They also absorbed most of the attention while a separate set of regulatory developments moved forward quietly, without the same noise, and in some cases without the political framing that would have made them easier to track. Those are the ones that are showing up in compliance conversations right now. And in several cases, the organizations that assumed "federal deregulation" meant "reduced regulatory risk" are finding out that the two things are not the same.
The Trump administration spent much of 2025 reviewing whether to keep the Biden-era designation of PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances under CERCLA. The expectation in many corporate legal and EHS departments was that the designation would be rolled back.
It wasn't. After review, the Trump administration decided to retain the rule designating two common PFAS chemical subtypes as hazardous substances under CERCLA.
That decision carries real operational weight. The designation of PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances under CERCLA has had an immediate impact on real estate transactions, and the liability implications extend well beyond property deals. Manufacturing facilities, water and wastewater systems, and industrial sites with any historical PFAS exposure now carry cleanup and liability obligations that didn't exist five years ago and that were not relieved by the administration's broader deregulatory posture.
PFAS compliance is quickly shifting from a niche concern to a cross-department priority involving EHS, legal, and procurement. Organizations that have been treating PFAS as a future problem are increasingly finding that the problem arrived.
There's more coming. In April 2026, EPA plans to finalize a proposed rule designating nine additional PFAS compounds as hazardous constituents under RCRA, which will require corrective action for releases of these substances. That's not a distant regulatory development. It's a spring 2026 action, and it lands on top of CERCLA obligations that are already in force.
The federal SEC pullback from climate disclosure requirements created a narrative that reporting obligations had softened. For companies operating in California, that narrative is simply not accurate.
California's SB 253 requires companies with over one billion dollars in annual revenue doing business in the state to begin disclosing Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions in 2026. U.S. states like California and New York continue to advance expansive climate reporting mandates despite federal pullbacks, while companies face rising complexity as states adopt opposing pro and anti ESG laws that impact investment decisions, contracting eligibility, and operational risk.
The patchwork is the problem. A company that operates in multiple states is now navigating disclosure requirements that vary by jurisdiction, enforcement posture, and political climate. Some states are expanding obligations. Others are actively penalizing compliance with those same obligations in other states. The legal and governance complexity of that environment requires active management, and most organizations have not built the infrastructure to manage it actively.
This will be another year of lawfare in the United States. As more Trump administration energy and environmental policy initiatives are implemented, opponents will bring legal challenges, and the resulting uncertainty creates its own compliance risk. Rules that are challenged are not necessarily suspended, and organizations that paused compliance work pending legal resolution have sometimes found themselves behind when courts moved faster than expected.
The administration's withdrawal of CEQ rules implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) received coverage as a deregulatory move, which it was. What received less coverage was the practical implication: agencies now use their own rules or guidance to implement NEPA, and those rules vary agency by agency.
For companies with projects requiring federal environmental review, this creates a less predictable process, not a simpler one. The uniformity that CEQ rules provided meant organizations knew what to expect. Without it, the review process now depends more heavily on which agency is leading, what internal guidance that agency has developed, and how individual reviewers interpret their mandate. That variability is a project risk that capital planning teams need to account for, particularly for energy infrastructure, transmission, and permitting decisions moving through the federal pipeline right now.
These three developments share something important. They are all cases where the headline version of the regulatory story pointed in one direction, and the operational reality pointed somewhere different or more complicated.
Federal deregulation is real. It has reduced certain compliance burdens in certain sectors. But it did not produce a broadly simplified regulatory environment. It produced a more fragmented one, where state obligations have intensified to fill federal gaps, where retained regulations carry more weight because federal enforcement posture has shifted the focus to specific high-profile targets, and where the legal challenges to deregulatory actions have created their own layer of uncertainty.
Agency rulemaking is likely to pick up during 2026 to get through both the rulemaking process and the inevitable legal challenges while the current administration is in office. More rules moving faster through a contested legal environment means more situations where compliance obligations are unclear, enforcement is unpredictable, and the organizations that waited for certainty are the ones scrambling.
The executives and legal teams that navigated Q1 well understood this. They didn't assume that federal deregulation meant the compliance calendar had cleared. They mapped the specific obligations in their specific jurisdictions, identified where state requirements had effectively replaced federal ones, and treated the PFAS liability question as settled rather than pending.
The organizations that assumed otherwise are now having different conversations with their legal teams.
