Congressional candidate Stefany Shaheen is calling for New Hampshire to slow down data center development until the consequences for water and energy are better understood, a stance rooted in the state’s hard-won lessons on PFAS contamination. Merrimack lived through Saint-Gobain’s pollution: a company that promised jobs in exchange for minimal regulation and left behind elevated rates of kidney cancer and a state investigation. Families like the Landrigans learned their well water was contaminated only after the state called to tell them to stop drinking it. This piece argues that prevention and regulation, not unfettered growth, are what protect communities the next time a major industry comes courting.

• Saint-Gobain’s PFAS contamination in Merrimack led to a state investigation into elevated kidney cancer rates and other cancers.

• Data centers promise economic benefits, but without regulatory guardrails, they risk repeating the same pattern: jobs and revenue promised, costs to public health left unaddressed.

• Stefany Shaheen is calling for a slowdown on data center development until impacts on water and energy are understood.

• New Hampshire’s PFAS history, from Pease Air Force Base to the Seacoast cancer cluster to Merrimack, shows what happens when regulation lags behind industry.

• This is not an anti-business position: it’s an argument for proactive protection instead of reactive cleanup.

Stefany Shaheen shows up for environmental and public health issues:

“I think ultimately what we need to be doing is slowing down the development of these projects until we better understand the consequences,” Stefany Shaheen said, and that is exactly the kind of leadership we need right now.

I’ve spent years working on PFAS contamination in this state, from the Pease Air Force Base aquifer to the Seacoast pediatric cancer cluster to Merrimack’s Saint-Gobain plume, so this hits close to home. We have already paid for “unfettered” growth once. Saint-Gobain shut down in Vermont and moved into Merrimack, promising us jobs in exchange for minimal regulation. What we got instead was elevated rates of kidney cancer serious enough to trigger a state investigation, along with elevated rates of other cancers, all traced back to the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) coined “forever chemicals” that the company dumped into our water for years before anyone stopped them. Families like the Landrigans got a phone call telling them not to drink their own well water, not to use it on their gardens, not to use it at all. That is not ancient history. That is less than a decade ago in New Hampshire.

Data centers bring jobs and tax revenue, and those are real benefits worth weighing seriously. But as two-term town councilor and NH State Representative Nancy Murphy and resident Brian Landrigan both point out, nobody is talking about the cost of letting another industry move in without real regulatory guardrails.

We don’t need a repeat of the Saint-Gobain story with a new industry’s name.

Prevention and regulation are not anti-business. They are how we make sure the next headline is not about our kids’ health.

This is an example of where her heart is and how she will fight to prevent a repeat across the US, and it is one reason I’m voting for Stefany Shaheen to be my Congresswoman by September 8th.

You can read the Union Leader story here.

Mindi Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a former New Hampshire State Representative, Chair of NH’s Environmentally-Triggered Chronic Illness Statutory Commission, and co-founder of the NH Safe Water Alliance and NH Science and Public Health.

The Union Leader ran my op-ed on the NH-01 primary this week, and I wanted to share it here too, for anyone who missed it.

I’m not the only one making this case. In July, four New Hampshire mayors, including Somersworth’s Matt Gerding, Rochester’s Chuck Grassie, Dover’s Dennis Shanahan, and Portsmouth’s Deaglan McEachern, wrote an op-ed supporting Shaheen, highlighting her record on the Portsmouth City Council, including her work to get PFAS-exposed residents screened and to ensure the cleanup was done right. Mayors don’t have the luxury of ideology; they must deliver. When four of them, who watch her work up close, reach the same conclusion I have, that’s worth noting.

I served alongside Stefany Shaheen on the task force then-Governor Maggie Hassan created to investigate the pediatric cancer cluster I had identified on New Hampshire’s Seacoast in 2014. I later spent years on the Pease Restoration Advisory Board, working to address PFAS pollution at the former Pease Air Force Base, and I pushed the EPA to enforce the original Coakley Landfill cleanup plan when regulators sought to roll it back. I know exactly what it looks like when someone shows up for this fight because I watched Shaheen do it from the seat next to mine.

Stefany Shaheen showed up.

Like me, Stefany fights for our children. Shaheen has spent her career proving she will, whether the threat is a chemical in the water supply or a disease in her daughter’s blood.

I have looked for that same record by Maura Sullivan, but I can’t find it. Her background is in the Marine Corps and the Pentagon, not in Portsmouth’s water system or the Seacoast’s cancer cluster investigations. I have been in these fights since 2016, in the same hearing rooms, on the same task forces and boards, alongside the same families. I never saw her there. Not once.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this pattern from her. When I ran for Executive Council in 2020, Sullivan agreed to headline an EMILY’s List event for my campaign. She never showed up and didn’t extend the courtesy of letting us know she wouldn’t be there. That’s been her M.O. as long as I’ve known her.

Her campaign website credits her with “helping elect strong grassroots leaders across the state as Vice Chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party.” I went looking for what that means. The same line appears nearly verbatim in a Donna Soucy op-ed endorsing her, which suggests it’s a stock characterization being repeated rather than a claim anyone has backed with specifics. I found no NHDP press release, event recap, or news story crediting her with a specific candidate win, training program, or organizing effort.

NHPR’s Josh Rogers found the same pattern of inflation in Sullivan’s description of her own record. She tells voters she spent six years in the Obama administration; NHPR found the real number is two, with the other four padded by an unpaid board seat she held while working full-time at PepsiCo. Her campaign has credited her with being part of the administration when the Affordable Care Act passed, though she was at PepsiCo, not in government, when it was signed. And she has told voters she “sat across the table with Netanyahu,” a claim her own campaign, once NHPR pressed for specifics, reduced to her being one of eight Americans in the room for a single Pentagon-organized meeting two weeks into her time at the Pentagon.

What I can find is Sullivan’s donor list. Federal filings show more than $370,000 from donors also tied to AIPAC, roughly 13 times the money from 15 times the number of donors compared to what Shaheen received from the same network. Her donor list includes at least one Palantir executive whose company holds a $30 million ICE surveillance contract, as well as backing from a super PAC supported by Jeff Bezos. Those aren’t the names of people who lie awake wondering whether their well water is safe.

This isn’t hypothetical. Right now, developers are looking at New Hampshire towns for data centers, facilities that can burn through millions of gallons of water a day to keep servers cool, in a state where many Seacoast families still rely on private wells. A proposal in Nottingham was withdrawn after residents packed a hearing to oppose it.

When that fight reaches Congress, who does Sullivan answer to: the neighbors on well water or the donors bankrolling her campaign? When the next PFAS cleanup needs federal funding and the private equity and defense money that elected her wants something else, who gets the call back?

That absence and that donor list matter in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District. This seat needs a representative who has already proven she’ll dig in when the fight is neither easy nor politically convenient, not one who owes her seat to the people least affected by the outcome.

On September 8, I’ll be voting for Stefany Shaheen. Not because she says the right things about clean water, but because I watched her do the work years before anyone outside the Seacoast was paying attention, and because we already know whose calls she’ll take once she’s in Congress.

Click here to read the Union Leader op-ed

NHPR’s Josh Rogers published a piece this week that’s worth your time if you’re following the NH-01 primary. I ran against Maura Sullivan in that same primary in 2018, so I’ve watched this resume get built over two campaigns, and NHPR’s reporting lines up with what I’ve seen.

• The “six years” in the Obama administration Sullivan cites is really two, with four unpaid board-member years folded in while she worked full time at PepsiCo

• Her campaign credits her with being part of the administration when the ACA passed. She was at PepsiCo at the time

• Her claim to have “sat across the table with Netanyahu” reduces, on her own campaign’s clarification, to one of eight Americans in a single meeting

The “six years” that don’t add up

Sullivan tells voters she spent six years working for the Obama administration. NHPR found the real number is two: she worked for the Obama-era Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs from 2014 to 2016. To reach six, her count includes four years as an unpaid board member of the American Battle Monuments Commission, a position she held from 2010 to 2014 while working full-time at PepsiCo.

Her campaign website goes further, crediting her with being “part of the Obama administration when they passed the Affordable Care Act.” NHPR notes she was at PepsiCo, not in government, when the ACA was signed in March 2010. When asked about the gap, the campaign shifted the claim to say she was part of the administration when it “implemented” the ACA, but her only government post at that time was the unpaid board seat, which had nothing to do with implementing the law.

“I sat across the table with Netanyahu”

Sullivan has told voters she spent “days, if not weeks, meeting with world leaders and military leaders throughout the Middle East,” and at a May candidate forum said, “I sat across the table with Netanyahu. I sat across the table with world leaders.”

Pressed by NHPR for specifics, Sullivan pointed to a single trip: then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s visit to the Middle East after the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which came two weeks after she started at the Pentagon. Her campaign later clarified she was “one of eight Americans in the room” for that Tel Aviv meeting. It did not provide details on which “world leaders” she otherwise sat across the table from.NHPR’s reporting isn’t about whether she has a record.

It’s about whether she’s describing the one she actually has.

Voters in NH-01 deserve a candidate whose account of her own experience holds up to a fact check, especially from someone asking to be trusted with the job.

Read NHPR’s full piece here.

Highlights

• VoteVets is the single largest outside spender in the NH-01 Democratic primary, $1.21 million in independent expenditures supporting Maura Sullivan, more than any other outside group in this race. That figure comes from my own FEC data work for Part 4 of this series.

• New reporting from The Lever and The American Prospect identifies Peter Kauffmann, VoteVets’ vice chair, as also serving as chief spokesperson for the Small Business Payments Alliance, a lobbying group representing Visa, Mastercard, and the banks that profit from credit card swipe fees.

• Kauffmann has not personally contributed to Sullivan’s campaign, nor does he appear in Sullivan’s FEC filings; the connection is through VoteVets.

VoteVets is a big player in New Hampshire’s 1st District primary. It’s the single largest outside spender in the race, $1.21 million in independent expenditures supporting Maura Sullivan, a figure I independently confirmed through FEC Schedule E filings for Part 4 of this series. Part 4 details that more than $370,000 has been funneled to Sullivan from AIPAC-adjacent PACs.

And it’s curious that they have gone so big on Sullivan since Urrutia, also a veteran, is in the race. That imbalance deserves an answer from VoteVets; we are left to speculate about backroom promises.

New reporting from The Lever, in collaboration with The American Prospect, adds a detail worth knowing about who helps run that operation. Peter Kauffmann is listed as vice chair of VoteVets and treasurer of its affiliated philanthropic arm, Vet Voice Foundation. He also serves as chief spokesperson for the Small Business Payments Alliance, described in that reporting as a lobbying operation representing the credit card industry’s interest in preserving swipe fees, the transaction charges Visa and Mastercard collect from merchants on every purchase.

VoteVets has publicly criticized the Trump administration’s rollback of consumer financial protections, including scams targeting veterans and servicemembers. Having one of its own leaders simultaneously representing the industry side of a related fight, credit card fees that fall hardest on small businesses and the customers who pay them, sits awkwardly against that record.

Kauffmann does not appear as a donor to Sullivan’s campaign, to any of the pro-Israel PACs covered in Part 4, or anywhere else in NH-01’s filings that I could find. He helps lead the outside group that, of everyone spending money in this race, has funded her the most.

Whether that distinction matters to voters is a fair question. VoteVets markets itself as an independent, trusted validator for veteran candidates. A leader with an active financial-industry lobbying role, on an issue his own organization has criticized from the opposite side, is the kind of detail that belongs in the record when a group spends over a million dollars trying to decide a primary.

Notes:

• The reporting on Peter Kauffmann’s roles at VoteVets, Vet Voice Foundation, and the Small Business Payments Alliance comes from The Lever and The American Prospect (“The Democratic Primary Operative With A Wall Street Side Gig,” published August 20, 2026).

• The $1.21 million VoteVets independent-expenditure figure is my own, drawn directly from FEC Schedule E filings via the official FEC API, using the same race-sweep methodology documented in Part 4 of this series.

  

  Mindi Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a former New Hampshire State Representative, Chair of NH’s Environmentally-Triggered Chronic Illness Statutory Commission, and co-founder of the NH Safe Water Alliance and NH Science and Public Health.

I served alongside Stefany Shaheen on the task force that then-Governor Maggie Hassan created to investigate the double pediatric cancer cluster I identified on New Hampshire’s Seacoast in 2014. I later spent years on the Pease Restoration Advisory Board, working to address PFAS pollution at the former Pease Air Force Base, and I pushed the EPA to enforce the original Coakley Landfill cleanup plan when regulators sought to roll it back. I know exactly what it looks like when someone shows up for this fight because I watched Shaheen do it from the seat next to mine.

Stefany Shaheen showed up.

She served on that task force while also serving on Portsmouth’s City Council. When our task force issued its recommendations, one called for extending municipal water service to families living near the Coakley Landfill Superfund site. When PFAS was detected in Portsmouth’s water supply, she pushed for screening of exposed families and for serving on the community advisory panel overseeing the cleanup at Pease. When residents and lawmakers raised concerns about how the Coakley Landfill Group was handling millions of dollars in public cleanup funds, she was among the voices willing to speak up and demand answers.

None of that was required of a city councilor. She did it because moms shouldn’t have to wonder whether the tap water is safe for their babies or children.

That same instinct drove Stefany Shaheen to fight for her daughter, Elle, who was eight when she nearly died from undiagnosed type 1 diabetes. Rather than let that fear go unspoken, Shaheen spent the next fifteen years turning it into action: building a company to help families manage chronic disease, writing a book about the experience, and joining the board of one of the country’s leading diabetes research institutions.

We fight for our kids. Shaheen has spent her career proving she will, whether the threat is a chemical in the water supply or a disease in her daughter’s blood.

I have looked for that same record by Maura Sullivan, but I can’t find it. Her background is in the Marine Corps and the Pentagon, not in Portsmouth’s water system or the Seacoast’s cancer cluster investigations. I have been in these fights since 2016, in the same hearing rooms, on the same task forces and boards, alongside the same families. I never saw her there. Not once.

What I can find is Sullivan’s donor list. Federal filings show more than $370,000 in bundling from donors also tied to AIPAC, roughly 15 times what Shaheen received from the same network. Her donor list includes an eighteen-year Bain Capital managing director, two Palantir executives whose company holds a $30 million ICE surveillance contract, and a Jeff Bezos-backed super PAC that has put hundreds of thousands more behind her. And those aren’t the names of people who lie awake wondering whether their well water is safe.

