When Regulators Fail, Litigation Becomes the Last Stand for Worker and Public Safety

As oversight agencies face funding cuts and weakened authority, lawsuits are emerging as a critical tool to uncover contamination, hold polluters accountable, and protect communities from toxic exposures.

• By Paul J Napoli
• September 23, 2025

This year, the EPA has proposed rolling back pollution safeguards — the very rules meant to limit toxic PFAS in our drinking water and cut emissions from power plants. Unfortunately, this move could mean more delays, more exposure, and no real accountability from companies when their workers — and the wider general populace — are exposed to toxic chemicals and environmental waste.

Occupational hazards can often lead to long-term health problems down the road, so it’s essential to stop unnecessary exposure to toxic materials and other environmental hazards as soon as possible, limiting their impacts. But this awareness is only possible if 1. The organizations and workforces are able to reliably uncover the risks, and 2. Then receive guidance for how best to mitigate such exposure.

It’s not just shifting standards in uncovering and mitigating PFAS chemicals. Many regulatory agencies are being stripped of power, funding, and trust. They are getting gutted everywhere — EPA, OSHA, and many more. This leaves environmental threats like PFAS contamination, pesticides, and industrial pollution unchecked. From worksites to nearby neighborhoods, exposure risks are rising as oversight erodes. When standards for monitoring activities, such as pesticide drift and power plant pollution, do not adequately encompass the effects on population health, litigation becomes increasingly crucial.

The problem here is that the agencies meant to safeguard public health are increasingly becoming unable to do so, either due to defunding, lack of power, or eroded trust. Regulators have been asked to take on too much with too few resources for decades, and this trend is making it harder to protect people from harm. As an example, my team recently flagged and identified decades-long pollution in North Carolina that the EPA and other regulatory bodies hadn’t. Had we not been able to bring awareness to this pollution through legal filing, action would likely not have taken place.

With regulators sidelined, legal investigations and community-driven lawsuits are becoming more common. Which is why some see litigation as one of the only mechanisms left to uncover hidden contamination, hold polluters accountable, and protect public and worker health. From worksites to safety standards for people’s homes, oversight is failing. This puts more pressure on law firms to produce accountability when pollutants put people at risk.

Why litigation has become the last stand

Given these regulatory rollbacks at many agencies tasked with protecting the American public, I believe we’ve entered a new era, one in which litigation has become, in essence, a fourth branch of government.

Take, as an example, the sheer number of times the Trump Administration has used the Supreme Court’s shadow docket to draw attention to legal action they deem urgent. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, in the first 20 weeks of the second Trump presidency, 19 emergency rulings were sought from the Supreme Court. To counteract the speed with which these agencies are thrown into uncertainty, attentiveness through court action is necessary.

I’ve seen the unfortunate cost firsthand in countless cases — opioid litigation, power plant pollution, and PFAS contamination. Not to mention the fight for accountability after the Flint water crisis, where communities were exposed to lead and ignored for years. It’s not just about compensation. It’s uncovering the truth, changing behavior, and creating consequences when the usual systems fail.

Through the years, we’ve seen a shift. Litigation seems to have taken center stage in public awareness, especially in how court proceedings now gain widespread coverage in the news and media. Consider the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, where a community's fight for accountability captured national attention for months, highlighting how legal action can be the only path to transparency when environmental disasters leave families displaced and uncertain about their long-term health.

That’s why litigation can be viewed as one of the last effective tools to enact change, and why I refer to it as the “fourth branch of government.” It has become so crucial as a way of drawing public attention that it merits such a statement.

Where litigation has worked to slow deregulation

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the government said the air was fine; it wasn’t. I was part of that fight for first responders, and I can attest to the degree to which the government went to evade liability. Without litigation, first responders would have had no means of accountability and reprieve. But it was an uphill battle. Without using litigation as a tool to get attention and require action, I doubt it would have resulted in compensation for first responders.

Or think of the opioid crisis, where it took extensive litigation to make any impact on the pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and pharmacies responsible for contributing to the health crisis. Had there not been a threat of prison time and a compensation ruling in these civil cases, the drug manufacturers would likely still be unaccountable for pushing opioids onto vulnerable populations.

Then there are PFAS chemicals as another example. We are just now learning the sheer scale of the contamination. In this arena, the Trump Administration has pulled funding for research into farmland usage, making it harder to fully understand its use, possible repercussions, and how we can mitigate the spread of these chemicals. My firm has been at the forefront of recent legal proceedings involving PFAS, uncovering the true scale of its contamination.

My point here is that litigation — be it through civil lawsuits or federal injunctions, or other means of court action — can be a useful tool to slow down the progress of regulatory erosion, as well as speed up compensation for victims. It forces agencies and bad actors to produce information when other methods of accountability wither away.

Law firms have a new, important responsibility

It’s a busy time for those dedicated to public health and environmental safety. Know that you are not alone. I’m not pretending when I say I am filing OSHA complaints or repping factory workers daily. They are uncovering environmental harm that affects workers directly (firefighters, farm workers, manufacturing plants near PFAS sites, etc.).

When it comes to understanding and mitigating the impacts of occupational exposures and diseases created by environmental and workplace chemical pollution (or, in the case of the healthcare space, exposure to harmful substances like EtO used in medical device sterilization), law firms have a unique ability and moral imperative to act. They can force agencies at the helm of deregulation and cover-up efforts to produce documentation for public awareness and, most importantly, accountability.

Legal firms can act as a much-needed partner to EHS folks who are exhausted from trying to keep pace in a fast-changing landscape. If nothing else, firms can help as needs arise, keeping information secured and confidential that might come in handy later.

The right technology is here to help

As we look to the future, new technological advancements can be useful in both litigation and accountability efforts. Law firms are starting to use AI to track and uncover pollution. Why? Because generative AI can do more than produce emails and other small tasks to shave a few minutes off busy schedules. It can be applied to litigation processes, like during the discovery stages, to add hands where time is of the essence.

AI has the ability to analyze massive amounts of data, which would take a human twice as long to perform, leading to faster document production for court proceedings. Furthermore, it could also be useful in monitoring pollution patterns over long periods of time, to determine where contaminations in a given region are likely to occur during specific seasons of the year. When manual oversight gets strained due to fewer hands on deck, technology can help fill these gaps and even accelerate manual processes through automation.

Guidance for EHS professionals

As safety managers and EHS professionals consider new ways to bring meaningful attention and accountability to government agencies that are experiencing defunding and weakened regulations, it’s important to remember that a legal consultation is a key step in ensuring all checkboxes are checked, all possible avenues are considered, and all red flags are identified.

Additionally, engaging with a legal firm can bring much-needed assistance with documentation efforts, especially when an agency’s responsibility for such documentation falls through the cracks. Having a paper trail for any future litigation will be essential.

Where regulatory rules are failing and where structural forces are strained, turning to specialized law firms can be a breath of fresh air in a crowded landscape of confusion. We have the unique tools to fight against time, speeding up accountability or slowing things down for public awareness to catch up.