It was a surreal moment for Susanne Brander.
She was sitting in the audience at a conference in April as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke about the health effects of exposure to harmful chemicals in our food, air and water.
As she listened, Kennedy cited recent research on microplastics from researchers in Oregon, finding these tiny particles had shown up in 99% of the seafood they sampled.
"It was definitely our study," says Brander, an ecotoxicologist at Oregon State University who co-authored the research along with a team at Portland State University.
The problem was, just an hour earlier while in line for breakfast, an email had popped into her inbox notifying her that a federal grant she'd relied on to fund her research for years — from the Environmental Protection Agency — was being terminated.
Her research, the letter explained, no longer aligned with the agency's priorities. And now here was the standard-bearer of the Trump administration's Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, agenda elevating her work.
"I was baffled and incredibly frustrated," she recalls. "It feels like they are promoting the field while ripping out the foundation."
Kennedy and the MAHA movement's rise to power is disorienting for scientists and advocates in environmental health who are focused on human exposure to toxic chemicals and environmental pollutants.
The research community has long warned of troubling links to chronic disease, especially for children, and have called for more government oversight of the plastic, fossil fuel and chemical industries. Kennedy is bringing attention to the issue as health secretary.
And yet in the first five months, the Trump administration has made moves that run counter to these very goals.
"It's an enormous contradiction in actions," says Thomas Burke, a former EPA official who directs the Johns Hopkins Risk Sciences and Public Policy Institute.
The firings and downsizing of the federal workforce have disrupted teams that investigate toxic substances and pollutants. Broad cuts to federally funded research have imperiled relevant scientific work. And regulators are weakening safeguards that limit pollution and other toxic chemicals.
Dr. Philip Landrigan, a leading figure in environmental health research, says the disconnect was underscored when the administration released the MAHA Report last month, overseen by Kennedy and other Cabinet members, including EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
That document, which has come under scrutiny for inaccurate or nonexistent citations, positions the issue of environmental toxins and chemicals as a key priority for tackling chronic disease in children, along with diet, physical activity, technology use and what it terms "overmedicalization."
Reading it, Landrigan says he couldn't help but think about the widespread damage the Trump administration is inflicting on the very agencies and scientific community with the "expertise, experience and know-how to protect children against these hazards."
"You can't say one thing and do another," says Sue Fenton, who directs the Center for Human Health and the Environment at NC State University, contrasting the administration's rhetoric about clean water and air with its actions.
Yanked grants, cuts to staff
Examples of the contradictions are not hard to find.
Cuts to the federal workforce under Kennedy's watch have hobbled NIOSH, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which responds to toxic chemicals and pollutants in the workplace.
During a round of layoffs, the administration eliminated most of a division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that investigated environmental hazards like heavy metals, air pollution and carcinogens. Though many of these workers were reinstated just last week, President Trump's proposed budget calls for axing the CDC center where the division is housed.
The National Institutes of Health, which is under Kennedy's command, has stopped accepting submissions for its flagship journal on environmental health and yanked research grants. For instance, Ami Zota, an environmental health scientist at Columbia University, had all four of her NIH grants canceled, though she was looking at chemical exposure in consumer products and tracking how PFAS chemicals affect women's health, during pregnancy and midlife.
At least eight members of Project TENDR, which studies the harm of toxic chemicals on brain development and its link to neurodevelopmental disorders, have lost federal grants, says Maureen Swanson, who co-leads the group.
She says another four to five members are still waiting to hear about "pending cuts, including to multimillion-dollar grants that fund their universities' environmental health research centers."
In a statement, the Department of Health and Human Services said Kennedy "is committed to finding the root causes of the chronic disease epidemic, including the toxins in our environment and our food." And the agency has said that it plans to consolidate and streamline work on environmental health at CDC and elsewhere into the soon-to-be-formed Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA.
Regulations on hold
At the EPA, which would play a critical role in any substantive efforts to reduce harmful chemicals and pollution, the agency's administrator Zeldin is prioritizing deregulation and cutting staff.
The agency has delayed implementing national drinking water standards on PFAS, or "forever chemicals," and proposed lifting regulations to reduce emissions of mercury and toxic pollutants from power plants. It has pushed back the deadline for industry to submit safety studies on more than a dozen chemicals including benzene, vinyl chloride and Bisphenol A.
The administration appointed a scientist who spent years working for the American Chemistry Council, Nancy Beck, to a prominent role at the EPA, despite the MAHA report's emphasis on eliminating conflicts of interest.
Zeldin has even touted EPA's success in gutting research grants. The cuts have affected scientists who are trying to understand the toxic effects of chemicals, including a researcher at Wayne State University, Christopher Kassotis, whose work on chemical mixtures was cited in the MAHA commission report.
Rebecca Fry, chair of the department of environmental health at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, says all of her faculty with EPA grants had them canceled.
"Their focus is exactly what's in MAHA," she says. "They're trying to understand these complex associations between chemicals in the environment and human health and disease."
