Shrinking the EPA could make wildfire smoke more dangerous todayheadline

This coverage is made possible in part through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in northern Michigan.

For weeks, smoke from Canadian wildfires has poured down into the United States, drifting clear across the Atlantic into Europe. Pulmonologist Vivek Balasubramaniam, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noticed more people calling in with asthma symptoms and asking for advice when smoke doused the region in early June.

“Walking outside those days, I mean, you could see the brown-orange discoloration to the air,” he said. “When you’re breathing in, you kind of feel like the air is a little heavier, a little harder to do things.” 

Monitoring air quality is key to forecasting and assessing wildfire smoke. Right now, that’s a coordinated effort between federal, state, tribal, and local entities. Federally approved and privately operated monitors feed data into tools like the Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow tool, and help forecast air quality and issue public health guidance. But air quality scientists worry that EPA budget and job cuts will make it difficult to get air quality information to people, endangering public health. And when it comes to longer-term research, some experts say community monitors won’t fill in the gap.

The Trump administration announced plans last month to reorganize the agency and cut staff back to levels last seen in the Reagan era, which could mean the elimination of thousands of jobs. The EPA’s proposed budget for 2026 would halve its funding, from $9.14 billion to $4.16 billion. 

“This is really disappointing,” said Christi Chester-Schroeder, lead air quality scientist at IQAir, a free platform. “And honestly, it is sort of antithetical, in the sense that the healthcare costs associated with breathing poor quality error are really significant globally.”

Along with proposed cuts to grants for state and local air quality management and pollution control, the EPA is planning to restructure how it regulates air quality, dismantling two offices charged with regulating air and climate pollution and running such programs: the Office of Atmospheric Protection and the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards. 

The EPA plans to create two new offices to clear a backlog of state plans to meet national air quality standards. A spokesperson said in an email that the new Office of State Air Partnerships would “improve coordination with state, local, and tribal air permitting agencies” to “resolve permitting concerns more efficiently and ensure EPA is working with states, not against them, to advance our shared mission.” The Office of Clean Air Programs would “align statutory obligations and essential functions with centers of expertise to create greater transparency in our regulatory work.”

Pushback on staffing and funding cuts has been constant. A U.S. District Court judge in Maryland ruled last week that the agency’s termination of $600 million in grants to help communities address pollution was unlawful. And the largest federal workers union was part of a coalition that sued this spring to halt cuts. A federal judge ruled in their favor in May, blocking new layoff and reorganization notices.

“EPA is complying with the court’s preliminary injunction,” said an EPA spokesperson of the lawsuit in an email. “In line with the court’s order and guidance received by the Department of Justice, EPA is moving forward with only reorganization planning activities.”

But the agency has already been hamstrung, according to Cathleen Kelly, a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, who said that eliminating the current air monitoring offices would harm research and public health — even if some of their components are preserved elsewhere. 

“It will leave communities more vulnerable when wildfire smoke makes the air unhealthy to breathe, for example, or when corporate polluters release unlawful amounts of pollution and on bad air quality days that increase asthma attacks and land kids and adults that are struggling to breathe in the hospital,” she said.

Overall, air quality in the U.S. has improved in the decades since the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970 and began more strictly regulating industrial pollution. The EPA’s own sophisticated monitors have been able to track changes over time, confirming how effective air quality regulations are. 

That progress has been curtailed as wildfire smoke has become more prevalent, and even one bad wildfire season can put the health of communities at risk, with Indigenous nations, low-income communities, and communities of color disproportionately affected. The American Lung Association says nearly half of Americans live with unhealthy levels of air pollution, and that wildfire smoke is a major factor. It can spread far from its source, affecting urban areas that are already dealing with pollution from industry and transportation as well as rural communities with less monitoring because they have fewer people. 

As the EPA seeks to cut jobs, some experts worry there won’t be the staff — or the institutional expertise — to process and distribute that data even if air quality monitors continue to collect readings. And as the EPA guts environmental regulations, like rolling back clean air rules for power plants, it may be harder for scientists to properly assess impacts to public health. 

“That’s, to me, the most concerning consequence,” said Tarik Benmarhnia, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who studies wildfire smoke.

The main hazard in wildfire smoke is PM 2.5, or particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (a millionth of a meter). This is bad for anyone to breathe, but especially hazardous for those with asthma or heart conditions. As wildfire smoke travels through the atmosphere, it also changes chemically to produce the toxic gas ozone, making breathing the stuff even more hazardous. 

Canadian scientists are also worried that the fires are burning across soils heavily polluted by mining operations, so the smoke could be laced with toxicants like arsenic and lead.

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As climate change exacerbates droughts and raises temperatures — which sucks up the moisture in vegetation — more landscapes are burning and loading the atmosphere with smoke. Recent research has shown that the human health impact of PM 2.5 from wildfire smoke can be up to 10 times higher than other sources of particulate matter, said Benmarhnia. A study published last month in the journal Communications Earth and Environment found that between 2006 and 2020, climate change contributed to 15,000 deaths due to particulate matter from wildfire smoke. 

To understand how wildfire smoke is affecting people’s health and warn them of its dangers, it needs to be measured. Places like the Great Lakes that aren’t used to dealing with wildfires and their fallout are just now solidifying public health awareness campaigns. 

“The first statewide air quality alert for fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke was in 2023,” said Aaron Ferguson, who manages the Climate and Tracking Unit at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. “That’s really when we first started developing a lot of our public health guidance and response strategies.”

That work relies in part on more than 40 air quality stations run by the state through EPA grants that are still in place for now.

Increasingly, federal air quality monitors have been supplemented by private companies and community monitoring efforts, including among tribal nations, rural areas and places federal and state governments have neglected. Free services like PurpleAir and IQAir provide hyper-local air quality readings for people to determine if they need to shelter from wildfire smoke. 

“What people are using this for is to decide when to let the kids out with asthma, or when to go cycling if they’re an athlete,” said Adrian Dybwad, CEO and founder of PurpleAir.

Pierce Mayville, the air quality scientist for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, said those monitors are “huge” when it comes to getting people usable, practical information, providing near-real-time information about air quality. They have one and are setting up another. 

“If we see the level really high in the purple, then we let people know,” Mayville said. “People can look at the map and see a live-time view of what’s going on so they can keep track of the air quality in their area.”

What Benmarhnia and other scientists need is a steady stream of reliable data, especially from advanced sensors that determine the composition of wildfire smoke, like if it contains heavy metals. Cheaper instruments just measure the amount of PM 2.5 in the air, not what it’s made of. They can then correlate that data with hospital emissions in a given area to get insights into what makes wildfire emissions so deadly. 

“In order to be able to better test these hypotheses, we need these federally funded monitors and networks and data,” Benmarhnia said. “This is critical. Without that, it would be impossible to do this type of research and better understand what is going on.”