Millions of Americans still get water from toxic lead service lines. Replacing them won’t be easy.

How big a problem is lead pollution? 
It’s dropped significantly since the 1970s, with the phasing out of leaded gasoline and bans on new lead water pipes and lead-based paint. But the toxic heavy metal remains laced throughout the infrastructure of many aging urban neighborhoods, and lead contamination continues to cause up to 412,000 deaths a year in the U.S., according to a 2018 study. Some 9.2 million lead pipes still carry water into homes across the U.S., and an estimated 31 million homes contain lead paint. Nearly 4 million of those properties are home to one or more children under age 6, who are at the greatest risk of health problems from lead exposure. To tackle this health threat, President Biden last month announced a new Environmental Protection Agency rule, setting a 10-year deadline for cities to identify and replace lead pipes. Meeting that goal could cost up to $47 billion. But many researchers argue that the health cost savings will far outweigh the expense of replacing the piping—by as much as 35 to 1, according to a Harvard study. “We can fix this problem,” said Harvard lecturer and former EPA scientist Ronnie Levin. “We just need the will to do it.” 

What makes lead so dangerous?
It is a neurotoxin that can easily enter the bloodstream when particles are breathed in or ingested. It then starts disrupting the flow of oxygen, building up within organs, and interfering with the neurotransmitter glutamate, which aids memory and learning. Lead accumulation has been linked to cardiovascular problems, kidney damage, cancer, and other issues in adults. But it does its most immediate, debilitating harm to the brains and nervous systems of children—exposure to small amounts of the metal can cause kids to appear inattentive, hyperactive, and irritable. Higher levels of exposure can cause children to grow and develop more slowly, and to suffer hearing loss and severe learning and behavior problems. The lead that leaches from pipes into drinking water results in American children losing a collective 200,000 IQ points a year, according to the EPA. Jade Shirey unknowingly exposed her son Benny to lead dust after sanding the painted floors in her home in Jamestown, N.Y.; he went from being a bubbly toddler who could sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to a nonverbal pre-kindergartner who has frequent meltdowns and difficulty following simple instructions. “My kid is 4 1/2 years old,” said Jade, “and I don’t even know what his voice sounds like.” 

Have lead bans made a difference?
Health data shows that they have. In the late 1970s, the average blood lead level in American children ages 1 to 5 was 15 micrograms per deciliter; the Centers for Disease Control has determined that medical attention is required at levels above 3.5 micrograms. It was 0.83 micrograms in the most recently measured period, from 2011 to 2016. Because lead poisoning is known to increase aggression, some economists even single out the removal of lead from gas and paint as the key contributor to the steep drop in violent crime rates since the 1990s. But nearly 500,000 children, a disproportionate share of them poor and non-white, still have lead levels that exceed the CDC’s 3.5 micrograms per deciliter threshold. The 1991 Lead and Copper Rule, which mandated water systems to either replace lead pipes or treat them with chemical anti-leaching agents, has been unevenly enforced. Most infamously, Michigan officials in 2014 ignored EPA guidelines to add an anti- corrosive agent when they began supplying the city of Flint with polluted, highly corrosive water from the Flint River. Lead leached from city’s pipes, the number of children with high blood lead levels doubled, and the share of children who qualify for special education services climbed 8 percent—researchers say broader community trauma could also have contributed to that rise. 

What is the solution?
Since the EPA says there is “no safe level” of lead in drinking water, it is mandating lead pipe removal. But with the cost of digging up and replacing each pipe running between $4,700 and $12,500, some local governments, utilities, and landlords are worried about who’ll pay. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law commits $15 billion toward the effort; municipalities and individual property owners may have to cover the remaining costs. Some cities are now mired in disputes over who is responsible for which pipes. And researchers are concerned about flaws in the EPA’s system of distributing funds: It identified Florida as having the most “projected” lead service lines, even though the Sunshine State’s homes and infrastructure are generally newer than those in the Northeast. Fifteen Republican state attorneys general, led by Kris Kobach of Kansas, have called for the “unworkable, underfunded, and unnec- essary” EPA rule to be withdrawn. 

Could it be scrapped?
Quite possibly. The Supreme Court’s decision this summer to end the 40-year-old Chevron deference precedent—which gave executive agencies wide leeway to interpret ambiguous laws—could make it easier for a challenger to overturn the EPA rule in court. President-elect Donald Trump has also vowed to cut environmental regulations when he takes office in January; during his first term, he rolled back more than 100 environmental rules. Project 2025, the policy blueprint devised by former Trump staffers and allies, contains sections mandating a “pause and review” of existing environmental rules and the virtual elimination of EPA enforcement powers. “Basically the entire infrastructure” of the EPA is “very much under attack,” said Erik Olson of the National Resources Defense Council. And with a project as enormous as lead removal, it’s often “the folks that don’t want to do anything who rule the day.”

