Federal Judge: EPA Can’t Ignore Noise Pollution
In a July 2026 ruling in a civil lawsuit, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, found that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has unlawfully neglected its legal obligation to address unhealthy noise under the 1972 Noise Control Act for more than 40 years.
The plaintiffs — Massachusetts-based non-profit organization Quiet Communities and state resident Jeanne Kempthorne — filed their suit in 2023 during the Biden administration in an effort to hold the EPA accountable for its 50-year failure to implement the Act under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and compel it to comply with federal law by fulfilling its statutory noise-regulation duties.
Congress first designated noise as a form of air pollution under the landmark 1970 Clean Air Act, which also made the EPA responsible for regulating it. Two years later it passed the Noise Control Act to address “the growing threat posed nationwide by uncontrolled noise,”1 declaring that it is U.S. policy “to promote an environment for all Americans free from noise that jeopardizes their health or welfare.”
Among other things, the Act required the EPA to publish reports related to noise, authorized it to regulate products that generate noise, and made it responsible for coordinating federal noise-control efforts. And just six years later, Congress went even further by passing the 1978 Quiet Communities Act, which empowered the agency to “promote the development of effective state and local noise-control programs.”
But in an onslaught of deregulation that foreshadowed Trump’s second term, in 1981 newly elected right-wing President Ronald Reagan and a Republican-controlled Congress de-funded the EPA’s noise-related activities, forcing the agency to close its Office of Noise Abatement and Control the following year.
Congress did not repeal the Noise Control Act, however, and in testimony in response to the Quiet Communities’ lawsuit, the EPA admitted that it could have used its lump-sum (discretionary) funding appropriation to continue to implement the Act, but intentionally chose not to do so.
On that basis, the judge ruled that the EPA’s deliberate decision to ignore its noise-control mandates is “not reasonable,” finding in favor of the plaintiffs on four of the suit’s nine legal claims.2 The potential remedies for the agency’s nearly 45 years of inaction on noise are to be determined in separate proceedings.
Though it’s not immediately clear what effects the federal court’s ruling will have on state noise regulation, the Providence Noise Project welcomes the court’s recognition that effectively doing nothing to regulate noise is not only irresponsible as a matter of public-health policy, but illegally negligent.
“The court affirmed that the federal government can’t simply ignore laws it finds fiscally or politically inconvenient,” said Noise Project communications coordinator John Wilner. “Yet in the 40+ years since Reagan shifted responsibility for noise control to the states, that’s mostly what successive RI governors and Assemblys have done: turn a deaf ear to excessive noise, its sources and adverse health effects.”
“And that abdication of responsibility has cascaded down to a series of Providence mayors,” he added. “It is long past time for both Rhode Island and its municipalities to declare excessive noise a major public health issue, take effective steps to reduce it, and measure the results in order to protect and ultimately improve residents’ physical and mental health.”
For media inquiries, please contact the Noise Project.
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1 Recreational Vehicle Industry Association v. EPA, 653 F.2d 562, 564 (D.C. Circuit 1981)
2 Count Four of the lawsuit alleges the EPA is not identifying commercial products that are major sources of noise and issuing proposed regulations for each of them within 18 months of that designation, as required under the Noise Control Act. Count Eight similarly asserts the agency is not reporting on the status and progress of federal activities related to noise research and control. The judge traced the lack of the latter information to EPA’s failure to actually conduct the activities it would be reporting on. The court dismissed five of the suit’s nine counts on legal grounds such as plaintiff standing and court jurisdiction, rather than merit.