North America’s largest coke plant hugs the west bank of Pennsylvania’s Monongahela River, belching out emissions from turning superheated coal into a carbon-rich fuel.
Researchers say the children at Clairton Elementary School about a mile away pay the price. They discovered the students there and at other elementary schools near major pollution sites in Pennsylvania had higher asthma rates than other children in the state.
Residents and environmental advocates saw reason for hope and relief in the form of a Biden administration rule designed to tamp down on coke oven plant pollution. But even before it took effect, President Donald Trump granted all 11 coke plants in the U.S. — including the one in Clairton — a two-year exemption from the standards.
Trump and Republicans have sought to align themselves with the Make America Healthy Again movement’s populist ideals, such as improving Americans’ food choices and reducing corporate harm to the environment. But the administration is ratcheting up its attacks on the very environmental protections that MAHA followers hold dear.
Taken together, these anti-environmental initiatives will lead to more pollution-related illnesses and higher health care spending, health researchers say. They could also have political ramifications, eroding MAHA’s support for GOP candidates in the November midterm elections if followers believe the party is more beholden to industry than to the movement’s agenda.
Only 1 in 5 American adults, including about a quarter of Republicans, support rolling back environmental regulations, according to a poll by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Some MAHA supporters believe voters will support Republicans because the Trump administration is delivering on other goals important to the movement.
“MAHA has a pretty diverse set of policy goals, ranging from medical freedom to food and the environment,” said David Mansdoerfer, who served in Health and Human Services leadership during Trump’s first term. “In totality, the Trump administration has strongly delivered on much of the MAHA agenda.”
While MAHA voters have been upset at some of the administration’s actions that promote industry, it’s hard to know how that may play out in the midterms, said Christopher Bosso, a professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern University. Many were disillusioned by a Trump executive order they viewed as promoting glyphosate, which HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called poison.
“The glyphosate thing really ticks off a lot of them; they’re really upset,” Bosso said. “Kennedy said it was poison. If it is a poison, why aren’t we regulating it? That’s where the tension plays out.”
The situation with the Clairton coke plant and the others granted exemptions from regulations underscores the potential public health risks. Six of the 11 factories had “high priority” violations of the Clean Air Act as of last May, according to a KFF Health News analysis. Five coke oven plants logged major violations every quarter for at least three years straight.
“Poisoning continues to some of the most vulnerable residents of Allegheny County,” David Meckel, who had lived in nearby Glassport, Pennsylvania, said at a March 2025 county meeting about the coke plant.
Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson Brigit Hirsch said the president gave companies extra time because the technology needed to meet a new standard isn't ready yet.
“Forcing plants to comply before the tools exist doesn't make the air cleaner, it just shuts down facilities and kills jobs with nothing to show for it,” Hirsch said.
But environmental groups disagree that the plants were unable to comply at a reasonable cost, and they say the exemption from the EPA requirements shows the Trump administration is prioritizing the coal industry at the expense of public health.
“The Trump administration’s relentless actions to dismantle lifesaving environmental protections are a gut punch to the administration’s own promise to Make America Healthy Again,” said Cathleen Kelly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
Hard Times in Clairton
Sprawled across nearly 400 acres, the Clairton plant operates ovens in which coal is heated to as much as 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to make up to 4.3 million tons annually of the carbon-rich fuel known as coke. The product is used in blast furnaces to produce iron.
It’s a dirty operation. The process leads to hazardous emissions of benzene, a carcinogen that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says can lead to anemia and leukemia, as well as sulfur dioxide, which can trigger severe asthma.
The Clairton operation has had repeated problems with its emissions and operations, including fatal explosions and excess releases of toxic chemicals. The plant has received more than $56 million in fines from the Allegheny County Health Department since 2022, stemming largely from a fire in 2018 that led to high emissions, and violated the Clean Air Act in each of the last 12 quarters, with the last compliance monitoring in July 2025, according to the EPA.
Nippon Steel Corp. last year acquired U.S. Steel, which now operates as a subsidiary. The company didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. U.S. Steel said it spends $100 million annually on environmental compliance at Clairton.
“Environmental stewardship is a core value at U. S. Steel, and we remain committed to the safety of our communities,” spokesperson Andrew Fulton said in a written statement.
Clairton was once bustling with movie theaters, a mix of grocery stores, and riverside parks, with a dance pavilion and a performing hot-air balloonist. But the decline of steel hit hard. The town’s population dwindled from more than 19,000 people in the mid-20th century to fewer than 6,000 as of 2024. Dozens of homes stood abandoned until they were razed and replaced with signs saying to keep out. The 1978 movie The Deer Hunter, which depicts a hardscrabble industrial town, is partly set there. Today, about 33% of residents live in poverty.
While the plant brings jobs and revenue, residents of the town and the surrounding areas have long complained about health problems they attribute to its emissions.
“My parents are gone. My mom had cancer, my dad,” Carla Beard-Owens, a Clairton resident, said at a 2025 County Council meeting. “I lost a lot of loved ones and seen other ones pass because of this mill.”
