# Plain Language Summary: Protection from Cumulative Emissions and Underenforcement of Environmental Law Act of 2025

This bill asks the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to tackle a major environmental justice problem: certain communities are getting hit with pollution from multiple sources at the same time, and environmental laws aren't being enforced equally everywhere. The bill focuses on protecting neighborhoods that are already dealing with the most pollution and have the least power to fight back.

The EPA will need to create a new system for measuring how different types of pollution and environmental dangers combine to affect people's health. This includes obvious things like air and water pollution, but also climate-related threats like extreme heat, flooding, and drought. The agency has six months to propose this system, then 90 days to hold public hearings and take comments from regular people. Within a year, they'll finalize it and start using it within three years. The goal is to understand that living near a factory while also experiencing extreme heat waves or poor water quality creates bigger health problems than any single threat alone.

The bill also requires the EPA to identify at least 100 communities that are both environmental justice communities (neighborhoods with high populations of people of color, low-income residents, or Native Americans) and places where environmental law violations happen more often than the national average. For each of these communities, the EPA must figure out why violations are so common, talk to residents about their experiences, and then implement solutions to bring violations down significantly below the national average within two years. This is meant to ensure that enforcement of environmental laws actually protects the neighborhoods that need it most, rather than letting pollution problems pile up in the same vulnerable areas year after year.