Shaheen has donated her AIPAC-adjacent contributions to 3 NH Community Health Centers. Sullivan has not done so as of this date. $370,000 would go a long way for NH Community Health Centers.

This isn’t hypothetical. Right now, developers are looking at New Hampshire towns for data centers, facilities that can burn through millions of gallons of water a day to keep servers cool, in a state where many Seacoast families still rely on private wells. A proposal in Nottingham was just withdrawn after residents packed a hearing to oppose it.

When that fight reaches Congress, who does Sullivan answer to: the neighbors on well water or the donors bankrolling her campaign? When the next PFAS cleanup needs federal funding and the private equity and defense money that elected her wants something else, who gets the call back?

That absence and that donor list matter in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District. This seat needs a representative who has already proven she’ll dig in when the fight is neither easy nor politically convenient, not one who owes her seat to the people least affected by the outcome.

On September 8, I’ll be voting for Stefany Shaheen. Not because she says the right things about clean water, but because I watched her do the work years before anyone outside the Seacoast was paying attention, and because we already know whose calls she’ll take once she’s in Congress.

Mindi F. Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a former New Hampshire State Representative, Chair of NH’s Environmentally-Triggered Chronic Illness Statutory Commission, and co-founder of the NH Safe Water Alliance and NH Science and Public Health.

Highlights

• AIPAC-adjacent donor money is larger than first reported: $370,630 independently verified for Sullivan, $29,650 for Shaheen, $500 for Beriont, each confirmed by matching employer and city, not just name, across five separate PAC donor lists.

• Shaheen donated her AIPAC funds to three NH Community Health Centers. We call on Sullivan to do the same. $370,000 would go a long way for NH Community Health Centers.

• 117 of Sullivan’s confirmed donors appear on more than one AIPAC-adjacent donor list; one donor is confirmed across all five.

• Shaheen’s TV ad claims “$300,000 bundled from AIPAC donors,” a figure that closely aligns with the $370,630 independently confirmed here.

• Beriont caught and voluntarily refunded a $500 check from a documented UDP donor.

• Sullivan’s “no corporate PAC money” claim does not hold; she accepted $2,500 from a corporate PAC.

In 2018, I ran in the Democratic primary for New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, the same seat and the same primary that a crowded field is now fighting over again. Chris Pappas, who won that race and has held the seat since, is giving it up this year to run for the Senate seat Jeanne Shaheen is vacating. That leaves NH-01 a genuine open seat, and it has drawn nine Democrats and five Republicans, including Maura Sullivan, whom I ran against in that same primary seven years ago, and Stefany Shaheen, the senator’s daughter.

Part 1 of this series assessed the money from independent expenditures by Jeff Bezos and VoteVets, among others, concluding that only 10% of Sullivan’s contributions are from NH residents in contrast with Shaheen’s nearly 50%. Parts 2 and 3 of this series traced how AIPAC PAC’s earmarking reaches sitting members of Congress and found that the mechanism is used to protect incumbents already in office. NH-01 has no incumbent, and after checking, I found that AIPAC PAC’s conduit-earmarking mechanism is not identifiable in this race. However, the race is not short on outside money. The money is just coming from different mechanisms.

AIPAC-adjacent donors, independently identified and verified

The Union Leader reported that Maura Sullivan received roughly $304,580 from 153 AIPAC- and United Democracy Project-affiliated donors, compared with $24,400 for Shaheen from 10 such donors, and that only one donor, Washington’s Ron Abramson, gave to both. I set out to independently verify the AIPAC-adjacent contributions in this race.

NH-01 candidates’ donor lists were pulled directly from the FEC’s API and cross-referenced with every name from five reference lists (see Table 1): AIPAC PAC’s complete donor base, AIPAC PAC’s earmarked donors, NORPAC (a different pro-Israel PAC), United Democracy Project (AIPAC’s super PAC), and Democratic Majority for Israel PAC. Each record was individually verified against the employer and city, rather than the name alone, and deduplicated across all five lists. Four of the five reference lists were pulled across three election cycles (2026, 2024, 2022).

Table 1. AIPAC-Adjacent Donor Overlap, by Reference List

Carleigh Beriont, a Hampton selectwoman also running in the Democratic primary, was checked against all five lists the same way. There were zero matches against NORPAC, UDP, DMFI, or AIPAC PAC’s full donor base; however, Beriont received a $500 check in June from Maurice Zekaria of Oakhurst, NJ, who gave $25,000 to UDP in 2024. Per the Union Leader, Beriont refunded the check immediately upon learning of the connection and said so on the record.

Recently, Shaheen released a television ad attacking Sullivan over “$300,000 bundled from AIPAC donors,” a figure that underestimates the total of $370,630 by $30,630.

$3.65 million in Independent Expenditures

Using a purpose-built FEC race-sweep tool that pulls every independent expenditure filed about any NH-01 candidate, from any committee, whether seeded in advance or not, the total outside spending in this race so far is $3.65 million. Despite explicitly including AIPAC’s United Democracy Project and NORPAC in that sweep, neither has filed a single independent expenditure in this race. The actual spenders are:

• VoteVets: $1.21 million supporting Sullivan.

• Article One PAC: $1.02 million supporting Shaheen, funded by the Servant-Leader Fund ($500,000), Glen Tullman ($100,000), and Laurence Tosi ($25,000).

• LCV Victory Fund: $606,000 supporting Shaheen.

• The No Kings PAC: $468,000 supporting Shaheen.

• Servant-Leader Fund: $355,000 supporting Sullivan, funded in turn by With Honor Fund III ($1.43 million) and With Honor Fund II ($840,000).

• Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, a different pro-Israel group from AIPAC: $382 supporting Sullivan, one filing, negligible.

The same veteran-candidate-recruitment network, anchored by With Honor Fund, is backing both leading Democrats simultaneously: Servant-Leader Fund gives directly to Sullivan while also funding Article One PAC’s spending for Shaheen.

Christian Urrutia, Heath Howard, and Carleigh Beriont all show zero outside PAC spending in either direction, worth watching whether that holds or shifts as the primary closes. Urrutia and Howard have both publicly pledged to reject AIPAC money.

Checking the “no corporate PAC money” claim

Separately from the AIPAC question: Sullivan’s campaign has described her fundraising as free of corporate PAC money. Checking this against her FEC filings shows two corporate PAC contributions: a $2,500 contribution from the Second Front Systems Inc. PAC on June 27, 2025, registered with the FEC as a Lobbyist/Registrant PAC, the standard designation for a corporate-sponsored PAC. So Sullivan's claims run contrary to the facts.

Another $350 contribution from Democracy Engine on February 12, 2026. Democracy Engine is a payment-processing conduit through which other PACs route donor money, not as a traditional corporate PAC, so this could be a small, real contribution or something processing-related.

This analysis covers only direct PAC-to-candidate contributions visible on Sullivan’s Schedule A. It would not capture corporate PAC money routed indirectly through a joint fundraising committee, a PAC-to-PAC transfer, or another conduit, the same kind of indirect channel this piece already found AIPAC-, NORPAC-, UDP-, and DMFI-adjacent money moving through elsewhere. This analysis may have missed PAC avenues that this specific method wouldn’t identify.

A challenge to Sullivan

The Shaheen campaign says it has redirected all donor funds tracked by AIPAC to three New Hampshire community health centers. That’s the right response to money a candidate doesn’t want attached to her campaign.

New Hampshire voters deserve more than a press release matching an attack ad; they deserve to see where the money goes.

Every declared candidate’s Pre-Primary Report is due August 27, twelve days before the September 8 primary, and will cover the final fundraising stretch. This piece will be updated, not finalized, once the filing posts are made.

This is a snapshot, not a final accounting.

Mindi F. Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a Senior Research Scientist at a national non-profit. She identified the pediatric cancer cluster on the New Hampshire seacoast in 2014, served on the Pease Restoration Advisory Board, and co-founded the New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance. Her research program includes PFAS ecological epidemiology and perinatal exposure.

Data sources: FEC Schedule A (itemized individual and PAC/committee receipts) and Schedule E (independent expenditures), pulled directly via the official FEC API (api.open.fec.gov), not scraped or estimated. AIPAC PAC’s earmarked-donor data comes from its monthly FEC filings, searched for the literal phrase “Earmarked for [committee name] (ID)”, not inferred from matching committee IDs. Independent expenditure totals come from a full-race-sweep tool that pulls Schedule E filings for any NH-01 candidate from any committee, whether seeded in advance or not.

Donor cross-reference methodology: every candidate’s complete donor list was checked against five reference lists, including everyone who has ever given earmarked money to AIPAC PAC, AIPAC PAC’s own complete donor base, NORPAC, United Democracy Project, and Democratic Majority for Israel PAC. Four of the five span three election cycles (2026, 2024, 2022). Every match was individually checked against name, employer, and city, since common names produce real false positives without that second check. Figures reported here are the confirmed floor after deduplicating across all five lists, so a donor found on more than one list is counted once.

The complete underlying dataset, including every donor list, every cross-reference result, and the corporate PAC disbursement data, is published here.

In Part 3, we take a close look at earmarking, a legal, disclosed campaign finance mechanism: a donor gives money to a PAC with instructions to forward it to a specific candidate, and the PAC must pass along the full amount; it can’t redirect or keep any of it. For an organization like AIPAC PAC, earmarking multiplies its reach without technically making a large contribution itself: it can solicit many individual donors, each writing a check within their personal contribution limit, and channel all of it toward the same candidates it has endorsed. Nothing about the mechanism itself is improper. What’s worth examining is the scale, the pattern, and how visible any of it is to a voter who isn’t already looking for it.

Evidence of AIPAC Coordinated Fundraising.

First, I wanted to assess whether patterns in AIPAC’s fundraising methods could be identified.

Four distinct donor patterns show up in this data:

The distribution of total AIPAC disbursements by donor pattern is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Distribution of AIPAC disbursements by donor pattern.

The evidence for each of the four donor categories is summarized below.

Algorithmic microsplit. The analysis found that about 12 percent of all earmarked entries in the dataset, but only 0.23 percent of total dollars, aren’t from donors choosing individual candidates. It appears that they are AIPAC PAC’s system splitting a single donor’s undesignated contribution across its full slate of currently endorsed candidates: one donor gave exactly $1.00 each to 249 different committees in a single batch; another split $1,795.74 across 274 committees using only five distinct dollar amounts, evidence of a tiered formula rather than an even split. That’s a different mechanism from a donor deliberately choosing individual candidates by name. It means a candidate’s appearance on an earmarking list doesn’t always reflect a donor’s individual choice.

Serial multi-candidate. One donor’s FEC filings, under two spelling variants of his name in different AIPAC PAC filings, both listing the same address, employer, and title, reveal a far broader pattern than a single week’s checks. This donor wrote 102 separate checks totaling $58,000 to 98 different candidate committees between February 2025 and June 2026, nearly the entire span of this analysis. Ninety-nine percent of those checks are round, standard amounts: $500, $1,000, $1,500, $2,000, not the arbitrary, formula-looking figures AIPAC PAC’s automated system produces, evidence that this is a person choosing recipients, not software dividing a check. Their contributions occurred in bursts: a 15-committee week in March 2025, already documented in Part 2 of this coordinated-giving pattern, then a much larger stretch in June 2025, with twenty committees on the 12th, thirty-one on the 18th, fourteen on the 20th, eleven more over the 23rd and 24th, 76 checks and $28,500 in under two weeks, then scattered single checks continuing for another year. Only a small fraction of his activity, five dates worth $5,000, falls within the dataset’s broader identified giving clusters.

Repeat cluster donor. Beyond one-time bursts, 573 donors appear repeatedly across three or more of the 23 high-activity giving windows identified over the full eighteen months, together accounting for $11,917,860. The clearest example is a donor who appears in eight of those windows, with a total of $321,800 across 51 different candidate committees. Only six of those 51 committees received more than one gift from this donor; the rest are one-time appearances, each on a different slate. That pattern, broad and repeated but not loyal to any race, reads less like a donor with favorite candidates and more like someone who reliably responds whenever AIPAC PAC is actively soliciting for a slate of candidates or committees.

One-off multi-candidate. The remaining pattern is a single, concentrated decision: 408 donors gave to two or more candidates within a short window, usually a single day, and never appear in the dataset again, for a total of $1,323,948. The cleanest example is a donor who gave $7,000 to each of 18 named candidates, for a total of $126,000, all sent on the same day, November 26, 2025. Unlike AIPAC PAC’s own automated batches, the amount is a deliberately chosen round figure, not a formula splitting one pool across many recipients; unlike the serial donor above, it happened once and didn’t recur.

Another pattern identified is that the timing of these earmarks isn’t random. Giving is heavily concentrated early in the week (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Weekly distribution of AIPAC earmarked contributions 2025 to 2026.

Monday alone accounts for $9.5 million of the full $42.3 million dataset, more than any other day and 5.1 times Saturday’s total. That weekday pattern isn’t a one-year artifact: when broken out by year, 2025’s weekday profile and 2026’s correlate at 0.976, and Monday’s share changes by just 0.21 percentage points between the two years, a consistency a single unusual year wouldn’t produce.

February 24, 2025, and February 23, 2026 (see Figure 3), the two largest single days in the entire eighteen-month span, a year and a day apart, together totaling $1,824,980 across 42 distinct candidate committees, both fall on a Monday. With only two years of data, an annual cycle is suggestive rather than confirmed. The two spikes also have different causes: nearly half of the February 2025 spike, 49 percent, is the three leadership committees above getting fully funded in a single coordinated push; the February 2026 spike is spread broadly across 26 different individual candidates’ own committees, with Dan Sullivan ($133,250) and Jon Husted ($126,250) the largest; a genuinely bipartisan mix received the bulk of disbursements; neither day lines up with a quarterly FEC filing deadline. The Monday pattern extends beyond AIPAC PAC’s filings: Better Blue Fund’s disbursements to its nine candidates, detailed in Part 2, are also overwhelmingly on Mondays; 89 percent of that money, in a small sample of eight transfers, even though Better Blue Fund’s donor receipts, the checks individual donors write to the JFC itself, are spread evenly across weekdays. The Monday rhythm looks like an administrative one, tied to how these committees process and move money internally; not a reflection of when donors happen to write checks.

Figure 3. Daily totals of AIPAC earmarked contributions between 2025 and 2026.

