Tighter regulations and an influx of federal funding in recent years have enabled communities across the country to begin efforts to clean up lead contamination in their soil, drinking water, and older homes. But Congress and the Trump administration have partially rolled back those rules and resources, potentially making it more difficult for cash-strapped cities and towns to undertake sweeping lead remediation programs.
The same is true for New Orleans, where a Vérité News investigation found elevated lead levels in about half of the city’s on-site playgrounds and detectable levels of the toxic metal in most homes whose drinking water was tested under a voluntary program.
Federal environmental officials say any level of lead exposure is unsafe, but comprehensive cleanup can be financially prohibitive. The city of New Orleans is facing a $220 million budget deficit, leading to furloughs and layoffs of city employees.
Congress allocated $15 billion over five years to spearhead pipe replacement under a bipartisan infrastructure law, but the Biden administration-era measure is set to expire at the end of this year. The Environmental Protection Agency will also tighten standards for lead-contaminated soil in 2024 for the first time in 30 years, requiring all lead-containing water systems to be replaced with water systems by late 2037.
But a spending package passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in January would direct $125 million in lead remediation funding to wildfire prevention. And since October, the EPA has rolled back some protections against soil contamination, raising federal hazard levels and standards for contaminated soil removal in urban areas.
Tom Neltner, national director of the nonprofit advocacy group Unleaded Kids, said this is the first time the government has eased limits on lead in soil.
“We’ve seen the Trump administration say positive things about their commitment to leadership and then take actions that undermine that commitment,” Neltner said.
But progress is still being made in some communities, he added.
EPA spokeswoman Bridget Hirsch said changes made under the Trump administration have reduced confusion and uncertainty that could hinder cleanup efforts.
“The Trump EPA’s track record of protecting Americans, especially America’s children, from lead is unparalleled,” Hirsch said in an emailed statement. “Just last year, the Trump Environmental Protection Agency backed up its promise to reduce children’s lead exposure with billions of dollars and historic actions.”
He cited the Environmental Protection Agency’s announcement in November that $3 billion was available to replace water pipes. The funding comes from the Infrastructure Act of 2021 passed under the Biden administration.
Verite News spoke to people in Michigan, Indiana, and Rhode Island to learn how they are dealing with lead contamination, with the goal of finding options that could be applied to New Orleans and other cities.
“We don’t need any more research on lead,” says Tulane University professor Felicia Rabito, an epidemiologist who studies the toxic metal and its sources. “What we need are policies that take their lead from the environment.”
Benton Harbor, Michigan: Lead pipes are being phased out.
Benton Harbor, a majority-black beach town of about 9,000 people on the southeast shore of Lake Michigan, has gone three years without complying with federal drinking water standards. Lead levels in water remained dangerously high until 2021, when residents and organizations petitioned the EPA and received responses from state and federal officials.
“No one should be drinking lead in water for this long,” said Erin Betanzo, an engineer who provided technical assistance to petitioning residents.
That same year, federal authorities issued an enforcement order to Michigan City to bring its water supply into compliance, and the state required Benton Harbor to replace all lead pipes within 18 months. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has pledged to secure funding from the state budget for $35 million in initiatives, including distributing bottled water and paying unpaid water bills to low-income residents. The state worked with the city to allocate money from the general fund, secure a community water loan, and combine grants from several federal programs to cover the total.
City officials completed the project by the end of 2023. We are now one of 21 municipalities in Michigan that have replaced all of our lead pipes. There were more than 4,500 pipes in Benton Harbor that needed replacing.
The Trump administration said it would protect a Biden-era mandate to replace pipes by 2037 from lawsuits challenging it.
Betanzo recommended that other city utilities, like Benton Harbor’s water system, reduce barriers to pipe replacement and increase efficiency.
City officials saved time by assuming most pipes were lead. They decided to go street by street and dig up, inspect, and replace nearly every pipe. If the pipes weren’t lead, they weren’t replaced, but nearly all were, Betanzo said.
Concentrating bulk replacements on one zone at a time makes the contract even more cost-effective, Betanzo added. Contractors bid for zones within the city, and multiple contractors worked simultaneously in different districts. To ensure transparency, progress was published in a public database.
The city also passed a law mandating the replacement of water meter leads, including those on the customer side. All residents must allow the contractor onto the premises or the connection will be severed. Residents did not pay to replace the power lines.
“The health benefits of lead service line replacement are greatest the sooner it is completed,” Betanzo noted, citing a 2023 study she co-authored. “If done incorrectly, replacing lead supply lines can definitely increase lead exposure.”
