FILE – Vials containing PFAS samples sit in a tray April 10, 2024, at a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lab in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel, File) Last month, two stories arrived at the same time, and together they tell us something we need to hear.
The first: The Pentagon has quietly delayed the cleanup of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, at nearly 200 military sites across 42 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. Not by months. By a decade on average, and in some communities by nearly two decades.
Eleven contaminated military sites were originally set to reach cleanup milestones in 2025. None met those timelines. They are now expected to reach those benchmarks between five and 19 years later than previously anticipated. At sites where PFAS contamination has already reached drinking water, families are being told to keep waiting.
The second: a landmark study published in JAMA Network Open, drawing on the National Institutes of Health’s Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) cohort, one of the largest and most diverse pregnancy studies ever conducted in the United States. The study found that pregnant women are exposed to dozens of everyday chemicals, many of which can affect how early a child is born or a child’s weight at birth.
It examined 10 classes of chemicals simultaneously, and the exposures were widespread. The harms were measurable. While this study did not examine PFAS directly, the scientific literature, including prior research from the ECHO program itself, has documented that PFAS exposure during pregnancy is associated with reduced birthweight, preterm birth and impaired fetal growth.
The cumulative picture is clear: The chemicals surrounding us during pregnancy matter, and they exact a measurable toll on the next generation. When taken together, a pattern becomes impossible to ignore.
The ECHO study did not measure PFAS specifically, but that is precisely the point. Pregnant women are not exposed to one chemical at a time. They carry a cumulative burden of dozens of chemicals simultaneously, from food packaging, personal care products, household goods and contaminated drinking water.
PFAS from military sites do not arrive in isolation. They arrive on top of everything else. And the government’s response to that documented, measurable burden is to quietly push cleanup deadlines out another decade, cut environmental restoration budgets and loosen restrictions on the very chemicals causing harm.
This is not a failure of knowledge. This is a failure of will. For years, I served on the Pease Restoration Advisory Board, a community oversight body created to hold the Air Force accountable for PFAS contamination at the former Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire. I watched an institution with enormous resources and clear legal obligations find endless reasons to slow-walk cleanup, dispute findings and manage timelines in ways that protected its budget rather than the people living downwind and downstream.
I also notified the state of a pediatric cancer cluster on the New Hampshire seacoast in 2014, a discovery that led directly to some of the nation’s first PFAS drinking water standards. The children in that cluster did not have the luxury of waiting for convenient timelines. PFAS contamination from military and industrial sources contaminates community drinking water and does not respect property lines. Delay is not a neutral act. It is a playbook.
As the Pentagon has assessed the scale of the problem and its cost, it has reduced the funding allocated to address it.
The Government Accountability Office recently found that the cost of PFAS investigation and cleanup will exceed $9.3 billion, tripling prior estimates. Rather than rising to meet that obligation, the administration has proposed cutting Pentagon environmental restoration funding even as cleanup costs have tripled, and timelines continue to slip. The fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law in December, extended the military’s authority to purchase and use PFAS firefighting foam through October, with broad new exemptions that could extend its use indefinitely.
The message to communities is unmistakable: Your water, your pregnancy, your child’s health, are acceptable losses.
More than 723 military installations and their surrounding communities are confirmed or potentially contaminated with PFAS. Blood tests in residents living near bases have revealed PFAS levels multiple times the national average. Farmers and ranchers have lost livelihoods. Veterans who served their country are now fighting a second battle, this time against the institution they served, just to get clean water.
The ECHO study is a gift of scientific clarity in an era of manufactured confusion. Researchers tracked real pregnancies, measured real exposures and found real associations with preterm birth and reduced birth weight. These outcomes shape a child’s health for life. And they do not fall randomly. They fall hardest on communities with the least power to push back, communities that often sit in the shadow of a military installation that has never been fully held to account.
Every year of delay is a year of continued exposure. The families near Pease Air Force Base, Wurtsmith Air Base in Michigan, Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania and Brunswick Naval Air Station in Maine know that.
Science has done its job. The question now is whether the people we elect to protect us will do theirs. Congress must require enforceable cleanup timelines, with the funding to meet them, and stop treating the most vulnerable among us as an acceptable cost of doing business.
Mindi F. Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a senior research scientist at a national nonprofit research institution and an assistant professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine. She is a former New Hampshire state representative, a former member of the Pease Restoration Advisory Board, co-founder of the New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance and chair of New Hampshire’s Environmentally-Triggered Chronic Disease Statutory Commission.
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