Where the Money Went

Leadership Committees. Three committees that received AIPAC-earmarked contributions are led by House Republican and Democratic leadership: all three are joint fundraising committees that split money among multiple participants. Grow the Majority (C00858373) lists 89 joint fund participants: Speaker Mike Johnson’s own campaign committee and his leadership PAC, American Revival PAC, sit alongside the Congressional Leadership Fund, the NRCC, the RNC, roughly a dozen state Republican parties, dozens of individual House Republican candidates, and a set of “GTM Nominee Fund” accounts pre-registered for specific districts before either party’s nominee is even chosen.

The Jeffries Victory Fund (C00768200) is narrower, with three participants: Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ campaign, his leadership PAC (Jobs, Education, & Families First – JEFF PAC), and the DCCC. The Jeffries Battleground Protection Fund (JBPF, C00916429, registered in August 2025) has 26 participants: Jeffries’ own committee, 25 other House Democrats, and the DCCC, as detailed below.

Table 2. AIPAC contributions to leadership committees between 2025 and 2026

JBPF’s disbursements confirm the same pass-through pattern established for Better Blue Fund in Part 2. Between April and June 2026, JBPF sent $1,001,053 to its 26 joint fund participants. The single largest recipient by far is the DCCC itself, which received $624,260, 62 percent of everything JBPF sent out, dwarfing the $26,400 that went to Jeffries’ campaign committee. Two names already shown in Figure 4 are also direct recipients: Don Davis ($9,929) and Greg Landsman ($15,965).

Congressional disbursements. AIPAC contributions were funneled to 29 members of Congress, 15 Republicans and 14 Democrats, totaling $20,220,451 in combined direct earmarking and Better Blue Fund joint fundraising committee funds, with the latter documented in Part 2.

Susan Collins is the top beneficiary in this analysis: $2,721,923 from 1,490 individual donors, the broadest donor base of any name in this table. The single biggest day, February 24, 2025, brought in $126,250 from 48 of her donors alone. Her earmarking is broad and sustained, spanning nearly the entire eighteen-month period covered by this analysis. Collins isn’t an outlier. The same earmarking language appears in AIPAC PAC’s FEC filings for 28 additional members of Congress; each was independently confirmed the same way: the literal text of the filed document naming that candidate’s committee (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. AIPAC contributions totaling $20,220,451 from 29 confirmed names, 15 Republicans and 14 Democrats, spanning both chambers of Congress.

Cross-referencing every committee listed in AIPAC PAC’s earmarking data, not just the 29 featured above, with verified candidate status for the current cycle shows that 98.94 percent of the dollars, $40,932,263 of $41,372,788, go to sitting incumbents defending the seats they already hold. Open-seat candidates receive 0.93 percent; challengers receive 0.14 percent, and even that residual isn’t outside challengers: it’s sitting House members running for Senate against a sitting senator, including Seth Moulton against Ed Markey in Massachusetts, Mike Collins against Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and Wesley Hunt, who lost his primary, against John Cornyn in Texas, plus one genuine political outsider, Jace Yarbrough, in a $5,000 open-seat race in Texas. (Leadership PACs and national party committees are excluded from these percentages entirely; they aren’t individual candidates.) Whatever else this mechanism is, it is almost entirely a tool for protecting incumbents already in office, not for buying new seats or engineering primary upsets. The rare exception is itself telling: at least one race in this data shows AIPAC PAC money on both sides of a contested Republican Senate primary, funding both the incumbent and a challenger running against him.

Candidate Committees. There are also 18 candidate committees that received AIPAC earmark funds and are non-incumbents: mostly current or former House members running for a different, usually higher, office, plus a handful who’ve never held federal office (see Table 3).

Table 3. Summary of candidate committees listed as receiving AIPAC earmark funds.

Limitations. First, the recipient names in this analysis come from AIPAC PAC’s document viewer, which resolves the earmarking language, not from the literal text in the machine-readable bulk data or from matching committee IDs alone. Second, this analysis is limited to the current eighteen-month cycle, January 2025 through June 2026, not career totals; a member’s cumulative AIPAC support across multiple election cycles, the kind of figure local reporting sometimes cites, could be higher than the numbers in this analysis. The analysis captures only AIPAC PAC’s earmarked pass-through money and Better Blue Fund JFC money, both of which are “support” channels. It does not capture AIPAC PAC’s direct contributions from its treasury, a separate and legally distinct channel capped by law at $5,000 per candidate per election, small next to the earmarked totals here. Finally, this analysis does not capture independent expenditures, positive or negative, made through AIPAC’s affiliated super PAC, United Democracy Project, which is legally barred from contributing to candidates and instead spends separately, without any dollar limit, including money spent specifically to oppose a candidate’s primary rivals. Haley Stevens is the clearest example: her $373,246 table total is a small fraction of the more than $30 million United Democracy Project reportedly spent supporting her and opposing Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s 2026 Senate primary, a race Stevens lost on August 4, 2026. The same kind of opposition spending may exist, unexamined, behind other names in this analysis.

The larger point from this analysis carries over from Part 2, sharpened by its breadth. A voter scanning Susan Collins’ or any of these 29 names’ FEC filings would see a dollar figure attributed to their campaign committee, with nothing indicating where it came from unless you already know to look for AIPAC PAC’s own conduit data. Disclosure law answers the question of who gave the money. It was never built to answer why or through which of several available channels. The pattern that started with one race and one surprising number turned out to reach into both chambers of Congress, both political parties, and the fundraising operations of both parties’ top House leaders, all of it sitting in plain sight in public FEC filings. The hope is that this analysis will be helpful as voters head to their polling places.

Notes: Figures are drawn from FEC Schedule A filings for AIPAC PAC (C00797670) and each lawmaker’s principal campaign committee, matched against current-cycle bulk data. Leadership committee receipts are confirmed the same way, directly from AIPAC PAC’s filings; JBPF’s disbursements are confirmed from its Schedule B filings. Sludge’s July 2026 reporting independently reached the same $149,300 figure for AIPAC PAC’s earmark to JBPF. Each total above is individually confirmed against AIPAC PAC’s itemized Schedule A filings by retrieving the underlying document and reading the earmarking language that names that committee. The complete underlying dataset, every donor-category breakdown, cluster window, and name-merge decision, is available at that link.

Mindi F. Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a Senior Research Scientist at a national non-profit and Assistant Professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine. She identified the pediatric cancer cluster on the New Hampshire seacoast in 2014, served on the Pease Restoration Advisory Board, and co-founded the New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance. Her research program includes PFAS ecological epidemiology and perinatal exposure.

Highlights

• As with AIPAC, when a donor network’s brand becomes a liability, the money doesn’t disappear; it just moves.

• Nine members of Congress, one shared conduit.

• Legal compliance and genuine transparency aren’t the same. A committee tied to AIPAC-adjacent donors can satisfy every FEC disclosure requirement and still leave voters unable to understand who gave the money and why.

• Reporting can substantially undercount political action committee (PAC) activity.

• Careful analysis of publicly available data can reveal coordination that no single filing shows.

As a research scientist, former elected legislator, and congressional candidate, I have learned a few things about money in politics and how to identify patterns in data. My previous blog, which traced a money trail through the NH-01 congressional race, showed how public Federal Election Commission (FEC) candidate filings can reveal who is trying to influence our elections.

Independent reporting from The Lever and Jacobin identified The Better Blue Fund, a joint fundraising committee (JFC) registered with the FEC on February 25, 2026, as a new vehicle for AIPAC-aligned donors. A JFC receives checks from donors, splits them, and reports the disbursement to each participating committee on the date it processes the split. The Lever’s reporting named eight beneficiaries: Rep. Wesley Bell (D-MO), Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), Ben McAdams, a former congressman now running again in Utah, Rep. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), and Jeremy Moss, a Democratic challenger for Michigan’s 11th District. Better Blue Fund’s FEC filing confirms a ninth participant, Maryland’s Adrian Boafo, who was not named in that reporting.

I decided to dig a bit deeper to see whether publicly available FEC candidate filings could help explain one lobbying effort: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s fundraising. However, to trace the money’s path, one must traverse and cross-reference data across several organizations. To help identify patterns suggesting coordination between AIPAC and the candidate committees, I built a script to cross-reference donor names in each committee’s FEC filings with AIPAC PAC’s donor list, then checked how often a person who gave to both committees made those two donations on the same calendar day. Chance alone rarely produces that kind of overlap; a shared processing date is the signature of a joint fundraising committee splitting one check into two.

Better Blue Fund’s Statement of Organization, as filed with the FEC, lists all nine joint fundraising participants: Bell (C00842336), Espaillat (C00701953), Goldman (C00816660), and McAdams (C00658633), plus Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY, C00516666), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN, C00422980), Rep. Rob Menendez Jr. (D-NJ, C00799767), Maryland’s Adrian Boafo (C00933994), who won Steny Hoyer’s former seat this cycle, and Michigan State Senator Jeremy Moss (C00904581), who is running for the state’s 11th District. According to Better Blue Fund’s two quarterly filings in 2026, $709,260 was raised from 34 individual donors, and $535,722.50 has been disbursed to candidates. Approximately 79 percent of donors gave amounts that were exact multiples of $3,500, the individual contribution limit, multiplied by the number of the nine participants they chose to support. One married couple sharing a New York address each gave exactly $31,500, the maximum possible across all nine. At least seven donor pairs in the data share an address and gave separately.

Bell’s FEC filings present the clearest case of contribution clusters that cannot be explained by chance. Of the 1,238 Bell donors independently confirmed by matching employer, ZIP code, or an eponymous company name to the same person who also appears on AIPAC’s FEC filings, 1,229 (99.3 percent) gave to both on the same calendar day. Both Bell and McAdams list Better Blue Fund as their joint fundraising representative in their respective FEC Statements of Organization, providing direct evidence of coordination between AIPAC and the candidate committees, independent of the timing pattern itself.

Timing alone doesn’t prove that the money moved specifically through Better Blue Fund; a donor giving to both a candidate and AIPAC PAC on the same day is only consistent with a joint fundraising committee splitting one check. The Statements of Organization above prove it. The timing pattern is corroborating evidence, showing the mechanism operating at scale, not the primary proof.

The same donor-timing test shows a similarly strong pattern among the rest of Better Blue Fund’s participants, as shown in the figure below. Espaillat, Goldman, Menendez, and Grace Meng share AIPAC PAC’s donor base far beyond what chance would produce, a pattern comparable to Bell’s. Boafo, Cohen, and Moss show none: no same-day donors survive once matches proven to belong to other committees are excluded, and Boafo and Cohen have received zero disbursements from Better Blue Fund in either quarterly filing to date.

Better Blue Fund satisfies FEC disclosure requirements: its donors are named, its transfers are itemized, and its beneficiaries are in the public record. None of that reveals the AIPAC-adjacent character of the money moving through it; a voter scanning a candidate’s FEC filings would see a committee that, on its face, appears unconnected to AIPAC.

JFCs are legal, disclosed structures and, in themselves, are not evidence of wrongdoing. The timing data shows the mechanism operating at scale, not an individual donor’s intent. What this piece adds to reporting that already named eight of the nine participants (Boafo required Better Blue Fund’s own Form 1 to surface) is a way to measure that scale: which participants carry a statistical fingerprint of coordinated giving, and which don’t. Bell, Espaillat, Goldman, Menendez, and Meng do so decisively.

The point is that when a donor network’s brand becomes a liability, the money doesn’t disappear; it just moves.

The data needed to trace this kind of pattern is entirely public. What’s scarce is the time it takes to search for it, so communicating the results to voters falls to data scientists and journalists.

Mindi F. Messmer, DMSc, MS, PG, CG, is a Senior Research Scientist at a national non-profit and co-founder of the NH Safe Water Alliance. She is a former NH State Representative and a nationally recognized environmental health advocate.

Notes: Figures are from FEC Schedule A filings for AIPAC PAC (C00797670), Bell for Missouri (C00842336), Adriano Espaillat for Congress (C00701953), Dan Goldman for New York (C00816660), Friends of Ben McAdams (C00658633), Better Blue Fund (C00940890), and Bi-State Blue Fund (C00939835), current-cycle bulk data. Better Blue Fund reporting per The Lever and Jacobin. Bell and McAdams’ joint fundraising representative disclosures per their respective FEC Statements of Organization (Form 1). Identity-confirmed figures reflect donors whose employer, ZIP code, or eponymous employer name independently corroborates the name match. The nine-participant roster is confirmed directly from Better Blue Fund’s FEC Form 1 (Statement of Organization), not inferred; the five additional participants are Grace for New York (Grace Meng, C00516666), Cohen for Congress (Steve Cohen, C00422980), Menendez for Congress (Rob Menendez Jr., C00799767), Adrian Boafo for Congress (C00933994), and Jeremy Moss for Congress (C00904581). Disbursement and donor-receipt figures are drawn directly from Better Blue Fund’s own Schedule A and Schedule B filings (FEC-1993151 and FEC-1962848).

• Coakley Landfill Superfund Site, a 27-acre dump site in North Hampton and Greenland, took waste from 1972 to 1985 and has kept leaching contaminants for more than 40 years since it closed.

• EPA’s lowered PFAS maximum contaminant level triggered a new risk assessment and an order requiring the Coakley Landfill Group to address contamination reaching Berry’s Brook.

• Monitoring has repeatedly found private drinking water wells exceeding standards for PFAS and 1,4-dioxane.

• A pilot pump-and-treat system is now in design along with filtration systems and water line extensions already provided to affected homeowners.

• The original Remedial Action Plan already required a pump-and-treat system. Ten years ago, I asked EPA to revert to that RAP and was demeaned by regulators in public meetings and had my credibility attacked, including by Portsmouth City Councilors.

What the Herald Confirmed This Week

A new Portsmouth Herald investigation by Jeff McMenemy confirms what neighbors in the Lafayette Terrace neighborhood have been saying since they first raised concerns roughly 50 years ago: the Coakley Landfill keeps leaching PFAS and 1,4-dioxane into Berry’s Brook and nearby private wells, decades after USEPA stopped the waste dumping and put the site on the National Priority List. The Coakley Landfill Group (CLG) is now designing a pilot pump-and-treat system, funded in part by a state grant, and has posted new warning signage along the Seacoast Greenway.

What the story does not say is that the original Remedial Action Plan for this site already required a pump-and-treat system. Ten years ago, I asked EPA to revert to that plan and enforce it and was demeaned by regulators in public meetings and had my credibility attacked by others, including Portsmouth City Councilors. The vindication is real, but so is the decade of delay for the people who drank that water and lived near the dump in the meantime.

