Recent EPA reversals, liability shields, and PFAS backsliding betray public health. Action Alert!
- Despite MAHA rhetoric, the Trump administration is weakening chemical safety protections—rolling back EPA standards, redefining “safe” exposure levels, and allowing greater public exposure to known carcinogens and toxins.
- The administration is backing efforts to protect chemical companies like Bayer/Monsanto from liability for harms linked to products such as glyphosate, while also slowing or weakening regulation of PFAS “forever chemicals.”
- These rollbacks increase everyday exposure to toxic chemicals, compounding poor diet and a prevention-weak healthcare system, and undermining any serious effort to “Make America Healthy Again.”
The slogan Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) promised a future with less chronic disease, lower healthcare costs, and healthier communities. But when it comes to environmental contaminants—pesticides, industrial chemicals, and so‑called “forever chemicals”—the Trump administration appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Recent actions by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Justice reveal a pattern: weakening safeguards, siding with chemical manufacturers, and leaving Americans exposed to more dangerous toxins in their homes, food, water, and air.
Formaldehyde
Formaldehyde is a well‑known carcinogen found in furniture, building materials, clothing, and countless consumer products. A few years ago, the EPA prepared to regulate formaldehyde based on the assumption that there is no safe level of exposure: carcinogens don’t behave like ordinary chemicals, and even low‑level exposure can increase cancer risk.
That approach is now being scrapped. Under the administration of Lee Zeldin, the EPA has issued a draft memo assuming that a “safe threshold” for formaldehyde exposure exists, a move that would nearly double what the agency considers safe to inhale.
This is being driven by EPA leadership with deep ties to the chemical industry. The agency’s chemical safety office is now run by former senior officials from the American Chemistry Council (ACC)—the lobbying arm of major chemical manufacturers—who, during their time at ACC, pushed back against the EPA’s risk assessments of formaldehyde.
To be clear, what’s being proposed is: more formaldehyde in consumer products. More exposure in homes and schools. More respiratory illness. More cancer.
Glyphosate and Roundup
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also going to bat for Bayer/Monsanto to protect them from liability lawsuits.
Glyphosate-based weed killers are implicated in thousands of lawsuits claiming exposures to them caused non‑Hodgkin lymphoma and other cancers. Juries across the country have repeatedly found that Monsanto—now owned by Bayer—failed to warn users of these risks. It’s why Bayer/Monsanto is backing legislation in Congress and at the state level to preempt these lawsuits.
Now, in a December filing with the Supreme Court, the Trump-appointed Solicitor General is urging the Court to take up the company’s appeal and rule that federal pesticide law preempts state “failure‑to‑warn” claims. Bayer’s argument is simple: because the EPA approved Roundup labels without a cancer warning, the company should be immune from lawsuits.
If the Court agrees, chemical companies could escape liability for the damage caused by their products.
PFAS Rollbacks
The betrayal of MAHA doesn’t stop with pesticides and formaldehyde. The Trump administration has also rolled back multiple efforts to regulate PFAS—so‑called “forever chemicals” that accumulate in the body and are linked to cancer, immune dysfunction, fertility problems, and developmental harm.
Instead of aggressive cleanup and strict limits, federal regulators are slowing timelines, weakening standards, and deferring to industry—allowing PFAS contamination to continue spreading through drinking water, food packaging, and consumer goods.
This is a recipe for disaster.
A Perfect Storm for Chronic Disease
Americans are not getting sicker by accident.
Chronic exposure to toxic chemicals—combined with a poor, ultra‑processed diet, a healthcare system focused on drugs rather than prevention, and sedentary lifestyles—is driving epidemics of cancer, autoimmune disease, neurological disorders, and metabolic illness.
Instead of addressing root causes, the Trump administration is weakening chemical safety standards, blocking updated health warnings, shielding corporations from accountability, and expanding public exposure to known toxins.
What Real “Make America Healthy Again” Would Look Like
There is clearly a disconnect within the administration. On the one hand, we have the Trump EPA rolling back regulations that protect Americans from environmental contaminants. On the other hand, we have HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary pushing a MAHA agenda in fits and starts. There have been some notable achievements—banning certain food dyes, updating fluoride policies, and rethinking federal vaccine policies—but the utility of these reforms will be undermined if we can’t get chemical regulation under control.
If policymakers were serious about making America healthy again, they would enact stronger public protections against these dangerous chemicals, rather than letting industry cronies set the agenda. They would also eliminate censorship of health information that presently prevents Americans from getting information about the science showing how nutrients, botanicals and other natural products can reduce the risk of all of the leading chronic diseases. Diseases that make Americans the sickest population in any major industrialized country.
ANH-USA will continue to expose regulatory rollbacks, challenge industry capture of federal agencies, and fight for science-based policies that protect people—not polluters.
Action Alert!
