People have recognized the dangers of lead at least since Hippocrates linked lead to poisonings circa 370 B.C., but the U.S. did not begin regulating the lead content in public drinking water until enactment of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) in 1974. Two years later, the U.S. banned lead in new pipes and solder, but millions of miles of lead-containing pipes and lead-based solder remain.
As if a doubtful nation had not taken the SDWA seriously, EPA did not issue its first comprehensive Lead and Copper Rule until 1991. The rule established an action level of 15 parts per billion for lead, as well as required corrosion control, public notification, and lead service line replacement programs. It did not mandate immediate replacement of all lead service lines.
The first Trump administration finalized the first updates in decades to the SDWA’s Lead and Copper Rule. Its 2019 proposal, finalized in October 2020, “require[d] more replacements than ever before” for aging water systems leaching lead and posing a public health threat.
The Trump rule also lowered the action level for forcing providers to work with state regulators to replace lead service lines from 15 ppb to 10 ppb but kept the 15-ppb level for requiring communities to replace 3% (rather than 7%) of known or suspected lead lines each year. However, as then-EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler noted, the rule also closed loopholes that had kept actual replacement rates at near the new levels anyway.
It took nearly all of President Biden’s four-year term for the administration to issue its own Lead and Copper Rule Improvements that, among other things, sought to require all U.S. drinking water systems to identify and replace any remaining lead pipes within the next decade. Such an expedited timetable had been eschewed by Trump 45 as achievable only via smoke and mirrors.
At the same time, the EPA announced $2.6 billion in new drinking water infrastructure funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, with nearly half set aside for disadvantaged communities. Other new funding included $35 million in competitive grants for reducing lead in drinking water and funding to support lead pipe replacement projects.
The EPA and its affiliates combat lead in drinking water by testing at the tap — because even the purest water that leaves a treatment plant can be contaminated as it travels through corroded lead service lines. If lead (or copper above set levels) is detected at the tap, any corrosion control treatments have been ineffective, and the service line becomes a candidate for replacement.
Public education is aimed at both making people aware of the potential problem and incentivizing affected people to demand positive action on their behalf. One difficulty is separating fact from presumption — for example, EPA’s own estimates of the number of lead service lines that must be replaced have run from 3 to 4 million to over 9 million.
The 1991 Lead and Copper Rule required states to replace a minimum of 7% of lead piping each year. States may exceed those figures — but are not supposed to fall short, even if replacement costs are exorbitant. But not until 2021 did Congress create a $15 billion fund, to be released by the EPA in $3 billion annual increments, to help states identify and replace corroded lead piping that threatens public health.
Some states prefer to bank their allocations until they can fund larger pipe replacement projects using multi-year funding, while other states merely use the federal dollars as reimbursements for work they already completed. Only a few may be ahead of the 10-year timetable.
It is the EPA’s job to determine each state’s share of that $3 billion a year — and in 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin explained a five-month delay in determining those allocations, noting that this year’s formulation was based on an updated approach using information from the 7th Drinking Water Needs Survey and Assessment, as well as “certain adjustments” from lead service line inventory data submitted by states that shed more light on the size of the job.
Simply put, there has not been a new legal installation of a lead service line since 1986, and many older properties (including apartment complexes) that had lead pipes have been demolished. However, there is no accurate count and no strategy to ensure high accuracy levels.
Zeldin believes some revised state counts are more accurate and is also aware that many federal programs can be plagued by fraud or incompetence. If State A claimed twice the number of lines to be replaced as actually existed, and State B did not, and no one noticed the discrepancy, State A would be robbing other states of their rightful share. Without oversight, the door to fraud is wide open.
The American Water Works Association, which had intervened in court in support of the 2020 (Trump) Lead and Copper Rule revisions, quickly filed a lawsuit against the 2024 (Biden) rule. In 2021, the AWWA boasted of the “tremendous progress water utilities are making to identify lead service lines, share that information with households, and overcome the legal and financial barriers to replacement.”
But the AWWA was “deeply concerned” that the Biden revisions incorrectly assume that a water system “controls” a lead service line when it has “access” to that line. The SDWA distinguishes access from control, yet the Biden upgrades attempt to expand the definition of a public water system to include private property and makes water utilities responsible for issues on private property they cannot necessarily legally address.
The Biden rule, said the AWWA, also posed affordability challenges for households struggling to pay for essential needs. With a nationwide price tag for replacing all lead service lines above $100 billion, many consumers will crumble financially when hit with huge water bills already ballooned by compliance with the PFAS rule.
That’s why the 2025 Trump action backs away from the idealism behind the 2024 Biden rule. They, too, do not see the 10-year timeframe as feasible — unlike the typical bureaucrat who has never had to grapple with building consensus among utilities, government, consumers, and other stakeholders to allocate the dollars needed to replace every lead service line in America.
America’s battle to eliminate lead from tap water started slowly — and only forty years ago. No one wants another Flint, Michigan, horror story — but the simple truth is that in America it takes far more than Washington federal mandates and money for people at the local level to identify lead service lines and prioritize those in the greatest need of immediate replacement. The legal battles alone can take a decade or more.
Meanwhile, the EPA and all of Washington over the past several decades have been hyper-focused on “climate change” while — until Trump 45 — ignoring real-world problems like water and wastewater infrastructure and the electric grid. If today’s timetable is too slow, look backward for the blame.
We could have started replacing lead service lines decades ago. But exceeding the speed limit is not the right way to make up for being late to the courthouse to fight a speeding ticket.
On the other hand, by setting more reasonable timetables, local communities may find that the pressure relief enables them to accelerate replacement without bankrupting public drinking water systems or their customers.