More than 40 years after it closed, the site continues to leach PFAS into nearby surface waters at levels the EPA has classified as unacceptable. A stricter federal limit on PFAS prompted a new risk assessment, which in turn led to an EPA order to address contamination entering the Berry’s Brook. Ten years after Jillian Lane and I posted warning signs, CLG was required to put up new signs along the Seacoast Greenway, the rail trail popular with runners and cyclists, warning people not to ingest the adjacent surface water.

The CLG, which includes Portsmouth, North Hampton, and Newington, along with private haulers and generators that used the site, now operates a monitoring network that has repeatedly found private wells exceeding regulatory standards for PFAS and 1,4-dioxane, a solvent EPA has linked to liver toxicity and cancer risk. Affected homeowners have been provided with filtration systems, and public water lines have been extended to some properties. The group is now designing a pilot pump-and-treat system to stop the pollution.

I Asked EPA to Enforce Its Own Plan Ten Years Ago

This is not a case where new science finally caught up to an old problem. The original 1994 Remedial Action Plan (RAP) already required a pump-and-treat system. Ten years ago, I asked the EPA to revert to that RAP and enforce what it already called for. The response was not curiosity; it was public dismissal. Regulators demeaned me in public meetings, and others, including Portsmouth City Councilors, attacked my professional credibility simply for pointing out the contamination. That kind of gatekeeping is familiar to anyone who has tried to move contamination science into public policy before the institutions are ready to hear it. The dump is centrally located to the double pediatric cancer identified in 2014, and it took two more years, until 2016, for that cluster to be officially confirmed. The pattern repeats: residents and independent scientists flag the risk, officials attack the messenger, and years pass while people keep drinking the water.

That is what makes this week’s update both a relief and a frustration. It is genuinely good news that Portsmouth, North Hampton, and Newington are finally funding a pump-and-treat system and extending water lines to the homes that need them. It is much harder to celebrate when you remember that Lafayette Terrace neighbors near this landfill were raising concerns roughly 50 years ago, not 10, and that the fix now being celebrated is the one the RAP already called for. Half a century is not a delay; it is a policy choice made repeatedly by people who had the authority to act sooner but did not.

Credit Where It Is Due

None of this stays in public view without dogged local reporting. Jeff McMenemy has covered Coakley Landfill and PFAS contamination at Pease for a decade, and the New Hampshire Press Association recognized that body of work with First Place for Investigative Story/Series at its 2018 Distinguished Journalism Awards. This latest piece is another example of why it matters. Stories like his keep a City Council briefing on groundwater monitoring from disappearing into a meeting packet nobody reads. When independent scientists face pushback and communities are stonewalled, a reporter who keeps asking the same uncomfortable questions year after year is often the reason anything changes at all.

So, I will take this one as a win, a late one, but a win. The Seacoast is finally getting infrastructure that matches what the science has said for years. I just wish it had not taken 50 years of complaints, a confirmed cancer cluster, and a decade of my own advocacy on top of that to get here.

Mindi Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a Senior Research Scientist at a national non-profit. She is a former NH State Representative, co-founder of the New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance, and chair of NH’s Environmentally-Triggered Chronic Disease Statutory Commission. She identified the NH seacoast pediatric cancer cluster in 2014 and helped pass the state’s landmark PFAS drinking water standards.

Summer in NH is for the beach, not the ballot box, but Labor Day is coming, and with it, the moment when voters start paying attention. In late June, while most of us were tuned out, six mailers supporting Sullivan landed in NH-01 mailboxes, paid for by the Servant-Leader Fund. That woke me up. I ran against Sullivan in the 2018 Democratic primary for this same seat, watched her outraise the entire field with out-of-state money, and then lose to Chris Pappas anyway. Eight years later, those mailers made me wonder whether she was running the same playbook again. So, I decided to lean into the cliché from All the President’s Men: follow the money.

The trail led through three generations of With Honor PACs, started by Jeff Bezos and his family, who’ve given roughly $32.29 million since 2017. The shell game: the original fund dissolved in 2023 and passed its balance through two additional funds before reaching the Servant-Leader Fund. Eight committees shared one PO Box in Alexandria and one treasurer. That chain spent $184,864 on the Sullivan mailers.

The trail also led to VoteVets, which has independently spent $1,040,832.80 backing Sullivan, including a $430,000 buy just days ago. Sullivan has AIPAC-adjacent ties too: about 10 percent of her donors have also given to AIPAC, and she won a February Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) endorsement that has not appeared on her website as of August 10, 2026, though her campaign denies taking AIPAC money or seeking its endorsement. Article One PAC has also independently spent $766,294.58 backing Shaheen, funded partly by the Servant-Leader Fund and partly by Robert Granieri, an AIPAC-adjacent megadonor. Sullivan’s total outside support, about $1.3 million, is one and a half times Shaheen’s $852,000, though Shaheen has consistently polled ahead. On direct PAC contributions, though, the two are roughly even.

Sullivan’s individual donor base tells a different story: only 10 percent of her contributions, by dollars, come from New Hampshire, compared with 42 percent of Shaheen’s.

Money isn’t the only gap between them. Data centers, Amazon’s core business, are among the most contested issues in Congress this year, and NH already got a preview: the state House voted 304-11 this spring to table a zoning bill, around the same time a Nottingham data center was withdrawn with more than 42,000 petition signatures as of this date. I found no public position from Sullivan. Shaheen told NH Today host Chris Ryan that NH lacks the grid capacity, water, and regulatory tools to safely host these facilities, and called for oversight that puts communities, not companies, in charge. On the one issue unconnected to campaign funding, Shaheen has something to say. Sullivan doesn’t.

This isn’t Sullivan’s first time running on money rather than roots. In 2018, she tweeted that she was a “lifelong Granite Stater,” despite having moved to NH the year before, and deleted the tweet after reporters noticed. She outraised the entire field that year, with more than 96 percent of it from out of state, and still lost. Her out-of-state share this time, 89.6 percent, is almost identical. Eight years later, the formula hasn’t changed: raise more than anyone else, mostly from people who don’t live here, and hope it’s enough.

It takes real money to be seen as viable. But there’s a difference between raising it broadly and being carried by it. Sullivan’s cash comes overwhelmingly from a handful of out-of-state megadonors, not from thousands of NH households. That’s the difference between a candidate the state chose and one wealthy interests invested in. I don’t think being carried this way prepares someone to fight for NH.

Voters rejected this exact formula once already, and I think they were right to. Shaheen has her own outside-money support, but she’s told voters what she believes Congress should do about the data centers reshaping her own backyard. Sullivan hasn’t told voters much of anything except how many out-of-state dollars she can raise. On September 8, I hope NH notices the difference.

Figures are from FEC filings (With Honor network, VoteVets, Article One PAC, Shaheen for Congress), current through August 9, 2026, plus HuffPost and NH Journal reporting on Sullivan’s AIPAC-adjacent ties.

Note: as of August 11,

Mindi Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a Senior Research Scientist at a national non-profit. She is a former NH State Representative, co-founder of the New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance, and chair of NH’s Environmentally-Triggered Chronic Disease Statutory Commission. She identified the NH seacoast pediatric cancer cluster in 2014 and helped pass the state’s landmark PFAS drinking water standards.

Key Takeaways

Today in New Hampshire, the sky is a sickly yellow-brown haze from Canadian wildfire smoke, the state’s air quality monitoring page showed “Good” for the Seacoast this morning even as residents watched a smoke plume roll in, not knowing what it was and taking to social media to ask, and across the country a waterborne parasite is sickening people at six times last year’s rate while measles cases approach a 35-year high. None of this is coincidence. The deliberate, accelerating dismantling of our federal public health infrastructure, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and across state systems that depend on federal funding and expertise, is leaving us blind, understaffed, and slower to respond at the exact moment we need those systems most. The costs will not be abstract. They are already being paid in hospitalizations, in children sick with preventable diseases, and in communities breathing air no one is adequately tracking.

• The CDC has lost more than a quarter of its workforce since January 2025, has no permanent director, and faces a proposed 53 percent budget cut that would eliminate over 60 programs. This is not “efficiency.” It is the strategic destruction of the nation’s early warning system.

• The U.S. has now confirmed more than 2,200 measles cases in 2026, already approaching all last year’s record total with months of transmission season remaining, and the country may lose its measles elimination status in November.

• A multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak has produced at least 1,645 confirmed domestic cases and potentially more than 5,100 additional cases still under investigation, exceeding the case count at this point last year by more than sixfold, with no source identified. The CDC’s public-facing surveillance page still shows 145 cases, nearly a month out of date, meaning the public is making decisions based on numbers off by more than an order of magnitude from what the agency itself knows.

• The EPA was stripped of more than 4,000 positions in 2025, reaching its lowest staffing in over 40 years, while climate-driven wildfire smoke is requiring more complex, real-time air quality forecasting than ever before.

When you hollow out public health infrastructure, you do not get a quieter system. You get a louder crisis with fewer people able to hear it, respond to it, or tell you the truth about what you are breathing.

Step outside in New Hampshire today, and the sky tells you something is wrong before any official alert does. You can smell smoke.

Canadian wildfire smoke from northern Minnesota and Ontario has been drifting across New England since this morning, turning the sky above the seacoast a yellowish, brownish haze. Beachgoers in Rye saw it happen in real time. The National Weather Service in Gray, Maine confirmed the smoke. Photographers documented it. And yet if you pulled up the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services air quality forecast page this morning, the Seacoast showed up as “Moderate” for ozone, with PM2.5 rated “Good.”

That is not a minor discrepancy. That is the gap between what the monitoring system was built to catch and what is happening to the air people are breathing right now.

I want to be clear that I am not blaming the scientists and forecasters at NHDES, who are doing difficult, technically complex work with limited tools and have been adapting in real time to the new normal of recurring wildfire smoke. NHDES has documented this challenge honestly. But the screenshot I took of that forecast page this morning is a snapshot of something larger: a public health infrastructure stretched far beyond what it was designed to handle, while the federal government is systematically stripping away its capacity.

That is the story of this particular Tuesday in July 2026. And it is also the story of the last 18 months in American public health.

A Parasite No One Can Find

Somewhere in the food supply, there is a contaminated source of Cyclospora cayetanensis, a microscopic waterborne parasite that causes severe gastrointestinal illness, the kind of relentless, explosive diarrhea, cramping, nausea, and fatigue that people sometimes describe as the worst they have ever felt. Since May 1 of this year, the CDC has confirmed at least 1,645 domestic cases across 34 states, with more than 5,100 additional cases still under analysis. Nine percent of confirmed case-patients have been hospitalized. At this same point last year, there were 249 total domestic cases. We are running more than six times the 2025 rate.

No source has been identified.

The CDC, FDA, and state health departments are actively investigating multiple multistate clusters. Past outbreaks have been traced to fresh produce such as basil, cilantro, spinach, and berries, foods consumed at much higher rates during the summer months. Genotyping at the CDC’s specialized laboratory has historically been a critical tool for linking cases to common sources. But that laboratory, like the rest of the agency, is now operating under extraordinary strain.

The CDC has lost more than a quarter of its workforce since January 2025, through mass firings, resignations, retirements, and contract nonrenewal. A survey of 433 current and 191 former CDC employees conducted between February and April 2026 found that only 2 percent of respondents in chronic disease and injury prevention programs reported that their work units remain fully operational and able to meet their missions. Eighty-five percent of current employees reported burnout. And 95% said they believed Americans will die because of the changes to the agency. The CDC has no permanent director, no principal deputy director, no chief of staff, and no chief medical officer. There is no stable leadership structure in place to coordinate a complex multistate outbreak response right now.

HHS has called the cuts the elimination of a “bloated bureaucracy.” Tell that to the 141 people hospitalized so far with a gastrointestinal infection we cannot trace to its source.

That gap, between what the public can see and what the system knows, is not a minor administrative lag. It is a window into what happens when you cut the workforce responsible for updating, communicating, and maintaining public health data infrastructure. People making decisions about what to eat, whether to call a doctor, whether to report a sick child, are working from numbers that are off by more than an order of magnitude. That is not transparency. That is the public health information system failing in plain sight.

A Disease We Eliminated. Coming Back.

The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000. That achievement, built on decades of public investment in vaccination programs, surveillance systems, and community immunization infrastructure, saved countless lives and billions of dollars.

We are now on the verge of losing it.

As of this week, the CDC has confirmed more than 2,231 measles cases across 45 jurisdictions in 2026, with 32 outbreaks and 93 percent of cases linked to active transmission chains. The full-year 2025 total was 2,289 cases, itself the highest since 1991. We are already at 97 percent of that total with months of the school year, summer travel season, and fall congregation still ahead. The Pan American Health Organization will convene a review in November 2026 to determine whether the United States retains its measles elimination status.

The primary driver is the erosion of MMR vaccination coverage among children, dropping from 95.2 percent in the 2019-2020 school year to 92.5 percent in 2024-2025, falling below the 95 percent threshold required for community immunity. That translates to roughly 286,000 kindergartners left unprotected last year. When measles is introduced into a community with that level of susceptibility, it spreads.

And the infrastructure we rely on to detect it, contain it, and communicate about it, including CDC epidemiologists, state health department liaison staff, and the public health laboratory scientists who confirm cases and support outbreak response, is being hollowed out in real time.

40 Years of Capacity, Gone

The EPA was stripped of more than 4,000 positions in 2025, bringing the agency to its lowest staffing levels in more than four decades.

That happened in the same years that wildfire smoke from Canadian fires has become a recurring, intensifying force in New England air quality. NHDES documented this shift honestly: before 2021, New Hampshire had not experienced a PM2.5 exceedance since 2013. Since 2021, wildfire smoke has become part of the annual forecasting routine, bringing fine particulate matter into the state that the original monitoring network was not designed to capture. NHDES received IRA funding to install a new monitoring station in Berlin in 2024, working with EPA partners to find the right location. That kind of collaboration between state and federal air quality scientists is exactly what produces better forecasting.

It is also exactly what is being defunded.

EPA grants fund the clean and safe drinking water infrastructure that communities across the country, regardless of political party, depend on. They support the technical expertise that state agencies rely on when their own capacity runs short. They fund the air monitoring networks that tell us what we are breathing. A proposed more than 50 percent cut to EPA funding would not produce a “leaner” regulatory system. It would produce a monitoring gap: more events like today, where the sky is visibly hazardous, and the official forecast says “Good.”

