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KEY POINTS:
Indiana lawmakers want regulatory changes that dramatically weaken water protections.
If the new legislation is approved, polluters will easily evade state environment agency oversight.
The proposal, advanced by Republicans, was written without any input from minority party legislators.
INDIANAPOLIS, In. — President Trump’s goal of diminishing environmental regulation while boosting coal and nuclear energy is giving states more opportunity and authority to decide their ecological future, and powerful incentives to produce more electricity.
Arguably no state has responded with more speed and latitude than Indiana, which has a long history of advancing industrial interests by paring down environmental protections to legal minimums.
In the midst of a short eight-week legislative session, the state’s Republican supermajority is now seeking to seize the moment with a cadre of rollbacks and industrial favors that it argues will benefit businesses and residents, but that critics assert will place Hoosier waters — which are already among the nation’s most polluted — at further risk.
The groundwork for the deregulation initiative was laid last year with a series of executive orders signed by Republican Gov. Mike Braun, who promised to position Indiana “as a leading state for nuclear energy development over the next decade,” and is calling for “life extensions” for coal-fired power plants otherwise scheduled for imminent closure. The state is welcoming startups to scale the production of small nuclear reactors and has signaled that mining for both coal and rare earth elements remain desirable within its borders.
“Indiana is open for business,” Gov. Braun said in his State of the State Address in January.
The legislative center of the proposed changes is Senate Bill 277, a secretive and sweeping overhaul of Indiana’s Department of Environmental Management (IDEM). Meanwhile, Senate Bill 258, signed into law last week, lifts the state’s nuclear reactor ban and strips major permitting requirements for radioactive waste and hazard transparency.
Gov. Braun and his allies in the Legislature assert that the reform measures respond to Indiana’s “over-regulation” and assure that IDEM decisions will foster business growth.
SB 277 converts over 40 mandatory IDEM actions to discretionary “may” actions, aiming to simplify regulations.
If approved, for example, IDEM would no longer be required to prepare state water quality reports to the governor, bring suit against or enforce pollution that is an “imminent endangerment to health and welfare,” nor be mandated to report instances of hazardous waste spilling onto or near domestic properties. A statement that enshrined protections for water pollution control laws “necessary for public health, safety, and welfare” would be deleted from the Indiana Code.
IDEM Commissioner Clint Woods, a 2025 Braun appointee and a veteran of the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, promoted SB 277 as a decided step forward to “reduce unnecessary burdens for IDEM implementation of federal and state environmental requirements in a manner that will benefit Hoosiers in terms of affordability and cost of living, but also to ensure they get the most environmental bang for their buck,” he said.
The 166-page bill, committee members say, was written without any input from minority party legislators, and environmental organizations across the state were not given any forewarning.
The bill passed out of the Senate with a 29-19 vote, and awaits action in the state House.
Gov. Braun’s proposal is consistent with Indiana’s “no-more-stringent-than” approach to environmental policy — a designation referring to states that ensure their own regulations are not stricter than those laid out by the federal government.
The “no-more-stringent-than” rule became Indiana law in 2017, and was reinforced last year with another executive order signed by Gov. Braun. The new proposal calls for Indiana regulations “to be no more burdensome” than federal requirements — a much more subjective position than the “no-more-stringent-than” distinction. It will give IDEM greater leeway to choose when and which environmental protections are enforced.
“Even before we had this requirement, it was pretty near impossible to do anything beyond federal requirements,” says Janet McCabe, the deputy administrator of the U.S. EPA during the Biden administration, who also worked at IDEM in various leadership roles from 1993 to 2005. “It’s been clear for a number of years that Indiana limits itself when it comes to the environment. We don’t have laws and rules that are proactive on these issues.”
Critics of the proposal say the state is acquiescing to industry while failing to consider environmental protection. “Indiana is among the leaders of going backward, and this is the most consequential anti-environmental session we have ever seen,” says David Van Gilder, the senior policy and legal director of the Hoosier Environmental Council. “In other words: bigger bills, more stuff, more consequences.”
Experts are unsure of the bill’s legality. McCabe says that its sudden introduction — and the sidelining of both lawmakers and the general public during its writing — has made for an “inaccessible process” with no clear proof IDEM will continue to adhere even to the U.S. EPA’s minimum requirements if it passes.
“With about 40 instances of ‘shall’ to ‘may’ provisions in the bill, it does risk the possibility that we are less stringent than the federal government and risking EPA takeover for certain programs,” says Delaney Barber Kwon, the government affairs director for Indiana Conservation Voters. “Hoosiers want state-level oversight, not the federal government, which does not work as quickly.”
“I’ll just be honest with you. I feel like I’m in front of a boulder getting rolled down a hill,” added Sen. Greg Taylor, a Democrat.
The Nation’s Most Polluted State
On its face, SB 277 will almost certainly make Indiana’s poor water quality worse.
An analysis published this month by the Hoosier Environmental Council — based entirely on state and federal data — shows that nearly 47,000 miles of streams and 91,000 acres of lakes in Indiana are impaired, the most of any state. All but one of its 92 counties is home to at least one facility in violation of the Clean Water Act, together adding to a total of 628 facilities not in full compliance with federal requirements.