Pediatric allergist Deborah Gentile looked into asthma rates among 1,200 children who attended school near major pollution sites in the area — including students at Clairton Elementary School. They had nearly triple the national rate of asthma, with the highest rate among African American youth, according to the study she led.
“We were shocked,” she said. “It was double or triple what we expected. The people are proud of their industrial background. We need steel, but they’re not running a good enough operation.”
A follow-up study found children with asthma living near the coke plant had an 80% higher chance of missing school when sulfur dioxide pollution was elevated.
Allegheny County, which includes Clairton and Pittsburgh, is home to a number of industrial plants, and researchers have linked its air pollution to increased deaths, chronic heart disease, and adverse birth outcomes. It was ranked in the top 1% of counties in the nation for cancer risk from stationary industrial air pollutants in a 2018 EPA report.
Clairton has an age-adjusted cancer death rate of 170 per 100,000 people, higher than the broader county’s rate of 150 deaths per 100,000 people, based on a KFF Health News analysis of state and federal data.
The American Lung Association in 2025 gave the county an F rating for its particle pollution levels. PennEnvironment, an environmental group that was party to a settlement with U.S. Steel involving the Clairton plant, says the coke operation caused 1.1 million pounds of toxic releases in 2021, which amounted to 60% of all such releases in the county that year.
From 2020 through 2025, the Clairton plant racked up more in fines from Clean Air Act penalties than any other coke oven facility nationwide, costing U.S. Steel over $10 million, according to EPA facility reports.
“We are deeply concerned with exemptions, which allow air toxics to affect public health,” Allegheny County Health Department spokesperson Ronnie Das said in a statement.
The Clairton plant provides 1,200 manufacturing jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue to the area. The jobs help generate nearly $3 billion in annual economic output, according to estimates from the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association.
Some community members and advocacy groups hoped air quality would improve after the coke plant was sold. Nippon Steel has pledged to upgrade facilities in the Monongahela River Valley.
Politics, Waivers, and Environmental Concerns
Under the Biden-era rule, coke plants were supposed to start meeting new limits on leaks from the lids and doors of ovens that heat coal. They would also have had to monitor for benzene at their property lines and take steps to lower emissions of the carcinogen if they exceeded certain levels. Compliance deadlines were set for July 2025.
The Trump administration, which has sought to revive the coal industry, intervened. Last year, it invited hundreds of industrial plants, including coke plants such as Clairton’s, to seek presidential waivers from nine separate rules issued in 2024 by the EPA.
Then Trump in November went further, granting all coke plants a two-year compliance break.
The reprieve was necessary, the EPA spokesperson Hirsch said, because the requirements would have meant extra costs for the industry when standards already in effect work “extremely well” at reducing pollution.
Hirsch also said the agency under Trump is protecting the environment, pointing to action the administration has taken to reduce long-lasting chemicals called PFAS, prevent lead poisoning, strengthen chemical safety, and protect Americans’ food and water supply.
“We are building a future where the next generation of Americans is the healthiest in our nation's history, and they inherit the cleanest air, land and water in the world,” Hirsch said.
However, the administration has taken several steps that environmental advocates say weaken health protections.
The president's executive order on glyphosate, an herbicide the World Health Organization has linked to cancer, which touched off a furor among MAHA enthusiasts who said they felt betrayed. The EPA has decided to stop considering the health-related economic benefits of reducing pollution when making policy decisions, instead focusing on the cost to industry of complying with rules. The agency also rescinded the legal and scientific basis that had long established greenhouse gases as dangerous to public health.
The actions have rankled some MAHA enthusiasts who counted on the administration to tackle chronic disease, especially among children. A petition to Trump on Change.org with more than 15,000 signatures called for the removal of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, citing deregulatory actions it said supported corporations over MAHA goals.
Some MAHA enthusiasts have sounded off on social media.
“No one should believe that MAHA is being upheld at the EPA at this point,” Kelly Ryerson, a leader of American Regeneration, which focuses on a conservation approach to farming, said Feb. 8 on X.
Alex Clark, host of a health and wellness podcast, also aired her concerns on X, saying “there is something really freaking spooky going on at the EPA and I refuse to let the American people be gaslit into thinking they’re upholding the MAHA agenda.”
“A significant number of people who supported Trump are worried these rollbacks are going to hurt their health,” said Max Burns, a Democratic strategist and the founder of the communications firm Third Degree Strategies. “The MAHA voters, especially women, are very sensitive to this. Republicans have put themselves in a bind.”
MAHA supporters shouldn’t be surprised by a Trump administration that doesn’t prioritize environmental protections over industry, because the president has always championed fossil fuels, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan election forecasting newsletter published by the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
The coke plant exemptions have disappointed some community members, environmental groups, and regulators concerned about public health and emissions.
Nearly 300,000 people live within 3 miles of the 11 active coke plants across the U.S., according to EPA data compiled by the Environmental Defense Fund.
Weakening environmental rules has helped boost Trump with the $91 billion U.S. coal industry. In February, mining industry executives and lobbyists gathered at the White House, greeting Trump with applause.
Coal miners, including some in white hard hats bedecked with American flags, presented him with a bronze-colored trophy emblazoned “The Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal.”
At the event, Trump praised their work. “We love clean, beautiful coal,” he said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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