What This Is Actually About

Public health infrastructure is invisible when it works. You do not see the epidemiologist who traced a Cyclospora cluster back to a specific cilantro supplier and prevented a hundred more hospitalizations. You do not see the CDC laboratory scientist who genotyped the samples that made that link possible. You do not see the air monitoring technician who calibrated the PM2.5 sensor that sent you the alert that kept your asthmatic child indoors. You only notice these systems when they fail.

We are being told, repeatedly, that the cuts represent efficiency. That the agencies were bloated. That the money was wasted.

But what we are living through, today, on a July afternoon when the sky is yellow, and a parasite is spreading, and measles has returned to levels not seen since I was a child, is the consequence of those claims. We are watching, in real time, what happens when you remove the people whose job it is to see threats coming, track them, name them, and stop them.

Jennifer Nuzzo of Brown University’s Pandemic Center said it plainly: “Making it real for everyday Americans and what it means for their lives... cutting the federal workforce isn’t just affecting blue states.”

She is right. Wildfire smoke does not stop at state lines. Contaminated produce moves through every supply chain. Measles spreads wherever vaccination rates have been allowed to fall. These are not partisan threats. They are biological facts.

But the decision to defund the systems that protect us from them is a political one. And the people making it need to be held accountable for what that choice looks like on the ground.

What New Hampshire Is Facing

I’ve been fighting for environmental accountability in this state for more than a decade. I helped notify New Hampshire of a pediatric cancer cluster on the seacoast in 2014. I spent years on the Pease Restoration Advisory Board fighting the Air Force to address PFAS contamination at the former base. I served in the legislature and co-founded the NH Safe Water Alliance to push for clean water protections. I know what it looks like when government fails to protect communities from environmental harm, and I know what it costs.

What I am watching right now at the federal level is a faster, more deliberate version of the same pattern. Remove the science. Reduce the monitoring. Eliminate the workforce. Claim it was a waste. Wait for people to get sick.

Today in New Hampshire, the sky is orange-yellow from wildfire smoke that the forecast did not predict. Somewhere in our food supply, a parasite is sickening people, and no one has found the source. Measles is circulating in 45 states. The CDC has no director. The EPA has lost 40 years of workforce capacity.

This is not a coincidence. This is the consequence of a policy decision to treat public health as expendable.

We cannot stay silent.

Mindi F. Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a Senior Research Scientist at a national nonprofit and an Assistant Professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. She is a former New Hampshire State Representative, co-founder of the NH Safe Water Alliance and NH Science and Public Health, and a 2026 Keene State College President’s Award recipient for Outstanding Woman of New Hampshire.

This essay expands on my op-ed published today, Sunday, July 12, 2026, in Seacoast Online.

Key Takeaways

Last month’s Merrimack River sewage disaster closed 41 beaches, contaminated shellfishing beds from Gloucester to Salisbury, and kept families out of the water during a record heat wave over the Fourth of July holiday. It was entirely preventable. A decade-old EPA consent decree, a chronically underfunded federal grant program, and years of deferred infrastructure investment created the conditions for this failure long before the pipe cracked. This crisis is not just about Haverhill, nor is it just about sewage.

• A 1970s-era sewer force main that failed had been on Haverhill’s repair list under an EPA consent decree since 2014. It just had not reached the top yet.

• The federal combined sewer overflow grant program serves more than 800 communities nationwide on just $41 million, an amount that guarantees that what should take 5 years takes 20 or 30.

• When municipalities cannot afford to comply, EPA moves the deadline. The pipe breaks anyway.

• Massachusetts responded with real-time beach monitoring and rapid reopening. New Hampshire spent days deciding whether to increase testing at all, because it has chosen not to invest in the capacity to do so.

• This is the same infrastructure of neglect that allows PFAS to contaminate drinking water for years before anyone acts. The crises look different. The cause is the same.

On June 27, a severe storm overwhelmed Haverhill’s wastewater system. A 42-inch sewer force main, installed in the 1970s, cracked in two places. For days, roughly 8 million gallons of raw sewage poured into the Merrimack River daily. Bacteria counts at some monitoring locations reached 40 times the safe level. Forty-one Massachusetts beaches were closed. Shellfishing beds from Gloucester to Salisbury were shut down. A temporary bypass stopped the discharge on July 1, but the river stayed contaminated. Beaches were still closed through the Fourth of July weekend, during a record heat wave, as families who simply wanted to swim were told to stay out of the water.

Every single part of this was preventable.

The term “preventable” gets used a lot; however, it rarely leads to action.

The pipe was on the list.

A decade before it broke, Haverhill signed a consent decree with the USEPA agreeing to fix its combined sewer overflow problem. Then-Attorney General Maura Healey called it a step toward protecting the Merrimack.

In all but three of the last ten years, Haverhill released a greater volume of sewage overflow than it did the year the decree was signed. The city pledged to fix the problem. The EPA signed off on the plan. It got worse.

Haverhill’s April compliance report noted that a contractor was working on final designs for pipe replacements at the South Mill Pumping Station, the very site of the breaks. The pipe that failed was on the list. It just had not reached the top yet.

This is what regulatory failure looks like up close. Not even a mistake, exactly. Just a system that moves too slowly, funded too thinly, with no meaningful consequence for missing its own deadlines.

This is a funding crisis wearing a management crisis as a costume.

The federal combined sewer overflow grant program is intended to serve more than 800 communities nationwide with aging combined sewer infrastructure. In 2024, the program had $41 million in funding, and in 2026, the EPA announced plans to reach $81 million over two full fiscal years. This program is woefully underfunded. Haverhill's own repair list alone is estimated at $56 million, meaning a single mid-sized city's backlog would consume more than half of the program's entire 2026 allocation, leaving the other 800-plus communities to divide what remains. When municipalities cannot afford the fixes, the EPA moves the deadline. What should take 5 years takes 20 or 30. The infrastructure failure at the heart of this crisis belongs to both parties, across decades of governance at every level.

The consent decree was signed under a Democratic administration. The grant program has been chronically underfunded through Republican and Democratic Congresses alike. The people who could not take their children to Crane Beach this July 4th were not checking which party is in power. They were checking whether it was safe to go into the water. They were told no.

I have watched this dynamic play out my entire career in environmental health. I identified a pediatric cancer cluster on the NH seacoast in 2014. I sat in budget hearings in the NH House of Representatives and watched industry lobbyists testify in opposition while environmental bills died in committee. I served on the Pease Restoration Advisory Board and fought the Air Force to address PFAS contamination at a former military base that had been poisoning a community for years before anyone acknowledged it. In every single case, the failure was not a surprise. It was a prediction.

The interstate dimension clearly reveals the structural gap.

Massachusetts acted with urgency after the Haverhill break: a real-time beach-monitoring dashboard updated hourly, coordinated closures, and beaches reopened within hours of clear test results. New Hampshire spent days determining whether to increase testing at coastal beaches last sampled before the pipe broke. NH beaches ultimately cleared, and dilution volumes worked in the state’s favor. But that is not the point.

NH was not prepared to move quickly because it has chosen not to invest in the capacity to do so. The 2026 to 2027 state budget explicitly restructured NHDES to reduce reliance on tax dollars. Maine’s coastal beach monitoring program is not even mandated by state law. What Massachusetts built, because it invested in it, is the difference between a crisis you can manage and a crisis that manages you.

This is not separate from the PFAS story. It is the same story.

Yesterday I published a piece in The Hill about PFAS contamination at military sites and what it costs mothers and newborns when Congress keeps delaying action. The two pieces look different on the surface: one is about invisible chemical contamination accumulating in bodies over decades, and the other is about 8 million gallons of visible, acute sewage flooding a river in a single week.

The cause is identical. We have chosen, repeatedly and across party lines, to underfund environmental infrastructure, delay regulatory enforcement, and defer the cost of protection onto communities who have no say in that decision. The Merrimack River did not fail. Our investment in it did.

What you can do right now.

This problem has two levels, federal and state, and both need pressure.

At the federal level: Contact your U.S. Senators and Representative and ask them specifically to increase funding for the EPA’s combined sewer overflow grant program. $81 million for 800+ communities is not a program. It is a waiting list. Ask them to support mandatory compliance timelines with real enforcement consequences when consent decrees are not met. You can find your representatives here.

At the state level: If you live in New Hampshire or Maine, contact your state legislators and ask them why your state lacks a real-time beach monitoring system and what they plan to do about it. Ask specifically about NHDES budget restructuring and what it means for environmental enforcement capacity going forward. In NH, you can find your legislators here, and if you live in Maine you can identify your representatives here.

In Massachusetts, you can contact Governor Maura Healey here. Raised in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, she signed the original consent decree as Attorney General and now leads the state's response as Governor. She knows this river. She knows this coastline. It is time to finish what she started.

Wherever you live, share this piece. The bipartisan support this op-ed has drawn tells me people across the political spectrum understand that dirty water is not a partisan issue. It is a public health emergency we keep choosing to defer. The river cannot wait any longer.

Mindi Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a Senior Research Scientist at MedStar Health Research Institute and an Assistant Professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. She is a former NH State Representative, co-founder of the New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance, and chair of NH’s Environmentally-Triggered Chronic Disease Statutory Commission. She identified the NH seacoast pediatric cancer cluster in 2014 and helped pass the state’s landmark PFAS drinking water standards.

Key Takeaways

Last month, two landmark stories arrived at the same time, and together they reveal something we can no longer afford to look away from: the Pentagon is delaying PFAS cleanup at nearly 200 military sites by an average of a decade, even as new science confirms that chemical exposures during pregnancy exact a measurable toll on birth outcomes and child health. This is not a failure of knowledge. It is a failure of will, and mothers, newborns, and the communities living in the shadow of contaminated military bases are the ones paying for it.

• The Pentagon has delayed PFAS cleanup at nearly 200 military sites across 42 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C., by an average of a decade, with some communities waiting nearly 20 years longer than originally promised.

• A landmark NIH ECHO cohort study in JAMA Network Open found that pregnant women carry dozens of simultaneous chemical exposures, with measurable associations with preterm birth and reduced birthweight.

• PFAS contamination from military sites does not arrive alone. It arrives on top of everything else a pregnant woman is already exposed to, from food packaging to household products to drinking water.

• The GAO estimates PFAS cleanup will cost more than $9.3 billion. The administration’s answer has been to cut environmental restoration funding and extend military authority to keep using PFAS firefighting foam.

• Congress must require enforceable cleanup timelines, backed by real funding, and stop treating the health of the most vulnerable among us as an acceptable cost of doing business.

My op-ed in The Hill went live today, and I want to give you the full context behind it, because the story behind the story matters as much as the piece itself.

Last month, two things arrived at the same moment. The first was a report confirming that the Pentagon has quietly delayed PFAS cleanup at nearly 200 military installations across 42 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. Not by months. By years, a decade on average, and in some communities by nearly two decades. Eleven contaminated sites were supposed to reach cleanup milestones in 2025. None of them did.

The second was a landmark study, published in JAMA Network Open and drawing on the NIH’s Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) cohort, one of the largest and most diverse pregnancy studies ever conducted in the United States. Researchers examined 10 classes of chemicals simultaneously and found widespread exposure across the cohort, with measurable associations with preterm birth and reduced birthweight.

The study did not examine PFAS directly. But that is precisely the point.

Pregnant women are not exposed to one chemical at a time. They carry a cumulative burden from food packaging, personal care products, household goods, and contaminated drinking water, all at once. PFAS from a military installation does not arrive in isolation. It arrives on top of everything else a pregnant woman is already carrying. And the government’s response to that documented, measurable burden is to push cleanup deadlines out another decade, cut environmental restoration budgets, and extend the military’s authority to keep using PFAS firefighting foam.

I have been watching this playbook for a long time.

For years, I served on the Pease Restoration Advisory Board, a community oversight body created to hold the Air Force accountable for PFAS contamination at the former Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire. I watched an institution with enormous resources and clear legal obligations find endless reasons to slow-walk cleanup, dispute findings, and manage timelines in ways that protected its budget rather than the people living downwind and downstream.

In 2014, I notified the state of New Hampshire of a pediatric cancer cluster on the seacoast, a discovery that led directly to some of the nation’s first PFAS drinking water standards. The children in that cluster did not have the luxury of waiting for convenient timelines. They still don’t. Neither do the families near Wurtsmith Air Base in Michigan, Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, or Brunswick Naval Air Station in Maine.

The GAO has now confirmed that the cost of PFAS investigation and cleanup will exceed $9.3 billion, tripling prior estimates. The administration’s answer has been to propose cutting Pentagon environmental restoration funding even as those costs have tripled and timelines continue to slip. The FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act extended the military’s authority to purchase and use PFAS firefighting foam through October, with broad new exemptions that could extend its use indefinitely.

The message to communities near these bases is not subtle. Your water, your pregnancy, your child’s health are acceptable losses.

They are not.

Science has done its job. The ECHO study is a gift of clarity in an era of manufactured confusion. The communities living near contaminated military installations have done their jobs, for decades, at enormous personal and financial cost. The question now is whether the people we elect to protect us will do theirs.

Congress must require enforceable cleanup timelines, with the funding to meet them. Not suggestions. Not aspirational benchmarks. Enforceable obligations, with consequences for missing them.

Every year of delay is a year of continued exposure. And some of those exposures are happening right now, in the first trimester, during the weeks when it matters most.

Read the full op-ed in The Hill: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/5962805-pfas-exposure-pregnancy-health/

Mindi F. Messmer, DMSc, MS, PG, CG, is a Senior Research Scientist at MedStar Health Research Institute, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine, and co-founder of the NH Safe Water Alliance. She is a former NH State Representative and a nationally recognized environmental health advocate.

Key Takeaways

On the Fourth of July holiday weekend, tens of thousands of beachgoers across MA, NH, and ME are encountering closed beaches and unsafe water. Not because of some unforeseen act of nature, but because of decades of deferred infrastructure investment and regulatory failure for which both parties share responsibility. A 1970s-era sewer main in Haverhill, MA collapsed under a storm surge on June 27, dumping an estimated 8 million gallons of raw sewage per day into the Merrimack River for at least a week. The warning signs were in plain sight; a 2016 federal consent decree that changed almost nothing.

