On Tuesday, March 3rd at 10 AM (US Pacific) / 1 PM (US Eastern), you can watch live as the Fluoride Action Network’s attorney, Michael Connett, and the attorneys for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) make oral arguments before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The hearing will be brief, likely lasting less than an hour, and will be an opportunity to witness history and likely the final step in our decade-long precedent-setting federal lawsuit over the neurotoxicity of fluoridation chemicals.
WATCH HERE:
What’s Next?
The appeal will be decided by a three-judge panel. The appeals process generally takes 6-12 months to resolve, although there is no guarantee of that short of a time frame. While some cases are decided based exclusively on written documents, some cases, like FAN’s, are selected for short oral arguments before a court panel. With most cases, the court of appeals decision is the final ruling, though in rare instances the parties can ask the US Supreme Court to review it or the case can be sent back to the trial court for additional proceedings. Ultimately, our attorneys expect an appeal judgement by fall or early winter of 2026.
Appeal Background
In September of 2024, FAN won a historic 8-year-long legal battle in federal court against the EPA over the neurotoxicity of water fluoridation. The court ruled that fluoridation of water at 0.7 mg/L–the level considered “optimal” by proponents of fluoridation–“poses an unreasonable risk to reduced IQ in children,” and the risk is “sufficient to require the EPA to engage with a regulatory response.” Read the full court ruling.
In the court’s ruling, the judge pointed out the scope of the potential harm that’s occurring on a daily basis throughout the U.S.:
“The size of the affected population is vast. Approximately 200 million Americans have fluoride intentionally added to their drinking water at a concentration of 0.7 mg/L…. Approximately two million pregnant women, and over 300,000 exclusively formula-fed babies are exposed to fluoridated water.” [p. 76]
Contrary to what proponents of the fluoridation, like the American Dental Association, have been incorrectly telling policymakers and the media, the ruling doesn’t require the EPA to review the safety of fluoridation. The nearly decade-long trial was the safety review, and fluoridation failed. The court used its authority under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to officially classify fluoridation chemicals as an unreasonable health hazard, triggering a federal law requiring the EPA to initiate a process to eliminate the risk. The EPA ought to have immediately started the rulemaking process in the fall of 2024 to promulgate new regulations banning the sale and use of fluoridation chemicals for water treatment purposes in an effort to protect public health as quickly as possible. However, that’s not what the agency did.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit gave the EPA a deadline of mid-January of 2025 to decide if they planned to appeal the ruling. On January 17th, several days before the appeal deadline and only three days before a new EPA administrator and presidential administration entered office, the EPA filed a Notice of Intent to Appeal.
After being granted four separate extensions of the deadline to submit an opening brief, the EPA finally filed their appeal this past July. In its brief, EPA did not challenge the science or the merits of the court’s determination that fluoridation poses an unreasonable risk. Instead, EPA focused on procedural issues, including their view that the court should have ignored a series of groundbreaking new studies on fluoride and IQ, including one by the federal government’s own National Toxicology Program (NTP). EPA argued that the court should have ignored this new data because EPA did not have it in its possession when the agency denied our request to take action back in 2017.
Click here to read the EPA’s appeal brief.
FAN’s Response to EPA’s Appeal
In November, FAN filed our brief in response to the EPA’s appeal. In the response, Connett explains that the purpose of the law (TSCA) is “to protect the public, not to protect the EPA from the public.” The court was thus justified in considering and acting upon the new research, including the NTP report that even EPA conceded was “indisputably central” to reaching a correct decision.
An amicus brief in support of the court’s original ruling in our favor was also filed by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Click here to read it.
After reading Michael Connett’s great work, we hope that you will feel as confident as all of us at FAN that we will again be victorious in court.
Click here to read the FAN’s response to the EPA’s appeal.
Sincerely,
Stuart Cooper
Executive Director