And Zota worries about the loss of grants around the country to train scientists on the toxic effects of environmental chemicals. "It's just so devastating," she says. "If you talk about how to kill a field, you really attack the up-and-coming generation."
The EPA said in a statement to NPR that the administration is "working to solve big problems and having robust conversations across government about how to drive economic growth while protecting human health and the environment as part of the Make America Healthy Again Commission."
A growing concern among scientists
As Kennedy's MAHA push brings new visibility to her field, Tracey Woodruff, who leads the UCSF Center on Reproductive Health and the Environment, says she and many of her colleagues are trying to navigate a delicate exercise in science communication.
Kennedy has a history of making false or misleading claims on this topic, whether it's about chemtrails, or the effect of certain herbicides on gender. His rhetoric about the "mass poisoning of children" can veer into sweeping claims about the impacts of environmental toxins, without sufficient scientific evidence. And his actions on vaccines have provoked alarm across public health.
More broadly, MAHA's focus on environmental toxins sometimes reflects a strain of thought in the world of alternative medicine and wellness that inaccurately frames any "natural" substance as good and man-made or synthetic chemicals as bad.
But it's also true that when it comes to many well-studied chemicals, including some that Kennedy cites, "we have enough data to take action," she says. "If we don't talk about the things that he's saying that are real issues the government should be addressing, I'm worried it will delegitimize all our work."
Woodruff and others in her field have outlined their major areas of concern in consensus statements and other peer-reviewed papers on the evidence tying synthetic chemicals and other substances to obesity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, fertility, neurodevelopmental disorders and more.
Phthalates, forever chemicals, flame retardants, bisphenols, formaldehyde-releasing preservatives and certain pesticides are some of the culprits, but there are thousands in use that have never been carefully evaluated for their health effects, especially on infants and children.
"There are huge gaps in the way that we regulate or protect people from these harms," says Burke of Johns Hopkins.
It's enormously challenging to pinpoint the impact of specific substances because people encounter so many of them over the course of their lives. The evidence of harm often comes from lab work and long-running observational studies that can look for relationships with disease and health problems in the population.
Increasingly, researchers emphasize it's the cumulative exposure that is most concerning here.
"Many of these chemicals of concern attack the same mechanism in the human body and can have additive or exponential effects," says Dr. Leonardo Trasande, who directs NYU Langone's Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards and studies the health impacts of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in everyday products.
Linda Birnbaum, the now-retired director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, was also in the audience with Susanne Brander when Kennedy spoke at the policy summit on chemicals and plastics earlier this year.
She says about "80% to 90%" of what she heard during that speech was "really good" about the need for major reform. "But there are no simple solutions. We're not going to cure chronic disease in a year or three years or five years," she says.
Questions about a bold agenda
In public appearances, Kennedy has outlined what experts describe as an ambitious agenda to overhaul how the U.S. evaluates chemicals, particularly in the realm of food and some consumer products.
"It would do what many of us have been asking for for a long time," says Trasande at NYU. "I'm not trying to put rose-colored glasses on. I just think we have to call it fairly," he adds.
This includes looking at the cumulative and mixture effects of chemicals in the food supply and revising a regulatory pathway that allows companies to self-declare whether a food additive is safe.
In a statement to NPR, HHS also pointed to its announcement of a new review program to "reassess previously approved chemicals in food and food-contact material and expand safety assessments to study endocrine and neurobehavioral effects." According to the FDA, a public website will share information about chemicals under review.
But academics and advocacy groups that have pushed for such changes are skeptical about the Trump administration's commitment.
Even on eliminating petroleum-based food dyes, an area that Kennedy has touted as a major achievement, Woodruff points out that the administration made this a voluntary decision for manufacturers, not an outright ban.
"We're not seeing any meaningful action," says Katherine O'Brien, a senior attorney at the nonprofit advocacy group Earthjustice.
"What we've seen is splashy press releases, handshake agreements with industry, and basically plans to make plans," she says, "but what reduces the incidence of chronic diseases from chemical contamination is using the federal government's actual regulatory authority."
She and other advocates say there's a lot the Trump administration could do quickly — actions like prohibiting phthalates in food packaging, which groups like hers have wanted the FDA to do for years.
And the reality is that any comprehensive effort to crack down on harmful chemicals requires the EPA to also wield its regulatory powers because the substances also show up in our water and the environment.
Maria Doa, a former EPA scientist now at the Environmental Defense Fund, says this is a glaring inconsistency in the Trump administration's MAHA platform.
"You need to take a holistic approach," she says. "You shouldn't be pulling back efforts to regulate our exposure to chemicals in one area and say you're going to be more protective in another."
As a self-described pragmatist, Linda Birnbaum says she hopes to salvage something from the "mess" that has disrupted so much of her field, but mostly she's dubious.
"Very honestly, my concern with Kennedy, among others, is that as soon as he starts actually trying to regulate some of this stuff, industry is going to go to Trump and they'll kick him out," she says.
Copyright 2025 NPR