Meanwhile, MA acted immediately to protect the public while NH spent days assessing whether to increase testing at coastal beaches that had last been sampled before the catastrophe began. NH beaches ultimately cleared, but the structural question remains: a state that monitors 16 coastal beaches up to twice weekly, primarily on federal dollars, is not prepared for the next emergency. Sewage releases do not respect municipal boundaries, and ocean water does not respect state lines. What gets dumped into the Merrimack in MA washes up on beaches in NH. What gets ignored in a consent decree in one state becomes a public health emergency in the next. This is a regional story, and it is an American story, about what happens when environmental infrastructure is treated as a local burden rather than a shared public health obligation.

• A federal consent decree signed a full decade ago required Haverhill to fix its combined sewer overflow problem; instead, the city discharged even more sewage than before in 7 of the last 10 years, and the EPA moved the goalposts rather than enforcing the deadline.

• An estimated 32 million gallons of untreated wastewater poured into the Merrimack River before a temporary bypass stopped the bleeding, forcing closures of beaches in Ipswich, Essex, Newburyport, and Salisbury just as temperatures climbed toward record triple digits.

• MA had closed 41 beaches by Tuesday and acted aggressively, with state-level real-time testing and coordinated closure decisions; NH, by contrast, had last tested its coastal beaches four days before the spill began and spent days “determining” whether additional testing was needed.

• The federal government’s combined sewer overflow grant program, meant to help the more than 800 communities nationwide with aging combined sewer systems, currently has $41 million, a sum that wouldn’t cover a single mid-sized city’s infrastructure needs, let alone the regional crisis unfolding along the Merrimack.

• This is not a partisan story with clean heroes and villains; it is a bipartisan failure of political will that has played out across administrations, and the people paying the price are the same ones we ask to trust that government works.

It is the July 4^th holiday weekend. A heat wave is bearing down on coastal New England, with temperatures forecast to hit triple digits. Families who have planned for weeks to beat the heat at the beach arrive to find signs warning them to stay out of the water. Shellfishing beds are closed. The smell gives it away before the signs do.

Every single part of it was preventable.

What Happened

On the evening of June 27, a severe storm overwhelmed Haverhill’s wastewater system. A 42-inch sewer force main near the city’s South Mill Street Pump Station, the main artery carrying the city’s wastewater to its treatment facility, cracked in two places. Since then, roughly 8 million gallons of untreated wastewater have been spilling into the Merrimack River per day.

By Tuesday evening, officials estimated roughly 32 million gallons of untreated wastewater had entered the river. A barrier was installed to hold back solid waste, but contaminated water flowed freely downstream, carrying bacteria counts that at some locations along the river reached up to 40 times the safe level.

Every beach from Essex to the border with NH was closed to swimming. The Ipswich closure included the beloved Crane Beach. Newburyport and Salisbury closed their shores. Shellfishing beds in Gloucester went dark. In addition to the beaches impacted by the sewage leak, another 14 beaches were closed due to high bacteria levels, including two beaches in Salem on Children’s Island, where a YMCA camp was taking place.

The number of MA beaches closed to swimming rose to 41 on Tuesday, with Plum Island, Salisbury Beach, Essex beaches and Crane Beach in Ipswich among those off limits as temperatures were forecast to skyrocket past 100 degrees on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

On Wednesday, July 1st, contractors completed the installation of the first temporary 24-inch bypass pipeline and announced that the active discharge had stopped. That is the good news. Here is the bad news: the bypass is a temporary patch while crews excavate the damaged sections of the original 42-inch main and conduct engineering evaluations before permanent repairs can even begin. Officials warned the public to continue avoiding contact with the Merrimack River and downstream waters for at least 48 hours after the discharge stopped, a window that carries directly into the July 4th holiday weekend. As of this writing, multiple beaches remain closed or under advisory. The river is still contaminated. The damage from five days of continuous raw sewage release does not simply wash away the moment the pipe is patched.

All of this happened just before a holiday weekend at the height of summer and during a record heat wave.

The discharge may have stopped. The crisis has not.

This Is Not a Surprise

A decade before a sewer main broke, city officials signed a consent decree with the US Environmental Protection Agency, agreeing to take critical steps to prevent further pollution of the river.

The year was 2016. The City of Haverhill entered a Consent Decree with federal and state enforcement authorities, agreeing to pay a $125,000 civil penalty and to take critical remedial measures to address pollution the City discharged into the Merrimack and Little Rivers. The complaints alleged that, as early as 2008, Haverhill discharged pollutants from its combined sewer system on 190 occasions, in both dry and wet weather.

Then-Attorney General Maura Healey said at the time the state was “pleased that, through this settlement, steps will be taken to better protect the Merrimack and Little Rivers.”

Except the discharges continued, to the point where in all but three of the last 10 years, Haverhill released an even greater volume of so-called combined sewage overflow than it did in 2016, when the consent decree was signed.

The city pledged to fix the problem. EPA signed off. And then it got worse, not better. For the better part of a decade, the warning lights were flashing, and no one found a way to act with urgency.

“This is a result of not putting the funds in earlier on to fix this,” said Heather Govern, vice president of the Conservation Law Foundation. “It’s an issue that EPA should have dealt with earlier on, with a stricter message that you have to get this done a lot quicker.”

And even more damning: Haverhill’s most recent compliance report, from April, noted that a contractor was working on final designs for discharge pipe replacements at the South Mill Pumping Station, the very site of the recent breaks. The pipe that failed was on the list; it just hadn’t reached the top yet.

“This is what aging infrastructure looks like,” state Representative Andy Vargas wrote in a Facebook post. “The pipe that failed is 1970s-era concrete near the end of its life. This is a problem that runs through many MA communities, not just Haverhill.”

The Money Problem Nobody Wants to Solve

This is a funding crisis masquerading as a management crisis.

The core infrastructure problem in Haverhill, as in hundreds of American cities, is a combined sewer overflow system: a relic of older urban engineering where stormwater and sewage share the same pipes. When it rains hard enough, the system gets overwhelmed, and sewage exits through overflow valves directly into rivers and waterways. The fix, separating the storm and sewer lines or building holding capacity, is technically straightforward. The cost is not.

In 2017, as part of the consent decree, Haverhill identified 28 deficiencies and a schedule for their completion, estimating that the fixes could cost $56 million. In practice, the costs have grown. Upgrading the wastewater treatment plant carries a price tag of $60 million to $70 million, and separating sewer lines in parts of the city has cost $33 million.

And the federal government, which created this regulatory obligation, has never adequately funded the solution. When Representative Lori Trahan entered Congress in 2019, the federal government had a municipal grant program aimed at this problem, but it was not funded. It now has a grand total of $41 million, for all 800-plus communities across the US with combined sewer systems. “Over the course of history, the feds have kind of walked away from these federal investments,” said Trahan. “That’s hugely problematic because these are super expensive projects and they’re time-consuming. They require a sustained investment.”

Cities “cry poor,” and the EPA offers leniency, moving the goalposts so that what should take 5 years takes 20 or 30. In Haverhill’s case, the leniency outlasted the infrastructure itself.

In the past five years, Haverhill has received $220 million in low-interest loans from the state, including $50 million this year for the wastewater treatment facility and upgrades at the South Mill Street Pump Station. Every dollar borrowed is a dollar that comes back around to ratepayers, disproportionately burdening lower-income communities that can least afford the rate increases.

This is what it looks like when we choose not to invest in public infrastructure as a shared social obligation. We borrow the costs from the future. And eventually, the bill comes due in a catastrophic way, on a holiday weekend, with a heat wave moving in.

Two States, Two Very Different Responses

I am a public health scientist, and the contrast between how MA and NH handled this emergency tells us something important about preparedness, monitoring infrastructure, and the will to act when public health is at stake.

MA had a crisis on its hands, but it responded with urgency. Governor Healey and the state Department of Public Health maintained a round-the-clock coordinated response. The state’s beach quality dashboard updated hourly. Closures were posted in real time. When the bypass was completed and specific beaches showed clear results, those beaches were reopened within hours, not days. The system, imperfect as it is, was designed to respond.

NH’s situation is more complicated, and the response-time gap is only the surface of it. As of June 29, a NHDES spokesperson said the agency would determine whether the incident required changes to NH’s beach testing schedule. State beaches had last been sampled on June 25, the same day as an earlier accidental sewer discharge in Haverhill, and results showed no contamination.

The major sewer main break happened the night of June 27. NH’s most recent beach samples had been taken on June 25. Two days earlier. The state was “determining” whether it needed to test more. Meanwhile, the Merrimack River was sending up to 10 million gallons of raw sewage into the ocean daily.

But the testing lag is a symptom, not the disease. The deeper problem is that NH has made a sustained political choice to underinvest in environmental protection. The 2026-2027 state budget restructured NHDES programs with the explicit goal of reducing reliance on tax dollars and making programs “self-supporting.” The legislature eliminated mandatory vehicle emissions testing over the objections of NHDES’s own commissioner and despite a direct warning from EPA Region One that doing so would risk federal highway funding sanctions. The state’s beach monitoring program covers just 16 coastal beaches and is conducted up to twice per week, funded primarily by federal Beach Act dollars rather than state investment. ME’s coastal beach program is voluntary, not mandated by state law, leaving monitoring decisions to individual municipalities.

This is the infrastructure of neglect. When a major sewage emergency erupts just across the border, and millions of gallons of contaminated water are flowing toward your coastline, “up to twice per week” and “we are determining next steps” are not adequate public health responses. They are the predictable output of a system that has been deliberately starved. NH did eventually increase testing, and Gov. Kelly Ayotte said the state would continue monitoring through the holiday weekend. The beaches ultimately cleared. But the sequence matters. MA acted. NH assessed, then acted.

That gap is the difference between a public health system designed to prioritize precaution and one designed to minimize cost. I served in the NH House of Representatives. I sat in those budget hearings, and I watched industry lobbyists work the hallways while environmental bills died in committee. I watched colleagues vote down investments in water monitoring, in wastewater infrastructure, in PFAS testing, and then turn around and talk about protecting the Granite State’s natural resources. The fiscal lack of commitment to environmental protection in NH is not a surprise to anyone who has served there. It is a feature, not a bug, and the people paying the price are the ones who just wanted to take their kids to the beach.

This Is a Bipartisan Failure

The infrastructure failure at the heart of this crisis belongs to both parties, across decades of governance at every level.

The 42-inch pipe that broke in Haverhill was poured in the 1970s. The consent decree intended to fix the problem was signed in 2016 under a Democratic administration in MA. The federal funding that was never adequate has been chronically underfunded through Republican and Democratic Congresses alike. The Trump-era EPA has weakened enforcement posture and walked away from Clean Water Act commitments, yes, and that matters. But the chronic underinvestment in water and sewer infrastructure is a pattern that predates the current administration and reflects a bipartisan political consensus that environmental infrastructure is a budget line to be trimmed rather than a foundational public health investment.

Clean water is not a partisan value. Sewage flowing into rivers that people fish and swim in is not a partisan problem. The people who could not take their children to Crane Beach this Fourth of July were not checking which party is in power. They were checking whether it was safe to go into the water and were told no.

We have had decades of both parties treating water infrastructure as something communities deal with on their own, with a trickle of federal support in the form of loans that must be repaid. The result is sitting in the Merrimack River right now.

What We Should Demand

The time for waiting on results, waiting for the next storm, and waiting for officials to act is over. So, it’s time to attack those of us who refuse to stay quiet. These are the demands.

First, grant funding for wastewater infrastructure, not just loans. Communities with combined sewer overflow systems that serve working-class and low-income populations cannot finance $200 million in infrastructure upgrades through ratepayer debt. Congress needs to fund the CSO grant program at a level commensurate with the actual national need, which is measured in tens of billions, not $41 million.

Second, enforceable consent decree deadlines with real consequences. EPA has a pattern of extending timelines when municipalities “cry poor” and cry busy. That pattern ends here. If a community has been under a consent decree for a decade and things have gotten worse, something has gone wrong with enforcement, and someone must answer for it.

Third, real-time beach monitoring infrastructure across all three states. MA has built a system that updates hourly during beach season. NH monitors 16 coastal beaches up to twice weekly. ME’s beach program is voluntary, not mandated by state law, and relies on local municipalities. That patchwork is not adequate for a coastline serving millions of visitors during summer heat waves. The federal Beach Act provides funding for exactly this purpose. It needs to be fully deployed.

Fourth, climate-proofing of municipal water systems. Across MA, many cities and towns are grappling with infrastructure that wasn’t designed for their population sizes or the kinds of rain events that are becoming increasingly common as the climate warms, leading to greater atmospheric moisture and larger storms. The storm that broke Haverhill’s pipe was not unusual. It was a preview. If we do not upgrade these systems with climate-resilient design, this will happen again, and again, and again.

The Silence We Cannot Afford

I built my career in NH fighting for clean water. I know what it looks like when a community is told to wait, to study, to be patient while the contamination continues. I know what it costs in human health, in economic loss, in the slow erosion of public trust in the institutions meant to protect us.

The people on the beaches this Fourth of July weekend were not asking for much. They were asking to swim safely on a holiday in their own country. Many of them couldn’t.

That is not an acceptable answer. And the officials, at every level, in every party, who signed consent decrees and missed deadlines and underfunded grants and waited for test results that were already days old, owe the public more than a press conference.

They owe us infrastructure that works. Water that is safe. A government that acts before the pipe breaks, not after.

We cannot stay silent. Next, it will be us.

Mindi F. Messmer, DMSc, MS, PG, CG, is a Senior Research Scientist at MedStar Health Research Institute, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine, and co-founder of the NH Safe Water Alliance. She is a former NH State Representative and a nationally recognized environmental health advocate.

Key Takeaways

The federal government reached its first comprehensive enforcement settlement with a PFAS manufacturer, requiring Chemours to pay $22.5 million in civil penalties and spend an estimated $427 million on pollution controls and community drinking water over 15 years. The action is real and meaningful for affected communities, but it leaves critical gaps: DuPont’s legacy liability at the same facilities is entirely unresolved, the civil penalty is disproportionately small relative to more than a decade of alleged violations, and the North Carolina remediation requirements lack the specificity of those in West Virginia. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is simultaneously seeking to roll back PFAS drinking water standards nationwide, putting enforcement and regulatory policy on a collision course.

• The $450M headline is mostly injunctive relief, not a penalty. Only $22.5M is a civil fine; the rest of the funds are for operational changes and community water supply.

