Congress quietly dismantles toxic-disease tracking agency under farm-relief label
H.R. 91 — Freedom for Farmers Act of 2025 · Filed by Andy Biggs (R-AZ) · Introduced Jan 3, 2025 · Referred to committee
Your members of Congress
Enter a ZIP to see where your representative and both senators stood on this bill.
Looked up on this device — your ZIP is never stored on our servers.
What it does
This bill abolishes the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a federal agency that maintains registries of serious diseases and toxic exposures, and transfers its core functions to the Department of Health and Human Services within one year. The bill strips ATSDR from dozens of federal environmental and public-health statutes, removing it from coordination roles in water safety, chemical exposure assessment, and disease tracking.
Why we flagged it
The bill's stated purpose is agency abolition, but its functional effect is to dismantle a regulatory and public-health surveillance apparatus. The title 'Freedom for Farmers Act' frames this as agricultural relief, but the bill does not mention farming, pesticides, or agricultural regulation—it abolishes disease and toxic-exposure tracking, suggesting the title is a rhetorical wrapper for broader deregulation.
What the text implies
- Removal of ATSDR from 14+ federal statutes eliminates a dedicated interagency voice on toxic exposures in water safety, chemical regulation, and emergency response—functions now scattered across multiple agencies with competing priorities.
- The bill transfers ATSDR's disease and exposure registries to HHS without specifying budget, staffing, or statutory mandate, creating risk that these registries atrophy or are deprioritized within a larger bureaucracy.
The full analysis lists 4 implications of this text.
Who stands to gain
agricultural chemical manufacturers; industrial polluters; companies subject to toxic-exposure liability