In 1881, a group of forward-looking engineers founded the American Water Works Association (AWWA), whose goal was to improve protection of the public from tap water contamination. In the early 1900s, AWWA members and their onetime leader Abel Wolman helped to install water filtration and chlorination plants that largely eliminated cholera and typhoid, which in 1900 had been killing 1 in 20 Americans. But in recent years, the Abel Wolmans of the water utility industry seem largely to have disappeared, or to have been silenced.
What has happened to AWWA? While many water utility executives view themselves as “public health professionals,” AWWA is no longer are a voice for improved public health protection. In fact, all evidence is that it has now become the opposite. Rather than working hard to break our broken water infrastructure financing system, the association is, in some cases, teaming up with polluters and fighting to keep known contamination in drinking water. We would be happy to work with AWWA and utilities to fight for additional funding for water infrastructure and for assistance for low-income households to pay their water bills. But of late, AWWA’s priorities seem to be elsewhere.
Litigation to block protections from contaminated drinking water
- Lawsuit to block the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) rule to protect the public from lead contamination. Despite AWWA’s repeated statements since at least 2016 (recently reiterated) that it supports removal of all lead service lines, in late 2024, AWWA hired an expensive Washington, D.C., law firm to sue to block the lead in drinking water rule that would require just that—removal of lead service lines. This rule would prevent our kids from losing 200,000 IQ points and avoid thousands of deaths in adults from heart attacks due to lead in tap water. The benefits of the rule outweigh the costs by up to 13-fold or more. And the rule will prevent nearly a million children from being born with a low birth weight, which puts them at risk of developmental complications, and thousands of kids will be protected against ADHD due to less lead in their water.
- Litigation to overturn protections against toxic “forever chemicals” in tap water. AWWA and a sister utility group—the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies—joined the same chemical industries that have been polluting our drinking water in a 2024 lawsuit to block the EPA’s new drinking water standards for six of toxic PFAS, often called “forever chemicals.” The rule would protect up to 105 million Americans from these toxics that EPA has linked to cancer, kidney, liver, developmental, nervous and immune system, and reproductive harms.
- Lawsuit to kill the EPA’s guidelines to protect water systems from cyberattacks. AWWA and allies sued in 2023 and forced the EPA to retreat on cybersecurity guidelines. Predictably, last year the largest private water utility, American Water, had a cyberattack that reportedly caused it to shut down some operations, likely just a taste of our future.
- Litigation opposing a tap water standard for the rocket fuel component perchlorate. AWWA opposed a tap water standard for the toxic rocket fuel component perchlorate, which contaminates millions of Americans’ drinking water and is a developmental toxic that’s especially dangerous to pregnant women and infants. After AWWA helped persuade the first Trump EPA to refuse to set such a standard, they intervened in litigation to support that agency refusal. In 2023, a court rejected EPA’s and AWWA’s position as unlawful, ordering the EPA to set that standard.
Lobbying to weaken the Safe Drinking Water Act and EPA rules
- Silence on the proposed repeal of the EPA’s lead in drinking water rules in Congress? In one of the very first acts in the new Congress, Alabama representative Gary Palmer introduced a resolution in January 2025 that would not only erase the EPA’s lead tap water standard that AWWA opposes, but could tie the EPA’s hands from ever protecting people from lead pipes serving them water. AWWA has not publicly opposed it, despite its longstanding public pronouncements that it supports complete removal of all lead service lines.
- Persuading Congress to hobble the EPA’s ability to adopt new drinking water standards. After the EPA adopted many drinking water protections in the early 1990s, AWWA and its allies launched a successful lobbying campaign to gut the agency’s standard-setting authority. The 1996 amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act made it so onerous for the EPA to adopt new protections that for nearly 30 years, the agency failed to go through this cumbersome process to adopt a single new standard for an unregulated contaminant. The first time the EPA succeeded in running this gauntlet was last year’s standard for six forever chemicals. And AWWA and its allies are now litigating to stop it, citing the ungainly provisions in the 1996 law that they helped write.
