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 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. Landrigan 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 Law Center and 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 Trump Justice Department announced on March 7 the dismissal of a 2023 lawsuit “against Denka Performance Elastomer LLC concerning its neoprene manufacturing facility in LaPlace, Louisiana. The dismissal fulfills President Trump’s day one 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, 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 did point to specific Trump initiatives that are 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, down to 64 compared with 166 in January and February of 2024, according to The Associated Press.
Donald McDonnell, a professor of molecular cancer biology at Duke whose laboratory has received $40 million from N.I.H. over 30 years, told the A.P. that his lab is likely to go into the red because of the uncertainty of N.I.H. grants, forcing him to order layoffs: “The bottom line is, I can’t live, I can’t think in this chaos,” McDonnell said.
The threatened cuts, according to McDonnell, have endangered the next generation of researchers. Duke medical school has reduced the number of Ph.D. students it will admit from 130 this year to 100 or even fewer in the next academic year.
Similarly, at Johns Hopkins University, Richard Huganir, director of the department of neuroscience at Hopkins, told the A.P.: “If we can’t do science and we can’t support the science, we can’t support the surrounding community either.”
Huganir’s N.I.H.-supported research has focused on the SynGap1gene, which, when mutated, according to Huganir, leads to intellectual disabilities: “We have what we think is a really great therapeutic” almost ready to be tested in severely affected children, Huganir told the AP, adding that he applied for two new N.I.H. grants.
“The problem is for the kids, there’s a window of time to treat them,” he said, and “we’re running out of time.”
The uncertainty surrounding N.I.H. grant policy is causing havoc.
Research into such issues as why Black and white people are more or less vulnerable to certain cancers faces additional hurdles because of the Trump administration’s opposition to anything hinting of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
“Those studies are very much threatened right now. People don’t know what the rules are,” Otis Brawley, a professor of oncology, at Hopkins, told the AP. “We’re actually going to kill people is what it amounts to, because we’re not studying how to get appropriate care to all people.”
At least 12 universities have ordered hiring freezes, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Notre Dame, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.
Many of the Trump administration policies on environmental deregulation and reductions in federal research funding are now on hold as litigation proceeds in the courts, but the threat that the Trump policies will survive legal challenge continues to create both anxiety and uncertainty.
One of the most significant actions is an across-the-board cut by the N.I.H. in the share of grants to universities and colleges to cover such indirect costs “as depreciation on buildings, equipment and capital improvements, interest on debt associated with certain buildings, equipment and capital improvements, and operations and maintenance expenses.”
The N.I.H. order of Feb. 7 declares that instead of a negotiated level of indirect costs, there will be “a standard indirect rate of 15 percent across all N.I.H. grants for indirect costs in lieu of a separately negotiated rate for indirect costs in every grant.”
My Times colleagues Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia, Irineo Cabreros, Eli Murray, Francesca Paris, Margot Sanger-Katz and Ethan Singer wrote in a Feb. 13 article, “How Trump’s Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State”:
In the 2024 fiscal year, the N.I.H. spent at least $32 billion on nearly 60,000 grants, including medical research in areas like cancer, genetics and infectious disease. Of that, $23 billion went to “direct” research costs, such as microscopes and researchers’ salaries.
The remaining $9 billion “went to the institutions’ overhead, or ‘indirect costs.’ ” If the cut proposed by the N.I.H. survives count challenge, Badger and her colleagues estimate “that a 15 percent rate would have reduced funding for the grants that received N.I.H. support in 2024 by at least $5 billion.”
One of the explicit goals of Trump’s deregulatory agenda is the elimination or loosening of regulations designed to protect human health and safety in order to give free rein to the oil, gas, mining, chemical industries to, as Trump likes to put it, “Drill, baby, drill.”
One of the Trump administration’s most significant actions in this sphere was to call on the E.P.A., in his Jan. 20 executive order “Unleashing American Energy,” to begin the process of repealing its 2009 “endangerment finding.”
The finding is not itself a regulation; it’s a foundational document providing the legal justification for environmental regulation of six greenhouse gases and for policies to constrain climate change.
In a reflection of its significance, the endangerment finding was challenged by such industry groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Mining Association, along with some Republican state attorneys general, but the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit rejected their claims in a 2012, decision.
Lee Zeldin, appointed E.P.A. administrator by Trump, called the endangerment finding “the holy grail of the climate change religion.”
Studies have linked these emissions to cancer (methane, carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons), to hazards to immune system function, to thyroid cancer (PFCs), to asphyxia, to increased pulse rate, and to nausea (sulfur hexafluoride).