Pathogens, farm runoff, and forever chemicals are among the most common pollutants in the state’s surface waters, according to a 2024 IDEM report. Meanwhile, not a single stretch of Indiana’s 67-mile-long Lake Michigan shoreline is considered of good enough quality to support swimming or fish consumption. Last year, U.S. News and World Report ranked Indiana as the worst state for pollution.
“The idea that we might have burdensome regulations seems downright silly to me,” says state Rep. Carey Hamilton, a Democrat. “This really feels like pretty significant backsliding for public health protection. As a major manufacturing state we have significant emitters of toxic pollution, and regulating these emissions for the protection of human health is critical.”
Nuclear Launches Ahead, While Coal Cleanup Drags
The consequences of Gov. Braun’s proposed environmental cutbacks also come into sharp focus when considering Indiana’s energy strategy, which sees nuclear expansion moving swiftly while coal hazards linger.
At least eight former coal plants have been identified as potential sites to convert into Small Modular Reactor stations (SMRs), according to a 2024 report from the state Office of Energy Development. First American Nuclear Company (FANCO), a nuclear energy startup, announced in November that it would be moving its headquarters to Indiana with the goal of bringing reactors online by 2032.
Relaxed regulations are poised to help speed up this transition. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it would be establishing a “categorical exclusion” for advanced nuclear reactors funded by the government from careful environmental oversight. Under the rule, experimental reactors under development would no longer be subject to National Environmental Policy Act requirements including the publication of environmental impact statements, assessments, and potential consequences of nuclear accidents.
As it has for years, Indiana is closely following the federal lead. SB 258, introduced in January and signed into law by Gov. Braun on February 17, eliminated a provision that strictly regulates the operation of nuclear reactors within the state.
The law repeals clauses authorizing the IDEM commissioner “to conduct a public hearing on the environmental effects of the proposed operation of a facility” and requirements to adopt “rules and standards to protect Indiana citizens from radiation hazards.” The proposal also excuses the state from assessing and issuing permits for the construction, operation, or capacity expansion of nuclear power generating facilities or fuel processing plants.
In short, while the bill’s passage eliminates the state’s role in overseeing nuclear facilities in Indiana, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal licensing and safety agency, would still maintain its authority to oversee permitting, licensing, and safe operations at commercial reactors and processing plants.
“All we’re doing with this bill is, the Supreme Court made a significant decision, and we have laws on the books that conflict with that Supreme Court decision,” Rep. Edmond Soliday, a Republican, said during a February hearing. “This brings us into alignment.”
Not all lawmakers are pleased to delegate this responsibility.
“Are we going to wait till there’s some nuclear accident to go back and say, ‘Oh we made a mistake?’” says Sen. Taylor, who was one of the few dissenting votes in the bill’s 36-9 passage out of the state Senate. “From my perspective, good public policy says you don’t wait until something bad happens to start looking at regulation. You do it proactively so you don’t harm anybody.”
Roughly 10 percent of Indiana’s current power needs come from one nuclear plant. The Donald C. Cook Nuclear Plant, located on the shores of Lake Michigan, bolsters a bulk of northeast Indiana’s grid. The facility’s twin pressurized water reactors — which are licensed to operate until 2034 and 2037 — have a generating capacity 2,360 megawatts, enough to power 1.5 million homes.
“Just about every time I speak in public at a community session, I get a question about nuclear power,” McCabe says.
As concerning bills move through the state legislature, advocates are equally concerned about what they are not seeing. There has yet to be any state action that addresses coal ash, the solid waste left over from coal combustion, which contains neurotoxic pollutants including arsenic and mercury. No state has more coal ash waste than Indiana, with a majority of these sites stored within major watersheds and along Lake Michigan.
This month, in a reversal from a previous mandate, the U.S. EPA ruled it would give power plants an additional three years to clean coal ash storage sites — pushing the deadline to 2031 — and delay groundwater monitoring requirements by another three years.
Indiana lawmakers have made no move to add urgency to these cleanup efforts with state-level provisions.
“That’s a real issue for people who depend on groundwater that comes from near these facilities,” McCabe says. “Indiana might choose to make sure it happens sooner, because we have more of these than anybody else and know that some of them are potentially dangerous, but because of the no-more-stringent-than requirement, I presume the state won’t take that position.”
From a bird’s eye view of this consequential state legislative session, officials warn that Indiana may find itself with fewer tools — and less autonomy — to confront the mounting pollution challenges and risks within its own borders.
“We might look back on this as a historic moment, unfortunately, when we think about the state of Indiana ceding so much authority to the federal government,” Rep. Hamilton says. “It may be hard to get it back, if we ever decide we want it back.”
Featured Image: The Cleveland-Cliffs steel-making facility in East Chicago, Indiana, is one of the continent’s largest. Photo J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue
This story is part of a Great Lakes News Collaborative series called Shockwave: Rising energy demand and the future of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes region is in the midst of a seismic energy shakeup, from skyrocketing data center demand and a nuclear energy boom, to expanding renewables and electrification. In 2026, the Great Lakes News Collaborative will explore how shifting supply and demand affect the region and its waters.
The collaborative’s five newsrooms — Bridge Michigan, Circle of Blue, Great Lakes Now, Michigan Public and The Narwhal — are funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
