# Plain Language Summary: Freedom for Farmers Act of 2025

This bill eliminates the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a federal health agency that has operated for decades. The agency would be shut down one year after the bill becomes law. The ATSDR currently investigates how toxic chemicals and environmental hazards affect people's health, tracks disease patterns linked to pollution exposure, and maintains registries of people who've been exposed to dangerous substances.

When the ATSDR closes, its main responsibility—maintaining national registries of serious diseases and records of people exposed to toxic substances—would transfer to another part of the Department of Health and Human Services, likely the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The bill gives the government a one-year transition period to move staff, equipment, and records to handle these functions elsewhere. However, many of the agency's other programs and activities would simply end, including its chemical exposure assessments, environmental health investigations, and various collaborative health monitoring efforts with other agencies.

The practical impact is significant for people concerned about environmental health. Communities dealing with contaminated sites, industrial pollution, or chemical exposure would lose a dedicated federal agency focused specifically on investigating health risks and tracking disease patterns. While the disease registries would technically continue under different management, the specialized expertise and resources the ATSDR provided would be absorbed into a larger agency with broader responsibilities. This could mean slower responses to environmental health crises, less focused investigation of toxic exposure incidents, and reduced capacity to study how specific chemicals harm human health. The bill removes references to ATSDR from numerous environmental and health laws, essentially erasing the agency's role in coordinating federal responses to toxic substance threats.

Freedom for Farmers Act of 2025

Biggs, Andy

Freedom for Farmers Act of 2025This bill abolishes the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Currently, this agency, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), investigates and responds to environmental exposures to hazardous substances in communities. The bill requires HHS to transfer authority regarding certain national disease and toxic exposure registries to another appropriate HHS entity.