• DuPont is untouched. These same facilities operated under DuPont ownership for decades, and the settlement explicitly does not resolve DuPont’s liability.

• Chemours can keep manufacturing PFAS. The agreement is designed to allow continued production for commercial and military uses.

• North Carolina communities got less. The Cape Fear River facility faces an open-ended engineering review, not the specific, funded projects required at the West Virginia plant.

The public comment period is open, and community input can help shape these agreements (see details below).

More details

On June 24, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice, EPA, and West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection announced a $450 million settlement with The Chemours Company over PFAS contamination at four facilities in West Virginia, North Carolina, and New Jersey. The press release calls it a “landmark” action, and by the narrow measure of federal enforcement history, that is accurate. This is the first comprehensive federal settlement against a major manufacturer of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances dubbed “forever chemicals” or PFAS.

But a landmark alone is not sufficient. For the communities living downstream of these plants, and for the broader field of PFAS accountability, what this settlement does is as important as what it leaves unresolved.

The $450 million figure is a composite with several components.

A $22.5 million civil penalty covers alleged violations of the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and the West Virginia Water Pollution Control Act at all four facilities. Those violations, caused by Chemours’ unfettered pollution, allegedly continued for more than a decade.

The remaining roughly $427 million is injunctive relief, meaning it funds operational changes and community mitigation rather than functioning as a punitive fine. Specifically:

• $90 million for a multi-year program to mitigate PFAS discharges at the facilities.

• $60 million (estimated) for PFAS pollution controls, including granulated activated carbon treatment systems, for surface water discharges and air emissions at the West Virginia plant.

• $280 million (estimated) to supply clean drinking water for more than a decade to communities surrounding the West Virginia and New Jersey facilities.

Chemours is also required to control releases of GenX, a fluoropolymer processing aid, at a minimum efficiency of 99% across all four facilities. Fourteen specific projects address PFAS in wastewater, stormwater, and groundwater from the West Virginia plant. The North Carolina facility faces a separate requirement: evaluate and implement controls based on recommendations from a third-party engineering firm. And Chemours must implement enhanced Leak Detection and Repair programs for PFAS air emissions.

These programs run for 15 years.

The settlement has many shortfalls:

1. The settlement does not touch DuPont. Chemours was spun off from DuPont in 2015, and many of these facilities operated under DuPont ownership for decades before Chemours took over. The complaint explicitly states that “today’s settlement does not resolve DuPont’s liability for forever chemicals.” DuPont’s responsibility for legacy contamination from the same sites, over many more years, remains an open legal question.

2. The civil penalty is small relative to harm. $22.5 million for more than a decade of alleged multi-statute violations at four facilities is a modest figure. By comparison, the estimated cost of providing alternative drinking water to affected communities alone is $280 million. The penalty does not approach proportionality with the scale of documented discharge or the duration of alleged violations.

3. It permits continued PFAS manufacturing. The settlement explicitly allows Chemours to continue producing PFAS for commercial and military applications. This is acknowledged openly in the DOJ press release: the agreement is designed to let “the company continue its manufacturing operations while protecting communities.” Whether adequate long-term protection is achievable alongside continued production at scale is a question the settlement sidesteps rather than answers.

4. The North Carolina approach is less defined. While West Virginia receives specific, enumerated projects and dollar commitments, the Cape Fear River facility in North Carolina gets a process, not a predetermined outcome. Chemours will work with a third-party engineering firm to evaluate options and implement controls. For communities along the Cape Fear River, which have faced years of GenX and other PFAS contamination, the absence of specified remediation benchmarks is a significant gap.

5. The consent decree is still subject to public comment. This is not yet final. The decree has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia and will undergo a public comment period before it becomes binding. Community members, particularly in affected neighborhoods in West Virginia and New Jersey, should engage in that process.

The bigger picture:

This settlement arrives at a complicated political moment. The Trump administration is negotiating a regulatory rollback on PFAS maximum contaminant levels under the Safe Drinking Water Act, even as it positions this enforcement action as evidence that polluters are being held accountable. Enforcement after the fact does not substitute for prevention at the source, and weakened drinking water standards undercut the long-term value of the very drinking water protections this settlement funds.

There is also the question of who pays for what was not remediated. The $280 million drinking water commitment runs 15 years and covers communities around two of four facilities. It does not address groundwater contamination that has already migrated, health costs incurred by affected residents, or contamination in communities beyond each plant's immediate perimeter. PFAS travel; they accumulate and persist. A 15-year clean water supply program does not reverse bioaccumulation or undo exposures that occurred during the decade of alleged violations.

The West Virginia Governor’s statement in the DOJ press release is worth reading carefully. Governor Morrisey acknowledged that the settlement is “only one piece of a much larger issue” and that discussions are ongoing regarding a “comprehensive resolution for the Washington Works facility.” That language suggests the settlement announced yesterday is itself preliminary, at least from the state’s perspective.

What should come next:

For advocates and policymakers watching this case, several threads demand continued attention.

DuPont’s liability must be pursued independently. The same facilities, the same waterways, and many of the same communities were affected during DuPont’s ownership. A settlement that holds only the successor company accountable is structurally incomplete.

The North Carolina provisions need specificity. Community groups along the Cape Fear River should push for binding remediation benchmarks rather than an open-ended engineering review process.

The public comment period is an opportunity. If you live near these facilities or have expertise in PFAS remediation, enforcement, or community health impacts, your comment matters. DOJ consent decrees have been modified based on public input.

EPA’s broader PFAS enforcement program should be watched. This settlement establishes a precedent, but it is the first, not the last. How the agency applies the legal authorities invoked here, particularly under the Toxic Substances Control Act, to other PFAS manufacturers will determine whether this is a genuine turning point or an isolated action.

And Congress needs to hear from the public on the Safe Drinking Water Act PFAS standards. Enforcement against one company at four facilities does not compensate for a regulatory framework that weakens protections for millions of people served by public water systems nationwide.

Yes, the Chemours settlement represents progress. Communities near these plants will receive cleaner water. Discharge controls will be implemented. Violations that persisted for years will face consequences.

But real progress measured against the full scale of PFAS contamination in the United States, and against the public health burden that has accumulated over decades of industry production and inadequate regulation, is not the same as a problem solved. It is a beginning. And it has taken too long to arrive.

Mindi F. Messmer, DMSc, MS, is a Senior Research Scientist at a national non-profit and Assistant Professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine. She identified the pediatric cancer cluster on the New Hampshire seacoast in 2014, served on the Pease Restoration Advisory Board, and co-founded the New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance. Her research program includes PFAS ecological epidemiology and perinatal exposure.

Submit a public comment:

The consent decree is not yet final. The public has 30 days from June 24, 2026, to submit comments before the court considers approving it, meaning the window closes around July 24, 2026. The full settlement agreement and comment submission instructions are available at www.justice.gov/enrd/consent-decrees. If you live near one of the affected facilities, work in PFAS remediation or environmental health, or represent a downstream community, your comment is part of the official record. DOJ consent decrees have been modified based on public input. This one should be no exception.

This week, two stories arrived at the same time, and together they tell us something we need to hear.

The first: the Pentagon has quietly delayed the cleanup of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) at nearly 200 military sites across 42 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. Not by months. By a decade on average, and in some communities by nearly two decades. Eleven contaminated military sites were originally set to reach cleanup milestones in 2025. None met those timelines. They are now expected to reach those benchmarks between five and 19 years later than previously anticipated. At sites where PFAS contamination has already reached drinking water, families are being told to keep waiting.

The second story: a landmark study published this week in JAMA Network Open, drawing on the NIH’s Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) cohort, one of the largest and most diverse pregnancy studies ever conducted in the United States, found that pregnant women are exposed to dozens of everyday chemicals, many of which can affect how early a child is born or a child’s weight at birth. The study examined ten classes of chemicals simultaneously, including phthalates and alternative plasticizers, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, organophosphorus flame retardants, and halogenated phenols. The exposures were widespread. The harms were measurable. While this study did not examine PFAS directly, the scientific literature, including prior research from the ECHO program itself, has documented that PFAS exposure during pregnancy is associated with reduced birthweight, preterm birth, and impaired fetal growth. The cumulative picture is clear: the chemicals surrounding us during pregnancy matter, and they exact a measurable toll on the next generation.

Read those two stories together, and a pattern becomes impossible to ignore. The ECHO study did not measure PFAS specifically, but that is precisely the point. Pregnant women are not exposed to one chemical at a time. They carry a cumulative burden of dozens of chemicals simultaneously, from food packaging, personal care products, household goods, and contaminated drinking water. PFAS from military sites does not arrive in isolation. It arrives on top of everything else. And the government’s response to that documented, measurable burden is to quietly push cleanup deadlines out another decade, cut environmental restoration budgets, and loosen restrictions on the very chemicals causing harm.

This is not a failure of knowledge. This is a failure of will.

I know this firsthand. For years, I served on the Pease Restoration Advisory Board, a community oversight body created to hold the Air Force accountable for PFAS contamination at the former Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire. I watched an institution with enormous resources and clear legal obligations find endless reasons to slow-walk cleanup, dispute findings, and manage timelines in ways that protected its budget rather than the people living downwind and downstream. I also notified the state of a pediatric cancer cluster on the NH seacoast in 2014, a discovery that led directly to some of the nation’s first PFAS drinking water standards. The children in that cluster did not have the luxury of waiting for convenient timelines.

PFAS contamination from military and industrial sources contaminates community drinking water, and there is no doubt: these chemicals do not respect property lines, and delay is not a neutral act. The pattern I observed at Pease is not an anomaly. It is a playbook.

As the Pentagon has come to understand more about how large the problem is and how much it will cost, it has reduced the funding allocated to address it. The Government Accountability Office recently found that the cost of PFAS investigation and cleanup will exceed $9.3 billion, tripling prior estimates. Rather than rising to meet that obligation, the administration has proposed cutting Pentagon environmental restoration funding even as cleanup costs have tripled and timelines continue to slip. Congress is simultaneously considering legislation that would delay the phaseout of PFAS firefighting foam, further reduce cleanup funding, and lift the moratorium on incinerating PFAS-laden materials.

The message to communities is unmistakable: your water, your pregnancy, your child’s birth weight, are acceptable losses.

They are not.

More than 723 military installations and their surrounding communities are confirmed or potentially contaminated with PFAS. Blood tests in residents living near bases have revealed PFAS levels multiple times the national average. Farmers and ranchers have lost livelihoods. Veterans who served their country are now fighting a second battle, this time against the institution they served, just to get clean water.

The ECHO study published this week is a gift of scientific clarity in an era of manufactured confusion. Researchers tracked real pregnancies, measured real exposures, and found real associations with preterm birth and reduced birthweight. These outcomes shape a child’s health for life. And they do not fall randomly. They fall hardest on communities with the least power to push back, communities that often sit in the shadow of a military installation that has never been fully held to account.

Every year of delay is a year of continued exposure. The families near Pease know that. The families near Wurtsmith Air Base in Michigan, Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, and Brunswick Naval Air Station in Maine know that, too.

Science has done its job. The question now is whether the people we elect to protect us will do theirs. Congress must require enforceable cleanup timelines, with the funding to meet them, and stop treating the most vulnerable among us as an acceptable cost of doing business.

Mindi F. Messmer, DMSc, MS, PG, CG, is a Senior Research Scientist at a national nonprofit research institution and an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine. She is a former New Hampshire State Representative who helped pass the state’s landmark PFAS drinking water standards, a former member of the Pease Restoration Advisory Board, co-founder of the New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance, and chair of New Hampshire’s Environmentally-Triggered Chronic Disease Statutory Commission. She notified the state of a pediatric cancer cluster on the NH seacoast in 2014.

There are 12 resin vessels in the Pease Water Treatment Facility in Portsmouth, which were installed after unsafe levels of PFAS forever chemicals were found in the Haven well at Pease in 2014.

When the contamination was first discovered, we stepped up because the safety of kids and families – ours and our neighbors – was on the line. For more than a decade, the three of us have fought for transparency and action on toxic contamination in New Hampshire. We are moms, scientists, former elected officials, and advocates. We demanded blood testing, secured vital health studies, and advocated relentlessly for stricter state and federal safety standards for these “forever chemicals.” After years of hard-won progress in New Hampshire, we believed we were finally turning the tide toward a safer future for all American families.On Monday, the Trump EPA announced it will rescind drinking water limits on four of the six PFAS compounds regulated under the 2024 federal standard, and will delay compliance deadlines for the other two until 2031. After more than a decade of organizing, testimony, and scientific documentation, the progress we and so many others fought for is being undone by a single rulemaking change. For communities living with PFAS contamination, this is a crushing setback.

Trump’s decision to ignore the threat posed by these forever chemicals is an unconscionable betrayal. In gutting these vital protections, his EPA is putting the drinking water of millions of Americans at severe risk. Guarding against only two PFAS chemicals, PFOA and PFOS, neither of which are still in production, fails to address the broader risks posed by this large class of persistent chemicals. This decision allows continued exposure to harmful chemicals and does not reflect a meaningful commitment to protecting public health.

We know intimately the toll these chemicals take. In our community on the Seacoast, we had to fight aggressively to prove that the anomalous rates of rare cancers and developmental issues were not just a statistical coincidence. From a scientific perspective, we have long pointed out that treating PFAS chemicals one by one is a losing game; the chemical industry simply tweaks a molecule and continues polluting. Yet, this administration is deliberately moving backward, giving a free pass to the newer, equally dangerous replacement compounds still being pumped into our environment.

Let us be clear: this rollback is not making America healthy again. It is allowing ongoing exposure of harmful chemicals to innocent people and communities.

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Parents across the country deserve better than this blatant disregard for our families. When you turn on your tap to fill your baby’s bottle or boil a pot of water for dinner, you shouldn’t have to wonder if you are unwittingly exposing your kids to chemicals linked to kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, and weakened immune systems. The PFAS related health risks are well established and weakening existing standards undermines efforts to safeguard communities. The EPA’s action raises serious concerns about its commitment to its mission of protecting human health and the environment. Strong, comprehensive regulation is essential to prevent ongoing harm.

