The Trump administration is considering green-lighting the use of the fiber despite its known toxicity, according to a Monday court filing, per The New York Times. Asbestos is banned in more than 50 countries and is linked to an estimated 40,000 deaths annually.
Former President Joe Biden fully banned its use after a decades-long partial ban, which forbade new uses of asbestos in products introduced after August 1989. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a ban on asbestos under the Toxic Substances Control Act.
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Representative Teresa Leger Fernández, a Democrat from New Mexico, also went off on the MAGA administration.
“The Trump administration isn’t just going after ‘regulations,’ they’re going after your health,“ Fernández said. ”Who benefits from bringing back cancer-causing asbestos? Russia.”
She linked to an article from Ars Technica reporting that Trump’s support for asbestos has been welcomed by Russians with open arms, since the country is a primary asbestos supplier to the U.S. In 2018, a Russian asbestos company started marketing asbestos with Trump’s face on it and a label reading, “Approved by Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States.”
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John Jackson, a veteran and former Republican, called the move “f---ing psychotic.”
“Asbestos killed millions of people and the cancer it causes is the most lethal known to man,” he wrote. “The litigation surrounding it was an absolute clusterf--- that took decades to resolve and involved some of the largest bankruptcies in history.”