Trump Administration Backs Off Regulating Environmental Toxins Despite MAHA Demands

For decades, grassroots activists have led the way in pushing the government to regulate toxins that harm our health and wellbeing. The MAHA, or Make America Healthy Again, movement has taken up some of that activism to fight the growing prevalence of environmental toxins such as pesticides, PFAS and microplastics. Though MAHA has lobbied U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and President Trump to reduce the pollutants, many have been disappointed by the administration’s inaction. We’ll talk about efforts to regulate environmental toxins and the Trump administration’s approach.

Guests:

• Ken Cook, founder and president, Environmental Working Group
• Craig Spencer, emergency doctor; associate professor of the practice of health services, policy, and practice, Brown University School of Public Health; wrote a recent article for The Atlantic titled, “Public Health Needs MAHA.”
• Sarah Vogel, senior vice president, healthy communities, Environmental Defense Fund

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Rachael Myrow: This is Forum. I’m Rachael Myrow, in for Alexis Madrigal.

You don’t have to be all in with MAHA to worry about the chemicals in the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. This hour, we’re focusing our Forum magnifying lens on three key concerns: the pesticides in our food, PFAS — those forever chemicals — in our drinking water, and microplastics now turning up in human blood and tissue samples.

Setting aside politics, there is no serious scientific case that we shouldn’t worry. The questions are: How much should we worry? Why are politicians of so many stripes failing to get their collective acts together? And what can we do in the meantime to protect ourselves and those we love?

Well, we’ve got a great panel of experts here today to talk with us about these very questions, including, in studio, Ken Cook, founder and president of the Environmental Working Group, a public-interest research and advocacy nonprofit environmental organization working on toxic chemicals and health.

We also have Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and associate professor of the practice of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University’s School of Public Health. His recent Atlantic article — you’ve got to check it out — is titled “Public Health Needs MAHA.”

And last but not least, Sarah Vogel, senior vice president of Healthy Communities at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Thank you to you all.

Craig, why don’t we get started with you? Your recent column in The Atlantic is a large part of why we’re having this conversation today. You wrote, quote, “‘MAHA’ is an opportunity, and one the public health sector, academics, doctors, and leaders of advocacy groups cannot afford to squander.”

What did you mean by that?

Craig Spencer: Well, thank you for having me on. I’m glad we’re having this conversation.

Quite frankly, it has started a discussion because I’m probably the last person you’d expect to write an article in The Atlantic called “Public Health Needs MAHA.” Most of my background has been in global health and humanitarian response, but I spent the last year and a half talking to people all throughout the country.

I’m an emergency physician. I work in public health. And what I’ve learned in that time is that many of my colleagues in health and medicine think about MAHA as a monolith. When we hear the word MAHA, we think about anti-vaxxers, and we think about the destruction that has been wrought by RFK Jr. and this administration on a lot of public health capacity in this country.

Think of the CDC, our ability to respond to outbreaks abroad and at home.

But the bigger part of MAHA is actually the grassroots people who have come under this umbrella and have rallied around a cause, bringing together concerns not just about vaccines but also things like environmental exposures, clean air, clean water, and clean food.

What I’ve seen over the past year and a half is that the overwhelming majority of people I speak to have similar concerns inside MAHA as people outside MAHA. They’re worried, first and foremost, about healthcare affordability.

I work as a physician in the U.S., and let me tell you, I understand people’s concerns with how expensive healthcare is, the difficulty of accessing it, and their ability to trust it.

So what I’ve been saying in this piece, and more broadly, is that public health needs MAHA in the sense that MAHA represents about 40% of America, according to a KFF survey that found around 40% to 41% of Americans identify with the movement.

Public health is for the public. It’s not for individuals.

For us to get 95% coverage with measles vaccines, or for public health to do the work we need at a collective level, we need to have all Americans on board. That includes the 40% who identify with MAHA and have found in the movement a passion to improve health for Americans.

We can talk more about what that looks like, what the movement has actually delivered, and how I think its greatest impact to date has not been on policy but on politics, by showing that there is a movement that can fight for people — disingenuously at some points, but in a way that is quite alluring for many Americans.

Rachael Myrow: Well, let’s get into it then.

Sarah, let’s set the table, so to speak, with some basic science, starting with microplastics. We’ve only recently started paying attention to those, although plastic has been breaking down around us for decades.

Why do you think it’s taken so long for this concern to land as a public health question?

Sarah Vogel: Well, thank you so much for having me and for having this, as Craig noted, really timely and important conversation.