America’s lead capital 
Chicago has far more lead service lines than any other U.S. city, an unenviable record rooted in politics. Thanks to powerful mid-20th-century plumbing unions, whose members preferred the metal’s relative strength and malleability, the city code long specified that pipes connected to its water systems had to be lead. Water still flows to some 400,000 Chicago homes through lead pipes, and though the EPA has extended the city’s deadline to replace them by another decade, city officials estimate the process will take at least 50 years. Some past removal efforts only worsened the problem: When crews attached new cast-iron mains to lead service lines, they unsettled the pipe’s corrosion-control coating, sending lead-contaminated water into taps. Meanwhile, nearly 70 percent of children under 6 in Chicago live in homes with lead-contaminated water. “Does it hurt the children growing up? Sure, it does,” said longtime Chicago plumbing engineer Julius Ballanco. “Does it impact their mental capacity and decrease their ability? Yes.”

Donald Trump has created a task force to “dismantle the federal government,” said Michael Embrich in Rolling Stone. The president-elect announced last week that he was naming multibillionaire Elon Musk, who spent at least $119 million to get Trump back in the White House, and entrepreneur and “MAGA hype man” Vivek Ramaswamy to head his cost-cutting project, the “Department of Government Efficiency.” DOGE won’t be an actual department or even part of the government, which would require approval from Congress. But that hasn’t stopped Musk and Ramaswamy from proposing “extreme measures,” like cutting $2 trillion from the $6 trillion federal budget, “deleting” entire agencies, and firing 95 percent of government employees. “Yet the math simply doesn’t add up.” Only about 4 percent of the budget goes to civilian employee compensation, and firing all those workers would cripple national defense, veterans’ care, homeland security, and other essential services. To meet DOGE’s saving goals, the popular, big-ticket programs that make up two-thirds of spending—including Social Security and Medicare—would need to be slashed. Only Congress can stop “this impending disaster.” 

Our spending addiction is the real disaster, said Brian Hamilton in Fortune. A surging budget deficit pushed the national debt to a record $35 trillion this year. In September alone, we spent $38 billion servicing the interest on the debt, about 15 percent of the individual income tax dollars generated that month. This is wildly unsustainable, and DOGE’s goal of restoring fiscal sanity to Washington “is a worthy cause.” Musk and Ramaswamy will find plenty of budget items they can “toss, shrink, or squeeze,” said Andy Kessler in The Wall Street Journal. For starters, they could push for the Education Department to be shuttered and its duties returned to the states, or for the Agriculture Department’s corn subsidies to be nixed. Entrenched interests in both parties mean most of DOGE’s suggestions will probably be DOA. But even if this initiative saves only a few hundred billion, “it will be worth it.” 

It’s likely that DOGE will end with a “glorified recommendations report, written by a combination of AI chatbots and underpaid interns,” said Nitish Pahwa in Slate. But let’s be clear why Musk is engaged in this exercise. The world’s richest man doesn’t care about government efficiency, but instead hopes that DOGE will encourage Trump to weed out the regulators who oversee his SpaceX, Neuralink, and Tesla businesses. “In other words: shrink the government, and make it work more for the president’s men and less for the American people. What could go wrong?”

At 42, John Mulaney is finally a stable adult, said Brett Martin in GQ. Four years ago, the stand-up comedian underwent a very public crisis: He entered rehab for addiction to cocaine and prescription drugs. He and his wife, Anna Marie Tendler, split up. Then he relapsed again, hard. At one point, he left the door open to his New York City apartment because he thought paramedics might need to come get him after a cocaine binge. “I didn’t want them to have to break the door down,” Mulaney explains. A group of famous friends—including Seth Meyers, Natasha Lyonne, and Fred Armisen—staged an intervention, and he went back to rehab. 

Mulaney is now married to actress Olivia Munn, who still gives him random drug tests. “I like to be able to not even have that be a question in her or anyone else’s mind. Something about peeing in that cup is like, I’m walking this walk.” They now have two children, 3-year-old Malcolm and two-month-old Méi June. Mulaney is embracing fatherhood. “I’ve always been good at working with and for unreasonable people. Malcolm sometimes feels like one of those bosses: ‘Why is your hair wet?? Make it dry!’” Mostly, he’s glad to be alive. “It was like a tornado picked me up. And I landed somewhere extremely lucky and nice.”