Over years of fighting for clean water, we have stressed repeatedly that this isn’t a partisan issue—it is a fundamental public safety imperative. Clean water doesn’t belong to a political party, and protecting our children shouldn’t be subject to political whims. We refuse to accept a reality where federal agencies prioritize the convenience and profit margins of chemical manufacturers over the lives of our kids.We will not be intimidated by this setback. We remain committed to advocating for effective, science-based PFAS drinking water standards because we believe access to clean and safe drinking water is a fundamental right. Communities impacted by PFAS contamination will continue to pursue the protections they deserve because we are even more persistent than PFAS.

Stefany Shaheen is a former Portsmouth City Councilor and candidate for Congress. Mindi Messmer is an environmental and regulatory scientist and former state representative from Rye. Andrea Amico of Portsmouth is a co-founder of Testing for Pease.

Click here to link to the original article from Seacoastonline.

Mindi Messmer, DMSc, MS, PG, CG, is an environmental and public health scientist and author of Female Disruptors: Stories of Mighty Female Scientists. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and through your local bookstore.

The Coakley Landfill Group has received roughly another $1 million, framed publicly as a cleanup grant. Before anyone celebrates that headline, read the record of how this group has spent public money for the last three decades.

The Coakley Landfill Group, or CLG, is the consortium of municipalities and private waste haulers named as Potentially Responsible Parties under the Superfund consent decree for the Coakley Landfill in Greenland and North Hampton. The landfill operated from 1972 to 1985 and received municipal waste and, in its final years, incinerator residue from the Portsmouth Trash-to-Energy Facility at the former Pease Air Force Base. PFAS has been detected in monitoring wells, private drinking water wells, the cap itself, and surface water draining into Berrys Brook, Bailey’s Brook, and the Little River.

I identified the pediatric cancer cluster on the Seacoast in 2014. New Hampshire DHHS confirmed it in 2016. The CDC subsequently reported that New Hampshire had the highest pediatric cancer rate in the country. Children died. The contamination at Coakley sits inside that story, not outside of it.

The track record on money

In 1991, the consent decree required the CLG to install a pump-and-treat system. It was never installed. By 2018, the CLG had acknowledged spending roughly $27 million with no formal recordkeeping, and an independent audit directly contradicted the group’s own characterization of where that money had gone.

When I was a New Hampshire State Representative, we sued the CLG to force the release of its records under the state Right-to-Know law. The CLG argued it was a voluntary association of private parties not subject to public records law, despite being chaired by the city attorney for Portsmouth and funded almost entirely by taxpayers in Portsmouth, Newington, and North Hampton. By 2019, total CLG spending had reached roughly $17 million, with Portsmouth taxpayers carrying about $8.5 million. The largest line items were legal services and consultants. Not remediation infrastructure.

In December 2024, EPA’s updated risk evaluation determined that there is an unacceptable risk from incidental ingestion of surface water at Berrys Brook and the wetlands adjacent to the landfill. People walking the Seacoast Greenway Rail Trail are exposed, and after rain events, contaminated surface water floods the trail. For years, Jillian and I posted our own warning signs to keep children out of that water because the polluters would not. Only after EPA finally directed the CLG to install signage did the responsible parties take that minimal step. Signs are not remediation. Until EPA forced the issue, even signs were left to volunteers.

What we put on the record this month

For the first time, I was invited by the EPA to provide comments for the formal Coakley Superfund Site Five-Year Review interview, after Hon. Chris Muns urged the agency to include me. They have never agreed to allow me to participate in this process before, despite the fact that I identified the pediatric cancer cluster that put this region on the national public health map, I live in a town adjacent to the site, and I chair the State Legislative Commission with jurisdiction over environmentally-triggered chronic disease. We participated jointly, in our capacity as members of the Commission, and placed the following on the public record.

Cleanup at Coakley has been promised and rescheduled for decades. Each extension is justified by the need for further study. The studies have not produced a cleanup. They have produced more studies. Deadlines shift, exposure persists, and the cost falls on residents rather than on the responsible parties.

There is little trust within the greater Seacoast community that the CLG is interested in anything other than minimizing its financial exposure, securing additional funding, and protecting the responsible parties’ interests.

Multiple exposure pathways remain inadequately addressed. A recently concluded U.S. Geological Survey study found that contamination is migrating north and west from the site, potentially affecting the Little River and the Winnicutt River, not just Berrys Brook. PFAS has been detected in Aquarion’s MW-14, currently shut down. The bedrock investigation that EPA ordered in January 2018 still has not characterized the deep plume moving toward private drinking water wells in Greenland and Rye. Air emissions have not been investigated at all. Meanwhile, new townhouses and an expanded assisted living facility have been built on both sides of the dump, and we have not been told whether the hydrogeologic investigation indicates discharge toward them.

There has been no follow-up public health assessment and no update on cancer rates. We have asked EPA to support an assessment of North Hampton, Rye, Greenland, and Hampton, focused on the outcomes that the C8 Science Panel, NASEM, and IARC have linked to PFAS exposure. And we have asked EPA for annual public meetings, quarterly updates, and a public communications record that does not require a FOIA request to read.

About the million dollars

If history is the guide, the CLG will spend a meaningful share of new funds on legal defense, on consultants whose reports defer action, and on litigation aimed at narrowing CLG responsibility. The 2018 audit, the missing pump, and the spending lines from 2018 and 2019 are the record. Cleanup grants do not become cleanup unless someone tracks the money.

Here is what I am asking the Seacoast community to do.

Track the meetings. The CLG meets several times a year. Minutes are posted at portsmouthnh.gov. They are short, and they reveal where attention is going.

Track the spending. Ask Portsmouth, North Hampton, and Newington to report quarterly how much of any new grant has been spent on remediation contracts versus legal services or administrative costs. This is public money. The public is entitled to a public ledger.

Add your voice to the Five-Year Review. The Region 1 Community Involvement Coordinator is Aaron Shaheen. The Remedial Project Manager is Richard Hull. The formal record is what shapes the next remedy decision.

Show up. The CLG functions in obscurity. It always has. The one thing it cannot survive is sustained public scrutiny.

Why all of this matters more this week than last week

On May 18, the EPA proposed rescinding federal drinking water standards for four of the six regulated PFAS compounds and extending the compliance deadline for PFOA and PFOS to 2031. The federal government is signaling nationally that it will accept less from polluters. Coakley is exactly the kind of site where less from polluters means more disease in the communities downstream.

I have been doing this work for twelve years. The pediatric cancer rate that raised my concerns in 2014 is not a closed chapter. It is the reason every dollar at Coakley needs to be tracked, every comment period needs to be used, and every quiet meeting needs a witness.

We cannot stay silent. We will let the sun shine on the record.

Mindi Messmer, DMSc, MS, PG, CG, is an environmental and public health scientist and author of Female Disruptors: Stories of Mighty Female Scientists. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and through your local bookstore.

I have worked on PFAS for more than a decade. I started in 2014 after identifying a pediatric cancer cluster on the New Hampshire Seacoast. New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) confirmed it in 2016. The contamination traces back to the Former Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (NH), and to the Coakley Superfund dump located at the intersection of North Hampton, Greenland, Rye, and Portsmouth.

New Hampshire moved on its own. Due to legislation I passed in 2018, New Hampshire became the first state in the country to set its own enforceable PFAS drinking water standards. The NH Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) said this week that the federal rollback fits seamlessly into what NH is already doing. That is true for our larger public water systems in New Hampshire. It is not true everywhere. And it is not true for the millions of Americans on private wells, on small systems, in states that took their cues from the federal floor.

A national rollback is not a neutral act. It is a permission slip. It tells polluters that the cost of contaminating drinking water just got cheaper. It tells communities downstream of every Superfund site, every fluorochemical facility, and every airbase that used aqueous film-forming foam that the federal government is not going to enforce the standard that the science supports. EPA’s own 2024 analysis concluded that PFOA and PFOS pose risk at any detectable level.

EPA's proposed actions shift the burden from the polluter to the household. From the regulator to the person who has to figure out what is in the water before pouring a glass of it.

That is why I built PFAS Lookup (http://pfas-lookup.granitsoft.com/). I wanted a tool anyone, with or without a technical background, could use to find out what is known about PFAS in their drinking water and community anywhere in the United States (US). Type in a zipcode. See what the testing has shown. See what sites are nearby. The data was captured through the EPA’s Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR5). State agencies have collected the rest. The barrier has been that this information sits across portals built for engineers, not for a family at the kitchen table.

The tool will not clean up your water. It will not file your public comment. It will not vote in your state legislature. But it will tell you whether the conversation about PFAS in your community is happening in the abstract or in your tap.

How to submit a public comment

There are two proposed rules, with two separate dockets. Comment on both. Written comments are due by July 20, 2026.

Docket 1 (rescission of standards for four PFAS): regulations.gov/docket/EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0654. This is where you push back on EPA rescinding the maximum contaminant levels for PFHxS, PFNA, GenX, and the Hazard Index mixture.

Docket 2 (two-year compliance extension for PFOA and PFOS): regulations.gov/docket/EPA-HQ-OW-2025-1742. This is where you push back on extending the compliance deadline to 2031.

Once on either docket page, click “Comment” and follow the prompts. Comments cannot be edited or removed once submitted, so review before you send. Do not include anything you do not want made public.

Public hearing (verbal comment): July 7, 2026, virtual. Pre-registration to speak closes July 1, 2026. The registration link and combined sign-up for both rules is on EPA’s page at epa.gov/sdwa/proposed-pfas-rescission-rule. Questions to PFASNPDWR@epa.gov.

Tell EPA what the science says. Tell them what your community is living with. Tell them that walking back protections for four PFAS compounds is not a correction of overreach. It is a withdrawal of basic safety.

I will be writing more this week about Coakley Landfill, the Superfund site on the New Hampshire Seacoast where I have spent the last twelve years pushing for cleanup. The pattern there, where the responsible party has spent more on legal defense than on remediation, is the pattern this rollback empowers nationally.

We cannot stay silent.

Mindi Messmer, DMSc, MS, PG, CG, is an environmental and public health scientist and author of Female Disruptors: Stories of Mighty Female Scientists. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and through your local bookstore.

I do not fear artificial intelligence. I fear the people who profit from making the rest of us afraid of it.

A crisis that will not wait

This work has never felt more urgent because the human costs of inaction are no longer hypothetical. The American Cancer Society’s 2026 colorectal cancer statistics report, drawing on federal cancer registry and mortality data, found that colorectal cancer incidence is increasing by 3% annually in adults aged 20 to 49 years, and that colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer death in adults younger than 50. It is one signal in a much larger pattern of early-onset cancers in young people that has been building for years.

I have been watching this pattern for more than a decade. In 2014, I personally identified a rare double pediatric cancer cluster on the New Hampshire seacoast involving rhabdomyosarcoma and pleuropulmonary blastoma, two cancers occurring at rates that could not plausibly be explained by chance. The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the cluster in 2016. A 2018 CDC report subsequently found that New Hampshire had the highest pediatric cancer rate in the nation. Children died. Families were left without answers for years. The investigation pointed toward environmental exposures, including contaminated drinking water and nearby Superfund sites, that regulators had been slow to address.

That is what unregulated industries and untreated exposures look like in human terms. That is the urgency that brought me back to school, and it is the same urgency I now carry into AI. The technologies change. However, the pattern does not.

The playbook I already know

I have spent more than a decade studying how chemical exposures harm human health, particularly in communities contaminated by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). In a 2024 paper, I documented how the same playbook has been used by tobacco, big oil, and the chemical industry to delay regulation: manufacture doubt, weaponize complexity, fund convenient research, and run out the clock while harm accumulates.

That same playbook is being applied to artificial intelligence right now. The script is familiar. The technology is too complicated for ordinary people to understand. Regulation will stifle innovation. Trust the founders; they care about humanity. Wait for self-governance. Wait for the next breakthrough. Just wait.

We have seen what waiting costs. It costs cancer clusters, contaminated drinking water, and entire generations of children with measurable chemicals in their blood before they are old enough to read. It costs lives.

Galloway said it plainly

Yesterday on Smerconish, NYU professor Scott Galloway said something I think every voter and every policymaker should sit with. He warned against the comforting fiction that we can simply pick the right tech CEO and trust them to act in the public interest:

“We would still be pouring mercury into the river. We would still be selling cigarettes to 14-year-olds if the government hadn’t stepped in. This isn’t Musk versus Altman. This is whether or not we have the foresight to elect the people to domain expertise and the leadership to regulate these companies.”

And his sharpest line, the one I have been repeating in my head all morning:

“The illusion of complexity has been weaponized by the incumbents to delay and obfuscate regulation.”

He is right. We figured out how to regulate nuclear detonation, even when the scientists closest to the work believed regulation was impossible. We can absolutely regulate AI, and we should.

Why the degree matters

The reason I went back to school for a doctorate, while continuing my research, my legislative commission work in New Hampshire, and my advocacy, is that I am not willing to cede this ground while the public is kept in the dark about how these systems actually work.

AI is a profoundly powerful tool. In my own research, it is helping me extract clinical signals from electronic health records that would otherwise be invisible, identify communities at risk for PFAS exposure through geographic risk stratification, and link environmental exposure to disease outcomes at a scale and speed that was impossible even five years ago. AI lets us unlock the secrets of complicated diseases and the social and environmental determinants that drive them. That is not hype; I have built the pipelines and seen the results.

But every tool that powerful needs guardrails. The question is not whether AI will reshape medicine, public health, and government. It already is. The question is whether we will allow the people building it to also write its rules.

What I plan to do with it

This degree gives me the technical credibility to do three things I intend to keep doing for the rest of my career.

First, build. Real clinical decision support, real environmental health surveillance, real tools that move the needle on maternal mortality, on chronic disease, on contaminated communities that have been waiting for someone to take their water seriously.

Second, translate. Between the engineers who build these systems, the clinicians who use them, the patients who are affected by them, and the legislators who need to govern them. The illusion of complexity only works when no one in the room can call it out.

Third, refuse to stay silent. I have a principle I come back to often. We cannot stay silent, because next it will be us. Whether the harm is a forever chemical in a child’s blood, an algorithm that decides who gets care, or a regulatory vacuum that lets both happen, the cost of looking away always falls on someone, and eventually it falls on everyone.

So thank you to my thesis committee, my family, my colleagues at MedStar, Northeastern University, and the contaminated communities in New Hampshire who first taught me what science in the service of people actually looks like. The diploma goes on the wall this week. The work continues on Monday.

Mindi Messmer, DMSc, MS, PG, CG, is an environmental and public health scientist and author of Female Disruptors: Stories of Mighty Female Scientists. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and through your local bookstore.