Exaggerating costs and challenging benefits of health protections
- Inflating the supposed costs of the EPA’s rule protecting the public from lead-contaminated tap water. When AWWA fought against the EPA’s lead in tap water rule, the group doubled its cost estimates from just two years earlier (see p. 12-1 here). The EPA found (see Appendix A) that AWWA cherrypicked non-representative, anecdotal data from a small number of utilities (including several outliers), likely double-counted certain costs, and used inappropriate statistical analyses to draw its conclusions. The EPA also dismantled AWWA’s unfortunate challenges to the benefits of reducing children’s brain damage and adults’ heart attacks and other harms due to lead exposure. (see sec. 16.4 here)
- Exaggerating the costs of the EPA’s protections for tap water from toxic forever chemicals. As part of its campaign to weaken or block the EPA standards for six toxic PFAS forever chemicals, AWWA also grossly inflated the purported costs of the standards. The EPA carefully evaluated the costs and found that they would be less than half of what AWWA claimed, a conclusion confirmed by an independent engineering firm we asked to evaluate the costs (see here). Again, the EPA was forced to reply to AWWA’s unfounded attacks on the agency’s evaluation of many of the health benefits that will result from its standards (see sec. 13 here).
Successfully fighting the EPA’s proposal to prohibit utilities from making “false or misleading” statements to their consumers about their drinking water
- The EPA proposed a rule that would have prevented water systems from making “false or misleading” statements about their water or compliance record in reports to consumers that are required by the Safe Drinking Water Act. AWWA and allies lobbied furiously to delete this provision. The EPA relented and deleted this prohibition from the final rule. AWWA went out on a limb to defend its right to mislead consumers about water safety.
- NRDC submitted extensive, detailed comments on the EPA proposal that documented why the agency should prohibit false or misleading statements, reviewing reports from numerous water systems that had serious lead contamination, violations, or other water quality problems. We documented that utilities make misleading or outright false statements about their water. They frequently state that their water is “safe” and that they have excellent water that is in full compliance—even when it isn’t. For example, one system had been cited for health standard violations and had excessive lead levels well above the EPA’s action level but claimed it had “some of the best water in the state” and was in full compliance with all standards, which was false.
We can have safe drinking water that’s affordable for all
AWWA’s excuse for opposing all of these requirements has been that they will increase water rates and make water bills unaffordable for low-income people. But as my colleague Larry Levine has documented repeatedly and extensively, it is possible to ensure that our drinking water is both safe and affordable even for those most financially strapped; we even have a toolkit for how to make this happen.
Additional federal and state funding would help advance these twin goals—including funding for water infrastructure upgrades and for operation and maintenance for lower-income and underinvested communities. Also helpful will be enactment of a nationwide low-income household water assistance program, akin to the LIHEAP program for energy assistance, and restructuring of some troubled utilities (with community participation). And water utilities that take affordability concerns seriously should jettison their regressive rate structures and adopt low-income affordability programs, as some systems already have done, so that no one loses access to water because they can’t afford the bill.
Can AWWA and utility associations change their tune?
There has been a sad and steep fall for AWWA from its establishment nearly 150 years ago by a visionary group of engineers who sought to clean up our water supplies. There are many well-meaning water utilities and executives who want to provide the safest water feasible to their customers and do not support the extreme actions of AWWA and AMWA. The savvy ones recognize that they need regulations to enable them to make the case to those who control water rates and purse strings to authorize funding. Take lead pipes for example: For many years, AWWA has said it supports removing them, but because it’s voluntary, most utilities haven’t lifted a finger to do so—it will require rules to achieve this goal.
Yet the thoughtful water utility executives remain quiet and continue to fund and retain their membership in these organizations. The time has come for them to reckon with their consciences and press the associations to change their tune or to quit. Do they think the country’s children don’t deserve the best protection we can feasibly achieve? I suspect not. But their trade association that the public has never heard of allows utilities to avoid accountability for undermining the health benefits that the EPA’s rules are intended to provide.
I hope the water utility industry’s fever will break and that forward-looking leaders among them will revolt against the retrograde elements of their industry. We will gladly fight shoulder-to-shoulder with them to enact more federal, state, and local funding for water infrastructure and a national low-income household water assistance program. They could agree that lead pipes need to be removed in the next decade and install state of the art treatment to control forever chemicals and other risky contaminants as some of their brothers and sisters in the industry already are doing. They could vigorously fight to stop the same polluters that they ironically have joined in suing the EPA to challenge the forever chemicals standards.
Yes, the nation would welcome more Abel Wolmans.
