The EPA Tossed the PFAS Report. The Survey Meant to Replace It Never Shipped.

Dana Ames kept working while the cattle died. The Texas environmental crimes investigator collected water, soil and tissue samples from a family ranch in Johnson County, south of Fort Worth, sent them to a laboratory, and watched the results come back with PFAS readings she described to Sinclair's WJLA as "soul-shaking" contamination. Tony Coleman, whose family owns the land, told the network that 85 cows died. Investigators suspected the source was biosolid fertilizer — treated human waste, spread as cheap nutrients — stored on the property next door.

That is the small version of the story: one ranch, one pile of sludge, one family counting carcasses. The larger version, reported Oct. 29 by WJLA's Lisa Fletcher, Andrea Nejman, Nathan Aaron and Mario Pena, is about two documents the federal government already had and did not use.

The first is roughly 300 pages long. It is a risk assessment produced by scientists in the EPA's water office, and according to the reporting it found serious risks to people, livestock and the environment when even low concentrations of certain PFAS turn up in biosolids. The agency discarded it this year. Betsy Southerland, who spent 33 years at EPA and directed the Office of Science and Technology's water work, called the decision a "heartbreak." Her team wrote the report.

The second document is thinner and, in practical terms, more important. When EPA explained the discarded assessment by saying it lacked data, the WJLA team went looking for the data collection that was supposed to exist. They found a national survey designed to map PFAS in sewage sludge and trace it back to whoever discharged it — finished, in the words of Southerland, since November 2024, and never launched. The proposal has been sitting at the White House Office of Management and Budget for close to two years.

The difference between the report and the survey is the difference between a diagnosis and a list of suspects. A risk assessment says the material is dangerous. A survey says which industries put the fluorine into the wastewater in the first place. "If that survey had gone out, we would know today what the major sources of PFAS wastewater dischargers are in this country," Southerland said. "We would be able to identify the specific industries." Without it, she argued, "every state can just sit back and say, 'Well, we'll wait for EPA to do something.'"

Asked directly why the survey had not gone out, EPA Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi did not answer. He said PFAS contamination is a top priority for Administrator Lee Zeldin and the agency, acknowledged that "in some instances biosolids may contain some PFAS," and said EPA wants water systems and biosolids users to have the best available information and technical support for treatment where necessary. What the agency offers instead is nine pages of voluntary suggestions, which note the benefits of biosolids while advising against applying them near children or on certain crops.

EPA's own biosolids page, checked this week, fills in the timeline. The Draft Guidance for Reducing Risk from PFOA and PFOS in Biosolids was released July 1, 2026, under docket EPA-HQ-OW-2026-2509, and its public comment period closed Oct. 5. The draft risk assessment for the same two chemicals was posted for comment on Jan. 14, 2025. And the National Sewage Sludge Survey — the agency's own name for the sampling effort Southerland describes as ready and unused — is still written in the future tense on that page: EPA is "planning to conduct" it, in collaboration with a separate wastewater study.

Scale is what turns this from a regulatory annoyance into an agricultural one. Sludge goes onto roughly 70 million acres of American farmland every year, by WJLA's count, and regulators from Maine to Michigan have already tied contaminated material to damaged ground and sick animals. In Texas the practice runs through TCEQ permits, registrations and notifications, with Class A, Class AB and Class B biosolids carrying different paperwork and reporting duties. Those rules govern how the material is handled and how much of it moves. They do not tell anyone what is in it.

Nothing here establishes that the fertilizer next to the Coleman ranch caused those deaths. The suspicion belongs to investigators, and the testing found elevated PFAS in animals, soil and water without a published causal finding from a state or federal agency. What is established, and what the WJLA reporting documents, is that the federal government had a completed assessment of the risk and a ready-made survey of the sources, and has deployed neither while the material keeps going onto fields.

For Texas growers the practical question is upstream of any individual ranch. Biosolids are a cost decision — free or nearly free nitrogen and phosphorus, delivered by truck — and the risk sits in a contaminant nobody tests for at the gate. Our coverage of the PFAS pesticide route, from the toxicity-definition change that cleared more of them to the three active ingredients approved this summer, followed the chemistry into the spray tank. This is the other pipe into the same fields, and it is the one where the federal data collection was designed, finished, and left in a drawer.