Biden spent four years making your next surgery more dangerous.
His EPA did it quietly, through a single regulation most Americans never heard of.
What that rule was doing to the tools your surgeon uses – and what Trump just did about it – will leave you furious.
What Ethylene Oxide Sterilization Actually Does and Why Nothing Can Replace It
Ethylene oxide is a colorless gas you've probably never heard of that may have already saved your life.
It sterilizes half of all medical devices used in the United States – 20 billion of them every year.
The pacemaker keeping your neighbor alive. The heart valve your brother got last spring. Every surgical kit, catheter, ventilator, and syringe your doctor touches before cutting into a patient.
The FDA is unambiguous: for a massive portion of these devices, ethylene oxide is the only acceptable sterilization method on earth.
Not because scientists haven't tried to find alternatives – they've been working on it for decades.
But heat destroys certain materials, radiation damages others, and nothing else penetrates complex device geometries the way this gas does.
There are roughly 90 specialized facilities in the United States handling this sterilization – 90 facilities standing between American patients and a catastrophic shortage of sterile medical devices.
Biden's EPA decided to go to war with all of them.
How the Biden EPA Rule Pushed America Toward a Medical Device Shortage
In April 2024, the Biden EPA issued a rule demanding those facilities slash ethylene oxide emissions by more than 90 percent – within two years.
That meant spending enormous sums on specialized new pollution controls, or shutting down.
The Medical Device Manufacturers Association didn't mince words: Biden's rule would mean "fewer operations, fewer wellness and pediatric checkups, and longer wait times for life-changing procedures."
The American Hospital Association warned the standards "could put at risk a vital component to protecting human health."
Even the Biden White House – forced to acknowledge what its own regulators had done – quietly established a presidential exemption process in January 2025, just months after issuing the rule.
Biden's EPA created a crisis so severe that Biden's own administration had to hand out exemptions from it.
That's not a policy. That's a disaster with a press release attached.
There's a legal problem on top of the practical one.
The Clean Air Act requires EPA to conduct one risk review of ethylene oxide every eight years.
Biden's bureaucrats had already completed that review.
The 2024 crackdown was built on a second review – conducted outside the authority Congress granted – using a risk model that was nearly a decade old at the time.
According to the Trump EPA, that second review "should have never been completed."
Lee Zeldin and the EPA Rollback That Saved the Medical Supply Chain
Lee Zeldin's EPA issued a proposal to rescind the Biden rule entirely and restore the longstanding standards that had governed these facilities for decades.
The Trump EPA is keeping existing emissions limits in place – this isn't eliminating oversight.
It's eliminating the overreach that would have forced 90 facilities to either spend money they don't have or stop sterilizing the devices your doctor needs.
The EPA estimates the medical device industry saves up to $630 million over the next 20 years.
President Trump called sterilization facilities' work "essential to ensuring that our nation provides its sick and injured with the best outcomes possible" – his own words in a July 2025 proclamation granting dozens of facilities emergency exemptions while the review proceeded.
Zeldin put it plainly: "The Trump EPA is committed to ensuring life-saving medical devices remain available for the critical care of America's children, elderly, and all patients."
Biden's team named this regulation the "Cancer Moonshot."
That was their actual branding – a political trophy built on a rule they had no legal authority to write, handed to an industry they'd just threatened, timed to a compliance deadline they knew facilities couldn't meet.
Former Biden EPA Administrator Michael Regan signed that rule. He's gone now.
Lee Zeldin just made sure the pacemaker waiting for someone's father doesn't disappear into a supply chain crisis a bureaucrat created to win an environmental award.
That's the difference between an administration that governs and one that performs.
Sources:
- Thomas Catenacci, "EXCLUSIVE: Trump EPA To Reverse Biden's Climate-Fueled Crackdown on Gas Used To Sterilize Medical Devices," Washington Free Beacon, March 13, 2026.
- U.S. EPA, "EPA Releases Proposal for Commercial Sterilizers to Safeguard the Supply of Life-Saving Medical Tools," EPA.gov, March 2026.
- U.S. EPA, "Proposed Reconsideration for 2024 Commercial Sterilizer Rule," EPA.gov, March 2026.
- Medical Device Manufacturers Association, quoted in Washington Free Beacon, March 2026.
- U.S. FDA, "Sterilization for Medical Devices," FDA.gov.
- AdvaMed, "Ethylene Oxide & Sterilization," AdvaMed.org.