In March 2025, Donald Trump’s administration made a tantalizing offer to coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturing facilities and other factories: Their operations could be exempted from key provisions under the Clean Air Act, the bedrock environmental law estimated to have prevented thousands of premature deaths. All they had to do was ask.

No rigorous application was needed. An email, which they had until the end of the month to send, would suffice.

Within two weeks, executives across major industries began flooding an inbox set up to receive and funnel requests from the Environmental Protection Agency to the White House. They asked that their facilities be excused from expensive Clean Air Act requirements, relief that would save their companies money but pollute the air breathed by millions of Americans.

At least 3,000 pages of emails were sent to and from this inbox in the weeks that followed. ProPublica obtained them via public records requests, giving the most complete look to date at a key aspect of what Trump’s EPA calls the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”