There have been growing concerns about the health impacts of plastics, including the chemicals that are added to plastics, for many, many years.

I think the fact that people are now recognizing that microplastics are showing up inside our very bodies changes the story. It becomes very personal.

We’ve seen time and time again in the environmental health movement that when things become personal, they can really launch a movement. I think you’re seeing that with microplastics.

But I would say that, for decades, there have been efforts to better understand all of the different chemicals that get added to plastics, that leach out of plastics, that interact with your body, and that can contribute to a number of growing chronic diseases.

And just to add to what Craig outlined, one of the factors you see among people who are drawn into the MAHA community and narrative is rising concern about chronic disease and concern about what in the environment may be driving those diseases.

Everything from cancers to immunological diseases to neurological diseases — and not finding the answers from traditional medicine. I think that is a common theme you’re seeing among people drawn into the MAHA movement.

But it should be recognized that there is a rich body of scientific evidence around a number of different chemicals in the environment — certainly air pollution — and the linkages to serious chronic disease.

Most listeners may still be surprised that today air pollution, or particulate matter in the air, is the second-leading cause of death globally. That’s astounding.

You’re seeing chronic diseases associated with that on the rise all over the world.

So this movement is tapping into something that I think a lot of people are increasingly concerned about.

Rachael Myrow: The residue on a peach isn’t the same as on an onion. The exposure a field hand faces isn’t the same as a kid eating fruit from a roadside stand or a shopper in the city.

Is there a hierarchy of concern for you, or do you think we need to tackle all the pesticides, and stat?

Ken Cook: Well, I think we have to look at it comprehensively.

Thank you for inviting me onto the program today.

When you think about it, over many decades — and we have polling going back well before the KFF poll — there has been broad bipartisan support when you ask actual people about toxic chemicals in their food, their air, and their water, all the things you kicked off the segment with.

And yet, over time, it’s been harder and harder for the environmental community and for the public health community to make progress through regulation and law.

Politicians haven’t been stepping up, and I think part of that frustration came into flower during the emergence of MAHA at the beginning of the Trump administration, right toward the end of the campaign, in fact.

To me, the most important thing people need to understand is that we have to be comprehensive in the way we approach this, because that’s the way industry looks at it.

And here’s how the pesticide industry and the industrial chemical industry look at it.

If you ask them what the limit should be on the number of pesticides we could have on food, or what the maximum number of toxic chemicals should be in our water — or even in our babies — the answer they officially come back with is that it’s infinite.

There should be no limits as long as we make them legal. We just keep stacking them up.

The air pollution Sarah just talked about — much of the mortality happens below limits that are considered safe.

So we’ve pushed the safe limits sufficiently high that people die even though they’re exposed only to “safe” levels.

The same is true with chemicals.

When you realize that, you realize this is an industry that really needs to be taken on comprehensively.

We need to be thinking about the mixtures we’re all exposed to, as well as the individual chemicals that are regulated one at a time while industry keeps adding new ones.

As of 2003, when someone coined the term “microplastics,” these tiny particles — infinitely small — have been ending up in our bodies.

And the industry is saying — and I have to call my good friends in the plastics industry out on this — you’ve been in existence for more than 100 years. You have a trillion-dollar sales base here in the United States. You have perhaps a million scientists and engineers.

And you’re seriously saying you can’t take action on this problem because you don’t have an approved, standardized method for detecting these things in water or in our bodies?

Where have you been?

Why has it taken so long for these issues to come to the forefront?

It’s because I think the companies knew about these issues long before — just as they did with PFAS chemicals and all the chemicals Sarah and I have worked on throughout our careers.

The companies knew, and they didn’t tell anybody.

Rachael Myrow: Oh my goodness. Apologies, dear listeners, for raising your cortisol levels this morning. But we are indeed talking about activist efforts to get some kind of regulation of environmental toxins, and also talking about the Trump administration’s approach to all of that, with Ken Cook, founder and president of the Environmental Working Group; Craig Spencer, emergency physician and associate professor of the practice of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University’s School of Public Health — you’ve got to check out his recent Atlantic article titled “Public Health Needs MAHA” — and Sarah Vogel, senior vice president of Healthy Communities at the Environmental Defense Fund.

And we want to hear from you.

Do you consider yourself MAHA? What do you want to see from the Trump administration with regard to what we’re talking about today? How do you want to see the Trump administration deal with chemicals and toxins? What is your reaction to the current administration’s — and previous administrations’ — policies and actions on regulating environmental toxins?