The Trump Administration’s War on the Health of Everything It Claims to Protect
There is a bus. It travels around conservative political events with “Make America Healthy Again” painted on the side, and for a while it carried something that felt, to a lot of desperate and genuinely concerned Americans, like a real promise. Parents worried about what was in their children’s food. People who had watched someone they loved get sick and wondered if the water, the air, the chemicals on the crops, the dyes in the cereal had something to do with it. They heard Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talk about chronic disease and pesticides and ultra-processed food, and they believed something might actually change.
It hasn’t. It has gotten demonstrably worse. And the bus is still driving around.
“So many of the things that the MAHA movement wants, this administration is really regulating and legislating in the exact opposite direction,” said Jessica Knurick, a registered dietitian. “If you want fewer toxins in the environment, you have to regulate polluting industries.” RealClearPolling
That is the sentence the Trump administration cannot answer. Because it is true. And here is the evidence.
Glyphosate
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, one of the most widely used herbicides in commercial agriculture. Roundup’s previous manufacturer paid out billions of dollars to people who claimed they or their loved ones developed cancer after using it. MAHA supporters have spent years calling it poison. They organized around it. They voted for Trump partly because he stood next to RFK Jr. on a stage and talked about pesticides and chronic disease in the same sentence. RealClearPolling
The president infuriated MAHA supporters with an executive order to expand production of glyphosate. Then the Supreme Court took up a case that could shield Bayer — glyphosate’s manufacturer — from future lawsuits brought by cancer patients. The entire MAHA movement united against a pesticide liability rider attached to the Farm Bill that would limit the kind of claims individuals could make against Bayer. “The entire MAHA movement is very aligned in making sure that this pesticide liability [rider] doesn’t happen. Republicans or Democrats who vote for it are going to have a rude awakening in 2026,” warned one activist. PollingSource + 2
The administration’s EPA, meanwhile, is run by Lee Zeldin, whose agency has staffed its pesticide and industrial chemical office with people who came directly from those industries. “There is this constant effort to lie to everybody and say that what they’re doing is MAHA and say that they care about people’s health,” said one advocate. PollingSource
PFAS — Forever Chemicals
The EPA moved to roll back drinking water standards for PFAS — “forever chemicals” — leaving millions of people exposed to serious health risks. The administration also proposed to reduce reporting of PFAS manufacturing and imports by more than 97 percent, leaving consumers and communities in the dark about the PFAS in their homes and environment. PollingSourceCook Political Report
The EPA’s FY 2027 budget designates reducing PFAS exposure as an “Agency Priority Goal.” Yet the same budget cuts the Clean Water State Revolving Fund — the primary mechanism communities use to remove PFAS from drinking water — by 90 percent. Rep. Jake Auchincloss asked the obvious: “How do we get rid of PFAS in municipal water supplies with 90 percent fewer dollars?” Zeldin mentioned the hope of promising new technologies. Without any attached funding. Wikipedia
Clean Air
The EPA narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act and rolled back a Biden-era rule to strengthen limits on air pollution. Zeldin invited companies to email his agency so they could be exempted from air pollution standards. PollingSource
In January 2026, the EPA decided it would no longer account for the value of human lives in its analyses of air pollution protections. Senator Ed Markey put the result plainly: “American lives have become worthless — a value of zero in the eyes of your EPA.” Wikipedia
The Environmental Protection Network, made up of hundreds of former EPA staff and political appointees, estimates that 12 of the 31 rollbacks Zeldin announced in March 2025 could cause nearly 200,000 premature deaths over 25 years, and more than 10,000 asthma attacks every day. Wikipedia
Climate — The Endangerment Finding
Trump and Zeldin announced what they called “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history” — eliminating the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and all subsequent federal vehicle emissions standards. The Endangerment Finding was the legal foundation that gave the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases at all. Without it, the EPA has abdicated responsibility for the agency’s quintessential mandate of protecting human health and the environment. BallotpediaWikipedia
Zeldin called the Finding the “Holy Grail of the climate change religion” as he eliminated it. This is the man running the agency charged with protecting the air American children breathe.
The Budget
Roughly 4,000 EPA staff members are gone. The Office of Research and Development — the institutional engine of independent EPA science for half a century — has been dismantled. State environmental agencies, left without federal research support, are now quietly pooling resources among themselves just to maintain basic scientific capacity. Wikipedia
Food, Nutrition, and the Poorest Kids
The Big Beautiful Bill cuts are projected to result in 2.4 million people losing food assistance and 10 million people losing their health insurance by 2034, while the wealthiest Americans are expected to enjoy an additional $13,600 annually in tax cuts. The Trump administration’s budget for fiscal year 2027 also proposes to cut fruit and vegetable benefits for low-income breastfeeding mothers from $54 to $13 per month, and for low-income young children from $27 to $10 per month. 270toWin.com
A movement that says it wants to fix chronic disease in American children is simultaneously cutting food and nutrition benefits for the poorest American children. These two things cannot coexist as coherent policy. They can only coexist as a lie.
The Pattern
A House Oversight report found that the Trump administration is following an especially dangerous pattern: increasing risk to Americans’ health, reducing treatment options for Americans once they become sick, and eliminating data collection so that the harms of its actions are harder to track. 270toWin.com
This is happening as the administration dismantles regulations and policies that protect children from toxic chemicals, pesticides, and pollutants, while cynically packaging its rollbacks as victories for the MAHA movement. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the weakening of risk evaluations for five phthalate chemicals “a massive MAHA win.” Cook Political Report
That is the tell. When the man gutting the EPA calls gutting the EPA a health win, you are no longer in the realm of policy disagreement. You are in the realm of deliberate deception targeted at people who actually care about their children’s health and were desperate enough to believe that this administration might too.
The glyphosate issue has exposed “the contradiction at the heart of the MAHA movement,” as one dietitian put it — the fact that everything MAHA claims to want requires exactly the kind of government regulation that the Republican Party has spent fifty years dismantling. RealClearPolling
The bus is still out there. “Make America Healthy Again” painted on the side. Driving past the rivers with the forever chemicals. Past the fields sprayed with the weed killer they promised to confront. Past the kids eating lunch in schools where the air quality monitors have been defunded.
It is one of the most comprehensive frauds in modern American political history. And the people it hurt most are the ones who believed it hardest.