Complete pipe replacements are rarely completed in the United States due to cost, poor service line tracking, time, and other issues taking precedence. The process could require an investment of up to $1 billion over 10 years in New Orleans, according to the city’s Sewerage and Water Commission.
Indianapolis: A safe place for kids
It’s not just lead pipes that are a problem. A study published in the journal GeoHealth in 2024 estimated that nearly a quarter of homes in the United States have dangerous levels of lead in their soil.
To that end, Indianapolis has taken several actions that it can learn from other cities, said Gabriel Filippelli, a professor at the Indiana University Indianapolis School of Science who led the study and has studied the risks of lead exposure through soil for years.
The Indy Parks and Recreation Department partnered with Mr. Filippelli’s team to test more than a dozen parks relatively close to the site of contamination from a shuttered lead smelter.
Of all the parks tested, Filippelli’s team found only one hotspot, under an old bench where lead-based paint had flaked into the surrounding soil.
The Parks Department followed Mr. Filippelli’s suggestions by replacing the benches and adding concrete and a thick layer of mulch and plants to the ground to prevent children from playing directly in the contaminated soil.
“It was a relatively low-cost intervention,” he said, estimating the cost to be in the thousands of dollars. The ground was not excavated and no new soil was brought in. “If you deal with it by diluting it, capping it off, removing it at the source, you’re solving the problem today and probably for years to come.”
In some cases, such as after severe and widespread contamination from industrial sources, contaminated soil may need to be removed and replaced with clean soil. But Filippelli said such a large-scale renovation would be impractical and too expensive for the city to tackle on its own.
If complete restoration is cost-prohibitive, Filippelli said there are more creative solutions, such as landscaping, covering the area with new soil or mulching. Although these methods cannot completely eliminate lead, they significantly reduce the risk of exposure.
“You can eliminate the hazard at a fraction of the cost,” he said.
He said cities could also look to New York City’s free Clean Soil Bank program, where uncontaminated soil left over from construction projects can be placed in neighborhood-level banks and distributed by volunteers.
Rhode Island: Stopping Lead at the Source
New England, home to some of the nation’s oldest homes, has led the nation in mitigating one of the largest ongoing sources of lead pollution: paint.
In 2023, the Rhode Island Legislature, where most homes were built before lead paint was banned in 1978, passed a series of laws that strengthened the state’s ability to enforce tenant protections.
Before 2023, the state had long required most landlords to have their properties inspected to ensure they met “lead-safe” guidelines, said Dee-Anne Guo, a community organizer with the Childhood Lead Action Project. Although no level of lead is considered safe, replacing windows and doors with lead paint, painting all interior and exterior walls, and mitigating contaminated soil will greatly reduce the risk of exposure.
But for years, “there was no incentive to do it, other than it was the right thing to do,” Guo said.
Currently, landlords can be fined if they do not register a valid lead certificate for homes built before 1978, and the property must be inspected every two years to remain compliant. Before the new law, less than 15% of rental properties were certified. According to Guo, that proportion will increase to 40% by the end of 2025.
The state has also seen steady declines in lead levels in children’s blood.
Guo said it helps that the state receives federal funding through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Lead Safe Housing Program grant. If you are a homeowner or landlord and have an older home, you can apply to the state for an inspector. If lead is found, the state will send a certified contractor to address the problem at little or no cost to the property owner.
Rhode Island is prioritizing low-income households and families with pregnant women and children under 6 because of increased health risks. It can also help pay for repairs to homes if children living there have elevated lead levels in their blood.
Guo said states and communities looking to use HUD funding to launch successful lead paint abatement programs need a combination of strong enforcement, public education and grant funding. She said it also helps to involve community members in the planning process.
But under the Trump administration, more areas like New Orleans could find it more difficult to receive funding for “lead safety” programs. Last year, HUD asked Congress to eliminate new funding for the lead hazard program, saying it would be reinstated in 2027. But proponents of stronger lead protections argue that once funding is lost, it is unlikely to be approved again.
“This shows the hypocrisy of the White House, which talks about lead being important and then proposes eliminating essential funding to clean up affordable housing,” said Neltner, director of Unleaded Kids. “This administration talks about the importance of children, but it seems to be indifferent to children’s brains.”
This article was produced in collaboration with Verite News. The four-month investigation was supported by a Kozik Environmental Justice Reporting grant funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute. It was also produced as a project of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship Fund and the Dennis A. Hunt Health Journalism Fund.
