Biden sets 10-year deadline to replace nation's lead pipes

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are fighting to ensure a future where every community has access to clean, safe water. Since day one, the Biden-Harris Administration has worked to ensure that every American can turn on their tap and drink clean water without fear of lead and other toxic chemicals. As part of this historic commitment to clean water and environmental justice, President Biden committed to replace every lead pipe in the country within 10 years, issuing a comprehensive Lead Pipe and Paint Action Plan to achieve that goal.

Today, to deliver on this promise, President Biden is traveling to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to announce that the Environmental Protection Agency is issuing a final rule that will require drinking water systems nationwide to replace lead service lines within 10 years. EPA is also investing an additional $2.6 billion for drinking water upgrades and lead pipe replacements, funded by President Biden’s landmark Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This announcement comes as part of the President’s commitment to spend his remaining months in office “sprinting to the finish” and delivering on his historic Investing in America agenda, which is improving the lives of Americans and planting the seeds for a better, more prosperous future for decades to come.

In its first year, the Biden-Harris Administration announced that it would develop this new rule, known as the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, to establish the first-ever national requirement to replace all lead service lines. Since then, President Biden secured a historic $15 billion in dedicated funding for lead pipe replacement, and hundreds of thousands of Americans have already had their lead pipes replaced. Because of the President’s actions today, millions more will benefit from lead-free infrastructure in the years to come.

Lead poisoning can cause serious health effects, especially in children. It can cause irreversible damage to cognitive development, damage the kidneys, slow learning, and cause cardiovascular disease. Lead exposure can also impact pregnancies, increasing the risk of low birthweights or even miscarriage. No level of lead exposure is safe. Yet, due to decades of inequitable infrastructure development and underinvestment, lead poisoning disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color.

Today’s announcement will help protect Americans in communities across the country from these harms – the EPA estimates that every year, this final rule will prevent up to 900,000 infants from being born with low birthweight, stop up to 200,000 IQ points lost in children, and reduce up to 1,500 cases of premature death from heart disease.

To build on these commitments, today, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is investing over $416 million in new grants, prioritizing lead hazard reduction to protect children, alongside efforts to improve home health, energy efficiency, and community safety. HUD will provide funding to address lead-based paints in homes, develop training and partnerships to identify and control lead-based paint hazards, coordinate home inspections and more.

Replacing lead pipes in Milwaukee

Lead pipe replacement is actively underway in Milwaukee through a $30 million investment provided by President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding has accelerated Milwaukee’s lead replacement timeline from 60 years down to 10 years. Milwaukee is replacing lead pipes using union labor and prioritizing replacements in disadvantaged communities with the most need. The city is now a leader in the region, partnering with cities like Detroit in the to accelerate lead pipe replacement across the Midwest.

Replacing lead pipes across America

Beyond Milwaukee, the Biden-Harris Administration is taking action to accelerate lead pipe replacement nationwide. President Biden secured a historic $15 billion in dedicated funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for lead pipe replacement, and an additional $11.7 billion that can be used for both drinking water projects and lead pipe replacement. Nearly half of this funding is required to flow to disadvantaged communities, including in neighborhoods and communities that shoulder most of the burden of lead poisoning. In addition to providing clean drinking water for millions, this effort is also creating good-paying jobs, many of them union jobs, in replacing lead pipes and delivering clean water to households. This effort also advances the President’s Justice40 Initiative, which sets the goal that 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.

These actions from the Administration have already put cities across the country on track to meet the President’s goal of replacing every lead pipe within a decade:

Detroit, Michigan, has received $90 million from this Administration for lead pipe replacement, which has allowed the city to accelerate from replacing 700 lead pipes per year to replacing over 8,000 this year. Detroit is now on track to replace all 80,000 lead pipes within 10 years;
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has received $98 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and American Rescue Plan to replace lead pipes, and is on track to replace every lead pipe by 2026. The city is already over halfway done with this work;
St. Paul, Minnesota, received $16 million from the American Rescue Plan to enable the city’s Lead-Free St. Paul program to target the replacement of all lead pipes by 2032;
Denver, Colorado has accelerated its efforts through $76 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, allowing the city to be on track to replace all lead pipes within a decade;
Akron, Ohio is now on track to replace all lead service lines by 2027 thanks to $9 million in funding through the American Rescue Plan; and
And some communities have already finished replacing lead pipes. Following a lead-in-water crisis, Benton Harbor, Michigan, successfully replaced all its lead pipes within just two years, fueled by $18 million in funding from the President’s American Rescue Plan. And Edgerton, Wisconsin has replaced 100% of its known lead pipes after receiving funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Delivering Clean Water

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes more than $50 billion to help ensure every community has access to clean water – the largest investment in clean water in American history. Combined with new protections against toxic chemicals and over 42 million acres of lands and waters protected under President Biden, the Biden-Harris Administration has embarked on the most ambitious conservation and clean water agenda in the nation’s history, making historic progress to secure clean water for all. Highlights of this ambitious agenda include:

Combatting toxic “forever chemicals” in drinking water and wastewater. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law invests $10 billion to address harmful PFAS pollution in drinking water and wastewater. The EPA has also finalized the first-ever national standard to address these “forever chemicals” in drinking water, which will protect 100 million Americans from PFAS exposure, safeguarding public health and advancing environmental justice.
Protecting freshwater at the source. Our rivers, lakes, streams, and wetlands are the sources of clean drinking water that flows into our homes and economic drivers for many communities. Through the America the Beautiful Freshwater Challenge, the Administration has launched a nationwide initiative to protect, restore, and reconnect 8 million acres of wetlands and 100,000 miles of our nation’s rivers and streams by 2030. Over 200 states, Tribes, local governments, and businesses have joined the effort to meet these goals.
Investing in clean water for Tribes. The Biden-Harris Administration has announced historic Tribal water infrastructure investments totaling over $5 billion through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This funding will help bring clean water to Tribal Nations, where half of Tribal households lack access to basic clean drinking water or adequate sanitation. The Administration has launched 900 Tribal clean water infrastructure projects to date through these investments.

Investing in Wisconsin

Today’s announcement builds on a record of investment in the state of Wisconsin over the course of the president’s term in office. In addition to the President delivering on lead pipe replacement, the president’s Investing in America agenda has deployed $7.2 billion in public sector clean energy, manufacturing and infrastructure investments, which have catalyzed an additional $8 billion from the private sector.

These investments include:

$1.7 billion in funding to provide affordable, reliable high-speed internet to everyone in Wisconsin, with 72,000 homes and small businesses already connected;
$4.1 billion for transportation – to rebuild our roads and bridges, expand our transit and rail, modernize our ports and airports, and more. This includes $1 billion in funding that the Biden-Harris Administration announced earlier this year to replace the Blatnik Bridge, an important route for people and freight in the Twin Ports area;
1.3 million seniors and Medicare beneficiaries who can receive free vaccines, $35 insulin, and, starting in January, a $2,000 cap on out-ofpocket costs; and
$3.3 billion from Microsoft to bring a new data center that will create over 4,000 jobs to Racine, Wisconsin on the site of a proposed investment from Foxconn in the prior Administration that never materialized.