Amid the near daily announcement of new initiatives, two documents stand out in the Trump deregulatory agenda: the unleashing of the American energy executive order and the March 12 Zeldin announcement, “E.P.A. Launches Biggest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History.”
The word “health” appears only once in the 3464-word unleashing American energy order and that is in the title of a President Biden executive order that Trump revoked. The words “safety” and “toxic” do not appear at all. Safety and health are not mentioned in the Zeldin announcement, and the word toxic appears only once in a call to reconsider the regulation “of Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that improperly targeted coal-fired power plants.”
In his announcement, Zeldin proudly said:
Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, to unleash American energy, to bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.
Alongside President Trump, we are living up to our promises to unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, and work hand-in-hand with our state partners to advance our shared mission.
In his email, Landrigan, the pediatrician and expert on pesticides and children, described the probable consequences of some of the specific proposals in the Trump-Zeldin agenda:
The plan to reconsider Mercury and Air Toxic Standards for coal-fired power plants, if implemented, will result in increased atmospheric emissions of particulate air pollutants and mercury. The particulate pollutants will increase risk of stillbirths, low birth weight and asthma in American children and increase risk of heart disease and stroke in American adults. The increased mercury emissions will cause brain injury in American children, including children still in the womb who are affected through their mothers’ mercury exposure, and will result in decreased intelligence, shortening of attention span, and behavioral disruption.
Reconsideration of National Ambient Air Quality Standards for particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution, relaxation of vehicle emission standards, and dismantling of efforts to produce more electric vehicles will all increase levels of air pollution. Like airborne emissions from power plants, these emissions will increase risk of stillbirths, low birth weight and asthma in children, and of heart disease and stroke in American adults.
President Trump‘s undoing of President Biden initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will result in increased global warming and accelerate the pace of climate change. More violent storms, more droughts, more fires and more floods will result. All of those events will increase risk of disease and death that will be most highly concentrated in vulnerable populations. These climate-related health impacts are already occurring now, and if not checked, will worsen in the future.
Linda S. Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Toxicology Program at N.I.H., wrote by email that she finds Trump’s claim “to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong” hard to believe “when he plans to cut the E.P.A. by 65 percent, including dismantling of their office of research and development.”
Trump’s policies, she wrote, will result in
the complete loss of our science leadership with the cuts to the N.I.H., National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, etc.
N.I.H. is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world and has allowed the US to dominate this arena. With the proposed 15 percent cuts to overhead, there will be much less research able to be conducted. Currently, universities are not making, or are rescinding, offers to graduate students and postdoctoral trainees, as well as not offering faculty positions.
I asked Birnbaum whether Trump policies threaten lives.
“Absolutely,” Birnbaum replied by email:
Clearly those with less resources are most at risk. Climate has huge impacts on health — people die during heat waves; crops have lower nutritional content; flooding brings molds and increases the risks of asthma; droughts impact crop production, and livestock; the range of vectors of disease change — we may yet see malaria in Maine. The warmer climate also means more and extended use of pesticides.
Liz Hitchcock, director of federal policy for Toxic-Free Future, a nonprofit organization, voiced particular concern over the administration’s delay of a “ban on a cancer-causing chemical called trichloroethylene (TCE).”
For decades, Hitchcock wrote by email, “releases of TCE have contaminated drinking water supplies across the United States: 18.4 million Americans are known to be exposed to TCE from 420-plus drinking water systems in 43 states.”
Long-term exposure, Hitchcock continued,
is linked to multiple types of cancer as well as Parkinson’s disease and liver and kidney damage. Following brief exposures, TCE can cause fetal cardiac defects and autoimmunity, in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks its own healthy tissues and organs. TCE also breaks down into vinyl chloride, which can be even more carcinogenic to the liver.
TCE contamination is widespread at military bases, where families of service members have suffered serious health effects linked to TCE exposure, including one of the most well-known sites — Camp Lejeune, N.C. Its contamination has affected communities like Woburn, Mass., Franklin, Ind.; Tucson, Ariz.; Rochester, N.Y, Piketon, Ohio; Newark, N.J.; Bethpage, N.Y. on Long Island, and Wichita, Kan.
Given all the signals Trump and Zeldin are sending, the odds that the ban on TCE will see the light of day during the next four years are slim to none.
It may take time for the results to come in, but the odds are that the second Trump term will bring us more cancer, more asthma and heart disease, more low-birthweight babies, more Parkinson’s disease, more liver and kidney damage, more greenhouse gases, more fetal cardiac defects, along with fewer breakthroughs in cancer research, a smaller generation of new scientists and more children with diminished IQs.
So much for getting the toxins out of our environment.
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