and ACTION ALERT: Save the EPA Radon Grants and Program
The House Appropriations bill affecting EPA is going to be finalized next week. EPA’s radon programs constitute the nation’s primary defense against radon exposure risk, ensuring that the states, tribes, and EPA continue to alert the public to the need to test and mitigate if needed. The President’s budget has proposed to eliminate them.
Please contact your Congressional Representative – through social media, by phone, with an email – to ask him or her to ensure that the EPA radon programs continue and are fully funded by the FY 26 Interior- Environments Appropriations Bill next week, despite the President’s budget recommendation for their elimination.
Please reach out today or tomorrow – call or email AND re-post our social media posts to them.
To look up who represents you in the House of Representatives, click here.
To get the contact info for your Representative, click here for an alphabetical list of Representatives, their office phone numbers, the name and email address of staff assigned to appropriations.
Here is the key message for your call or email:
I am requesting your help in ensuring that the EPA radon programs continue and are fully funded by the Appropriations Committee in the FY 26 Interior-Environments Appropriations Bill, despite the President’s budget recommending their elimination. Without these funds, the radon risk reduction work which has been accomplished to date and the prevention of radon-induced lung cancer will end. Please ask the Appropriations Committee to fully fund these small but important programs in the FY Interior-Environments Appropriations Bill. Thanks.
If you can / want to add more – here’s some background and detail:
– Radon gas is a radioactive toxin that kills 21,000 people in the U.S. each year, the second leading cause of lung cancer, is invisible and discovered to be present in more and more homes across the US.
– In 1988, President Ronald Reagan and Congress signed the Indoor Radon Abatement Act, which required EPA leadership on grants to states, proficiency, training, technical assistance, protocols standards, and science so “that the air within buildings in the United States should be as free of radon as the ambient air outside of buildings.”
Specific Funding Requests:
- Categorical Grant: State and Tribal Indoor Radon Grant: $9,500,000
- SIRG grants enable health departments, tribes, and others to implement programs that save lives from radon exposure through outreach, education, radon testing, standards adoption, certification requirements, and other local initiatives.
- Environmental Program/Management: Indoor Air: Radon Program: $3,200,000
- The Radon Program advances nationwide risk reduction by partnering with other federal agencies, the radon industry, radiation protection, and lung health organizations, providing scientific and practical expertise for the ongoing development of codes and industry consensus standards, coordinating public outreach, building technical capacity, and overseeing the radon credentialing framework to ensure a quality workforce, public health protection, and consistency.
- Science and Technology: Indoor Air: Radon Program: $175,000
- The radon reference at the National Analytical Radiation Environmental Laboratory in Alabama ensures radon chambers, private and state labs, and measurement providers have a reliable national source for inter-comparison.
Past Years’ Funding Levels
Please email nationalpolicy@indoorenvironments.org with results and any questions.