Sen. Gary Peters convened the Senate’s first hearing on PFAS contamination in 2018 and brought attention to Oscoda, Michigan, where residents had spent years pressing for action to clean up the “forever chemicals” contaminating the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base. He asked what the federal government could do to identify the contamination, protect residents and speed the cleanup.
Eight years later, Peters is preparing to leave the Senate and Wurtsmith is still on the Pentagon’s long list of U.S. military installations with delayed investigations into PFAS contamination. So are 10 other Michigan sites, according to Peters’ office. At Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center and Selfridge Air National Guard Base, projected dates for completing the investigation and study phase have slipped by 26 years.
Now the Michigan Democrat is introducing one last piece of legislation to force progress at the Pentagon, the PFAS RAPID Response Act. Within two years of the bill becoming law, the Defense Department would have to initiate interim actions at at least 100 of the 351 installations with delayed investigation schedules. It also requires a congressional briefing within 30 days of becoming law.
“The community embraced the Air Force for all those years, and then they moved out and left this mess — and they need to come back in and clean it up,” Peters told The Washington Sun.
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The bill gives Peters the chance to shape a cleanup effort that will likely run for decades after his term ends in January. The military’s extensive use of firefighting foam containing PFAS — known as “forever chemicals” because they can persist in water, soil and air for decades — has potentially exposed service members, their families and nearby communities to health risks.
Peters, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has worked on PFAS for much of his career. He successfully helped push the military to move away from its reliance on firefighting foam that contains these chemicals and provide alternative drinking water when community wells are contaminated by PFAS. A defense law signed last year included provisions he led requiring a Pentagon strategy to accelerate PFAS remediation and a public dashboard showing site-level progress and timelines.
But getting the Pentagon to address the contamination itself has required him and other lawmakers to keep up the pressure.
“I’ve been a dog on a bone when it comes to that,” he said.
The Pentagon has identified just under 600 current and former military installations that require further investigation and likely cleanup. Its latest public update delayed projected end dates for the investigation and feasibility-study stage for 243 installations.
Those dates are for the work of figuring out the extent of contamination and how to fix it. They are not deadlines for completing a permanent cleanup. Peters’ bill would push the Pentagon to take protective steps while that extended process continues, such as treating contaminated groundwater or removing heavily contaminated soil, depending on the site.
“We here in Grayling are very grateful for the support we have received from Senator Peters and are very concerned about the future support of the PFAS contamination in the state and our community,” said Ray Basile, the community co-chair for the Camp Grayling Restoration Advisory Board. A PFAS plume from the military base in Grayling, Michigan, is migrating toward the town’s water source. The community has been trying, without success, to push the Pentagon to invest in stopping it before it reaches the water supply.
A Government Accountability Office review described PFAS cleanup as an undertaking that could take decades and billions of dollars. Costs are expected to rise as investigators discover the contamination’s full extent and determine the remedies.
Peters argued the Pentagon already has the money to begin work, even if Congress ultimately needs to provide more.
“You have enough money to start,” he said. “Whether or not you have money to finish it may be different.”
The Pentagon declined to comment on the pending legislation, citing its policy of not doing so. It pointed to its public explanation that new water standards have required more sensitive testing and another look at previously evaluated sites.
It also said it is prioritizing sites with the highest health risks and that updated timelines don’t necessarily mean delayed cleanups. It said it is already taking interim steps, such as providing alternative drinking water, treating contaminated groundwater and removing contaminated soil.
John Conger, a former Pentagon official who oversaw environmental policy, said the legislation raised the question of whether the Defense Department and Environmental Protection Agency have enough staff to complete the necessary work.
“If you want to have 50 or 100 sites take action in a certain period of time, you need people to execute all of those things; you need people to work up the documents, you need people at the EPA to be able to sign off,” he said. “They have a limited capacity and a limited staff over there to handle all of this.”
Conger said the Defense Department could do more immediately to explain the delays to residents. When it changes a projected date, it should publish a reason alongside the new date. “It’s not complicated,” he said. “Then you’re giving people information so that they understand what the hell happened.”
Lawmakers have been urging the Pentagon under successive administrations to go faster. Under President Donald Trump, there have been three rounds of delays, some adding decades to the timetables.
Peters meanwhile has pursued a similar approach through the annual defense bill. A provision he secured in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s version would require interim action in at least 50 delayed sites.
Peters said he and the co-sponsor of Thursday’s measure, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota), would work to expand the requirement in the defense bill to match their new standalone bill. Rounds’ home state has also faced lengthy delays: Investigation timelines at Ellsworth Air Force Base, Joe Foss Field Airport and Rapid City Regional Airport have slipped by at least a decade, according to the senators’ offices.
“I thought we had it on a schedule before, but we have new delays,” Rounds said. “The longer you delay, the more it disperses into the ground, which makes it more difficult and more expensive to clean up.”
If the expanded requirement does not become law before this Congress ends, lawmakers would have to pursue it again next year. Rounds said he intends to continue the work after Peters leaves, alongside other lawmakers from both parties.
“There are others that understand how serious it is, and this is something that impacts a lot of our Air Force bases,” he said. “Any place where you’ve had firefighting equipment over the years, there’s PFAS in the groundwater or in and around the groundwater, and we just have to clean it up.”
Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who will become Michigan’s senior senator, said she intends to take a larger role in addressing PFAS contamination and protecting the Great Lakes. Pointing to her work on PFAS legislation in the House and turnover among several lawmakers involved in water issues, she called this “the right time for me to be stepping up.”
“This is one of a number of issues I plan on just taking on in the role of senior senator,” she said. “I’m excited to take the charge.”
Peters declined to designate a successor but pointed to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s (D-New York) involvement with the bill alongside Rounds and Slotkin. Asked whether he felt he had done enough, he said the scale and expense of the problem would require Congress’s attention for years to come.
“You can never do enough,” he said. “You have to keep working at it, and it’s expensive to fix, so there’s a lot of pushback. You just have to be persistent. You have to be dogged.”
The campaign for Peters’ seat — between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers — has not focused on Michigan’s PFAS issues, leaving the Grayling community uncertain about who will take up the mantle with Peters gone.
“We have yet to hear from either candidate about their position on this very important subject and the effects the PFAS contamination will continue to have on the health of our citizens,” Basile said.
Both candidates told The Sun the PFAS issue remains a priority should they win in November.
“This delay is another policy failure by an administration that, time and again, screws over Michigan, either through incompetence or malice. Bases in Michigan, like the former Wurtsmith Airforce Base, rely on cooperation from the federal government in order to keep our environment healthy and safe,” El-Sayed said. “Sen. Peters has led on this fight and … I want to carry that work forward.”
“Michigan families deserve to know their drinking water is safe and clean, and the firefighters who spend their careers protecting our communities deserve protection from further PFAS exposure,” Rogers said. “PFAS contamination ought to be cleaned up expeditiously.”
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