"This is a really promising move from the federal level," said Anna Reade, with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Because before, whether or not you had data on these chemicals on whether they were in your drinking water, depended on local government or state governments taking the charge to actually require testing." The draft proposes to monitor for some PFAS in drinking water to get a better idea of how prevalent they are, and who is being exposed to them. The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) of 1974 requires the EPA to issue a new list every five years of unregulated contaminants to be monitored by public water systems. In a previous cycle, some PFAS chemicals were tested, but Reade said the reporting limits were really high.