This article is made possible through Spotlight PA’s partnership with NOTUS, a nonpartisan news organization that covers government and politics with the fresh eyes of early career journalists and the expertise of veteran reporters.
The Defense Department has once again delayed the forever-chemical cleanup timelines for nearly 200 U.S. military locations — this time by an average of about a decade, according to a NOTUS analysis of previously unreported updates to Pentagon records.
The delays, which affect sites in 42 states as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, go well beyond those first reported by The New York Times last year. The delays also include 15 sites where military PFAS contamination had already spread into nearby drinking-water systems at levels that federal regulators consider unsafe over a lifetime of exposure.
Those delays extend a cleanup process that federal, state and local lawmakers say has already gone on too long. At Camp Grayling, a Michigan National Guard training site that’s become one of the state’s most prominent military contamination cases, portions of the preparation for cleanup will take until 2043 — at least 10 to 15 years longer than previously projected.
“The longer you delay, the more damage is caused,” said Ray Basile, the community co-chair for the Camp Grayling Restoration Advisory Board in Michigan.
Sometime between mid-May and early June, the Department of Defense removed from its website the previous schedule for assessing and cleaning up forever chemicals at more than 700 sites.
Linked halfway down a military web page on forever chemicals, it published new timelines with a plan that shows the military pushing back the clean-up process anywhere from one to 20 years across the 178 sites, NOTUS found. The new timelines both extend the delays for some cleanups that were first pushed back last year and push out deadlines for more than 100 projects that until now appeared on track.
This is the second time the Defense Department has updated cleanup plans without public announcement. “While DoW strives to maintain original schedules, shifts may occur due to unique factors encountered at some sites,” the website reads.
NOTUS confirmed the most recent dates are different from the previously published schedule, by downloading the plan from the Wayback Machine’s archive of the Defense Department’s website. The changed timelines are dated Sept. 30, 2025.
So far, defense officials have found 54 military sites where forever chemicals are confirmed to be posing health risks to nearby communities. Fifteen of those locations are among those facing new, substantial delays for their cleanup.
That includes Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where the cleanup is estimated to reach its benchmark in 2043 instead of 2030, and Lucas County, Ohio, where the cleanup timeline has been delayed by 13 years to 2044. In Pima County, Arizona, the date is now 2047.
The Pentagon’s published timelines account for the process of investigating what needs to be done and how it should be carried out. There are no end dates set for actually finishing the cleanup at any of the sites.
In the town of Grayling, Michigan, the PFAS plume is migrating toward both the town’s water source and a river that feeds into Lake Huron. In March, the mayor wrote a letter to the federal government begging for help to stop the contamination from continuing to spread.
“Now the mayor needs the new well, that’s going to cost at least $2 million,” Basile said. “And that’s not the end game. The plume is still flowing into his sewer system, the city sewer system.”
The Pentagon told Congress in December that it is helping impacted people access safe sources of drinking water while the cleanup process continues. The town of Grayling is getting financial help with safe drinking water, but not yet with stopping the PFAS from continuing to migrate.
Lawmakers told NOTUS they were left in the dark about the latest set of delays for the overall timelines.
“Communities contaminated by PFAS from nearby military bases have waited years for DOD to clean up the toxic chemicals that are harming their health,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) said in a statement to NOTUS. “The Trump administration’s decision to quietly delay this remediation — in many cases by well over a decade — is reckless, dangerous, and unacceptable.”Last year, Gillibrand led 27 Senate Democrats in a letter demanding the Trump administration reverse earlier, less-significant delays. At the time, she and other members of Congress pressed the Pentagon to be more transparent about the department’s cleanup plans.
The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment.
PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are called “forever chemicals” because they persist in water, soil and the human body for decades. Significant exposure has been linked to a range of health concerns, including certain cancers, immune-system effects and developmental problems.
While PFAS contamination can come from industrial facilities, farms, waste processing and other sources, the military is one of the nation’s largest sources of the forever chemicals, stemming from a firefighting foam used for decades at airfields, fuel-storage areas and training facilities.
