking EPA’s impact assessments, which are required by this administration, for “high-impact AI tools” and other information regarding the use of AI on chemicals. EPA refused to release certain information.

The lack of transparency is likely unlawful, environmental advocates and legal experts tell the Monitor. They say it leaves the public in the dark about how decisions are being made about the use of potentially dangerous chemicals.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, September 15, 2026 Contact: Tim Whitehouse | (240) 247-0299 | Kevin Bell | (202) 946-3642 PEER and FIG Challenge Secrecy Surrounding EPA’s Growing Use of AI Washington, DC — Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Free Information Group (FIG) are appealing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) refusal to release its Final Impact Assessments for high-impact artificial intelligence (AI) tools deployed by the agency, after EPA...

This week we continue our series leading up to the midterm elections, How We Fight Back. In this post we turn to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — an agency whose mission is to implement federal laws that protect public health and the environment. Under Administrator Lee Zeldin’s leadership, EPA has instituted a culture of fear, destroyed its science programs, gutted most of its environmental programs, and betrayed its basic mission in order to please a few select powerful industries.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, September 3, 2026 CONTACT Kyla Bennett | (508) 230-9933 | Microplastics Added to a “Candidate List” With Scant Chance at Regulation Washington, DC — Despite calling it a “historic action,” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) addition of microplastics to the official “Contaminant Candidate List” under the Safe Drinking Water Act is largely meaningless, according to an analysis by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

I want to start this email with a huge thank you! This year’s Double Trouble campaign has come to a close, and I have exciting news to share: we met our match, raising over $70,000 from our supporters! Whether you made a gift, forwarded our emails, or shared our work with friends and colleagues — we are genuinely grateful. Your support enables us to keep fighting for federal employees who are risking their careers to tell the truth, protect the public, and uphold the laws they swore to enforce.