Vance and Zeldin ask the EPA inspector general to reopen East Palestine

Vice President J.D. Vance and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin sent a joint letter on Friday to Nicole Murley, the agency's acting inspector general, asking for a comprehensive independent review of how the federal government and private firms handled the Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, on 3 February 2023.

The letter asks the Office of Inspector General to look at health effects, environmental protection steps, what residents were told, and whether long-term monitoring was judged necessary. If the review finds gaps, Vance and Zeldin wrote, the current EPA will consider changes to emergency procedures, monitoring and the way agencies work together.

The train left the rails three and a half years ago and released hazardous cargo into a village of a few thousand people. Thousands were evacuated. A controlled burn of vinyl chloride followed. Air, soil and water sampling has been argued over ever since. A class-action settlement with Norfolk Southern later reached about $600 million. Residents still say they were not given a straight account of what was in the ground and the creek.

Vance and Zeldin's first joint official visit was to East Palestine. The Friday letter points to documents made public this week and to an EPA action against a government contractor whose groundwater work at the site in autumn 2025 failed data-quality standards. Analysts on that job were found to have altered sampling data. That enforcement file is new. It is also the concrete hook the letter uses to say the paper trail is still moving.

Independent testing cited in television interviews this week put a large share of dioxin and PAH readings above comparison levels, with a claim that those points were not on the table during settlement talks. The inspector general is being asked to test that claim against the agency's own record, not against a campaign post.

Zeldin said the people of East Palestine did not get certainty about health and safety from the previous EPA and that the current agency will keep working the site. Vance said that if public-health risks were withheld, someone should answer who knew what, and when. Those sentences are political. The request itself is a formal IG referral, which means Murley's office now has to decide scope, staff and whether the contractor case is in or out.

East Palestine has already had congressional hearings, state probes and civil litigation. An IG review cannot retry the settlement. It can say whether the EPA's own sampling, public notes and contractor oversight met the rules the agency writes for everyone else. That is the only new instrument Friday created.