Troy Downing Environment Healthcare Montana

Troy Downing Wrote a Bill to Permanently Exempt America's Dirtiest Coal Plant. It's in His District.

Colstrip Unit 4 has the highest toxic particulate emission rate of any coal-fired unit in the country, and Colstrip is the only plant of its kind without modern filters. Downing says the required technology isn't commercially viable. It's been on the market for 50 years.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 11, 2026

Troy Downing Wrote a Bill to Permanently Exempt America's Dirtiest Coal Plant. It's in His District.

On February 19, 2026, the EPA finalized a repeal of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards amendments — the 2024 rule that tightened limits on soot and toxic metals from coal-fired power plants. The repeal returns the country to the 2012 standards, dropping the stricter particulate limit, the tighter mercury limit for lignite plants, and the requirement that plants continuously monitor what comes out of the stack.

The next day, Troy Downing put out a statement celebrating it:

"For too long, the Biden-era MATS rule has strangled American coal-fired energy. I applaud President Trump and his administration for taking decisive action to rescind this rule that places unfair constraints on coal plants like Colstrip in Rosebud County."

He wasn't finished. In the same statement he urged the House to pass his own bill, the COAL POWER Act, which would roll the standard back to the first Trump administration's level and declare that the 2024 rule "shall have no force or effect" — so a future administration couldn't restore it.

Rosebud County is in Downing's district. And Colstrip is not just any coal plant.

The dirtiest unit in America

Colstrip Unit 4 has the highest rate of filterable particulate emissions of any coal-fired unit in the country. Unit 3 ranks third. Together they make Colstrip the largest source of toxic air pollution in Montana.

The reason is simple, and it is the part of this story Downing's press release leaves out.

There are more than 170 tangentially-fired coal plants in the United States. Every single one of them has installed either an electrostatic precipitator or a fabric filter baghouse — the equipment that catches soot and the heavy metals riding on it — or both. Colstrip is the only one that has neither.

That filterable particulate matter is not just dust. It carries the toxic metals. Between 2012 and 2022, Colstrip released 3.3 tons of lead, 1.45 tons of arsenic, 2.1 tons of chromium, 14 tons of manganese, 2 tons of nickel, and 6 tons of selenium into the air over eastern Montana.

"Not yet commercially viable"

Downing's press release says the 2024 rule mandated "compliance using emissions-control technologies that are not yet commercially viable."

Baghouses and electrostatic precipitators have been commercially available for more than fifty years. Over 170 comparable plants already run them. Colstrip's own owners did not argue in court that the technology doesn't exist — they argued it costs too much for a plant with a short remaining life, putting the upgrade at about $350 million and saying they could not recoup it.

That is a real business argument, and people can disagree about it. It is not the argument Downing made. He told Montanans the technology isn't ready. It has been sold in this country for half a century.

The owners took that cost argument to the Supreme Court, asking for an emergency stay of the rule. In October 2024, Chief Justice John Roberts turned them down in a one-page order with no explanation.

Having lost in court, the plant got relief from the White House instead: on April 8, 2025, President Trump issued a proclamation exempting Colstrip and other coal plants from the rule. Then the EPA repealed the rule outright. Downing's bill would make sure nobody can put it back.

What comes out of that stack lands on people

Mercury is a neurotoxin. It settles into water and soil, concentrates up the food chain into fish, and does its worst damage to developing brains — which is why the standard exists in the first place. The metals in the particulate stream — lead, arsenic, chromium, nickel — are linked to cancer, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory illness.

Dr. Robert Byron, responding to the presidential exemption, put the Montana stakes plainly:

"By exempting or delaying the Colstrip plant's compliance with air pollution standards they increase the risk to all Montanans, especially pregnant women and their fetuses, children, the elderly and people with underlying medical conditions."

The people breathing it are Downing's constituents. Rosebud County and the country around it are in Montana's 2nd District. He is not defending a plant in somebody else's state.

This is what a 0% score looks like

Downing has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, and a 0% lifetime score. Not a low score. Zero.

The Colstrip bill is what that number means in practice: a member of Congress whose district contains the single dirtiest coal-fired unit in America, using his seat to make sure it never has to install the filters that every comparable plant in the country already has.

He is also, on a separate front, calling the drug discount program that keeps his district's rural hospitals solvent "crazy" — which is a strange position to pair with making the air dirtier in the same counties those hospitals serve.

And Montanans who want to raise any of it with him in person are out of luck. Downing has held seven telephone town halls and zero in-person ones since taking office in January 2025.

There are honest arguments to have about Colstrip — about jobs, about grid reliability, about who pays for a $350 million retrofit at a plant with a finite life. Downing didn't make them. He told his constituents the pollution controls don't exist yet, and wrote a bill to make sure they're never required.

We deserve better.