Trump’s Environmental Agenda Is Actually Toxic

Opinion|‘It Is Hard to Imagine a More Sweeping Agenda to Make Americans Less Healthy’

In his address to a joint session of Congress on March 4, President Trump declared, “Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.”

But that does not appear to be Trump’s primary goal.

Philip J. Landrigan is a pediatrician and an epidemiologist. He is the director of the program for global public health at Boston College and was the chairman of a National Academy of Sciences committee on pesticides and children that documented the extraordinary vulnerability of children to pesticides. He replied by email to my inquiries concerning the consequences of Trump’s actual policies, as opposed to his soaring language:

There is no question that children in America today are surrounded by thousands of toxic chemicals and that these chemicals are contributing to increased incidence and prevalence of multiple chronic diseases in children, including asthma, cancer, learning disabilities, obesity, birth defects and diabetes. The attached article that colleagues and I published in January in The New England Journal of Medicine presents this body of evidence.

As a pediatrician, parent and grandparent, I am delighted that President Trump proposes to “get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply and keep our children healthy and strong.” Those are excellent words.

However, many of President Trump’s actions belie his stated intentions. These actions will result in unnecessary disease, disability and death in American children.

Scott Faber, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center and the senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, was just as direct in his emailed reply:

In combination, the steps the administration is taking to slow or even reverse the transition from fossil energy to renewable energy will not only increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather but will also increase pollution that will results in tens of thousands of preventable deaths.

No one can claim to be ‘making American healthier’ while simultaneously increasing the toxins in our air, food and water. Once the polluters are fully ensconced inside E.P.A. and other agencies, all our basic protections will be in jeopardy, ranging from recent limits on PFAS (widely used, long-lasting chemicals) in tap water to recent bans of TCE (trichloroethylene, which the E.P.A. links to health risks, including liver cancer, kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma) and asbestos.

Asked about the discrepancy between Trump’s speech on toxic chemicals and the actions taken by the administration, Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesman, told The Hill:

President Trump’s agenda is proof that we can restore American energy dominance while advancing environmental stewardship. President Trump is committed to replacing unclean foreign energy with the liquid gold under our feet while making America healthy again by ridding our environment, water and food supply of dangerous toxins.

In a concrete example of Trump deregulatory policy, the Justice Department announced on March 7 the dismissal of a 2023 lawsuit “against Denka Performance Elastomer L.L.C. concerning its neoprene manufacturing facility in LaPlace, La. The dismissal fulfills Trump’s Day 1 executive order, Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing, designed to eliminate ideological overreach and restore impartial enforcement of federal laws.”

The Biden administration filed suit against Denka two years ago, charging that the factory presented an unacceptable cancer risk to the nearby majority-Black community.

According to findings posted on the E.P.A. website:

Chloroprene is a chemical used in the production of neoprene. Chloroprene is classified as a likely carcinogen by several agencies, including E.P.A. In 2010 E.P.A.’s Integrated Risk Information System assessment identified chloroprene as a likely human carcinogen.

Abigail Dillen, the president of Earthjustice, emailed me in response to my queries. “It is hard to imagine a more sweeping agenda to make Americans less healthy,” she wrote.

I asked Dillen which policy concerned her the most. She replied:

The most important thing to understand is that we are seeing a wholesale approach to eradicating environmental protections. This is the hatchet, not the scalpel. So it’s everything from the water you drink and the air you breathe to the food you eat and the basic products you buy.

If the Trump administration is successful in rolling back that progress, we will pay enormous costs, some of them measurable in terms of health care and many of them incalculable in terms of human suffering and loss.

Dillen pointed to specific Trump initiatives that were underway or on the near horizon:

Revoke limits on mercury and other toxic pollution from power plants. Revoke air pollution standards, for example, for soot or fine particulate pollution and cross-state pollution. Revoke new standards for chemical plants that would reduce surrounding community cancer risk by 96 percent. Revoke standards for managing coal ash waste and wastewater — including the sprawling ash dumps and ponds of toxic sludge that are leaching into groundwater around the country and breaching in extreme weather.

Turning to the issue of medical research: Duke University provides a case study of the problems facing higher education institutions that are struggling to maintain research budgets under the Trump administration.

In 2024, Duke received $580 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health — about 61 percent of which went to the university for such indirect costs as utilities and buildings. In 2025, Duke suffered a drop in the number of grants, to 64 from 166 in January and February 2024, according to The Associated Press.