EPA under pressure to revive noise pollution program
- May 23, 2023
Sean Reilly, E&E News
More than 40 years have passed since EPA’s noise regulation program was silenced by a Reagan-era rollback.
It’s time to start again, in the view of an advocacy group that accuses the agency of turning its back on a major peril.
In a slowly escalating campaign that includes meetings with top EPA appointees and a recent lawsuit threat, Massachusetts-based Quiet Communities Inc. aims to revive what was once a bedrock function of the Office of Air and Radiation. Should the group prevail, it would mark a rare, if not unprecedented, achievement in pushing the agency back into a previously abandoned regulatory sphere.
Their letter was made public by Protect the Public’s Trust, a conservative watchdog group, which obtained it though an open records act request. The correspondence does not reflect an EPA response, but the Biden administration’s $12 billion fiscal 2024 budget request for EPA, released in March, contains no money for noise control.