The military is now transitioning away from the foam, but the Pentagon has identified nearly 600 installations that may require cleanup from decades worth of pollution.
Eleven contaminated military sites were originally set to reach cleanup milestones in 2025. None have achieved those timelines, according to the new schedule. Those sites are now expected to reach those benchmarks between five and 19 years later than previously anticipated.
The new DOD schedule does not reflect all of the increasing delays across the country. For example, in Michigan, the community near Wurtsmith Air Force Base was told in May that the new cleanup timeline would stretch out to 2035, eight years longer than what was listed on the timeline analyzed by NOTUS.
In Alaska, the community near Fairchild Air Force Base was told in April to expect a remedial investigation at the end of 2037 and a final decision in 2044, a 12-year delay from the 2032 date on the Pentagon’s most recent status chart.
The new list includes limited explanations for delays: additional testing and fieldwork, changes in the overall timeline, revised based on when a decision will be signed, or revised based on “the prioritization of resources based on the relative risk to human health and the environment.”
The Pentagon has defended previous delays to Congress. In a December response to members of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation, defense officials said that the Environmental Protection Agency’s new PFAS drinking-water standards, finalized in 2024 under the Biden administration, required added investigation and more sensitive testing methods at some installations.
They also said that conditions at contaminated sites can change over time, forcing a shift in the timeline.
“During each installation’s investigation, there is the potential for the extent of PFAS to be greater than anticipated as the plume migrates over time, and the investigation may identify data gaps that must be filled in order to design an effective remedy,” Robert Thompson, the official who was then performing the duties of the assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and the environment, wrote at the time.
Thompson wrote also that timelines can be affected by funding availability, contractor capacity, laboratory analysis times, regulatory reviews and project prioritization decisions.
The Trump administration recently moved to axe the Biden administration’s limits on four forever chemicals, as well as ease compliance timelines for drinking-water safety for two more: PFAS and PFOA. It’s not clear how those changes will affect the DOD process.
Defense officials have long warned that PFAS cleanup could cost billions of dollars. Congress has appropriated roughly $1.2 billion annually for Pentagon environmental-restoration efforts in each of the last two years, though the Trump administration proposed cutting that amount by about $44 million in its fiscal 2027 budget request.
A former Pentagon official who oversaw energy, installations and environmental policy, John Conger, said the delays are not necessarily evidence the cleanup efforts are being neglected.
As investigators learn more about contaminated sites, they can discover pollution has spread further than originally believed, requiring more testing and longer cleanup timelines, he said. “If that’s the thing that’s causing the delay, the implication is that there’s more widespread problems than they anticipated,” he added.
Cleanup programs are generally prioritized according to the level of threat to human health, Conger said, with officials trying to direct resources toward locations where the risk is highest.
“What chemicals are somebody going to encounter and have a negative health effect? Which ones are the worst ones and need to get out quickest?” Conger said. “The people doing these assessments know that, and they are doing their best to spend the money in such a way that it minimizes health effects.”
But lawmakers who for years have pressed the Pentagon to move faster on PFAS contamination told NOTUS that the latest delays raise concerns for communities that have already waited too long.
Sen. Gary Peters and Rep. Debbie Dingell, both Michigan Democrats, called the new delays “unacceptable.” Dingell co-chairs the bipartisan Congressional PFAS Task Force.
“Our veterans and active-duty service members who have operated or currently serve at these bases, as well as the residents of the surrounding communities, deserve better,” Peters said.The defense policy bill that the Senate Armed Services Committee approved this week includes provisions backed by Peters, which would require the Pentagon to begin interim remediation work at dozens of sites where cleanup timelines have been delayed, notify communities when cleanup schedules change and undergo a Government Accountability Office review of its PFAS-cleanup contracting practices.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), who has spent years pressing the Pentagon over contamination at military sites in her state, called the new delays “worrying.”
“Given all we know about how toxic these chemicals can be, our service members, their families and communities deserve to know that the department is taking steps to remediate contaminated sites now, not years from now,” Shaheen said.