When Jean-Marie Kauth first read the Make America Healthy Again commission report, released by the White House in May, she was “thrilled about some of the things they identified,” she says. “They clearly called out industry as a pernicious influence on why EPA has not been very successful in regulating chemicals, especially pesticides.”
Kauth’s daughter died of leukemia at age 8 after, Kauth says, she was exposed to the insecticide chlorpyrifos, which the EPA banned in 2021. (That ban was overturned by a court order in 2023.) Kauth, a professor at Benedictine University in Illinois, now serves as a member of the EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC), a group of outside experts who advise the agency on children’s health issues.
In late August, the committee met to discuss a new document: a draft strategy road map written as a follow-up to the May MAHA report, intended to execute its agenda. But Kauth’s optimism about parts of MAHA’s potential mission was undercut when EPA leadership—some of whom previously worked for and with the chemical and agricultural industries—had few answers for CHPAC about how the agency’s numerous recent regulatory rollbacks around chemicals would help to protect children’s health.
“By what mechanism are they going to actually accomplish anything when they’ve rolled back the meager protections we had at EPA?” Kauth says.
The final MAHA strategy report, with input from multiple agencies, was released from the White House on Tuesday. Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said in a statement that the strategy outlined in the document would “ensure our kids and our environment are protected.” But critics—including some in the MAHA movement—are questioning how the EPA can truly protect public health when it is so friendly to corporate interests.
Zen Honeycutt is the executive director of Moms Across America, a grassroots advocacy group at the core of the MAHA movement. (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is on the board of advisers.) Honeycutt says she has been overall “very encouraged by the collaborative initiatives of this administration to welcome bipartisan experts.” But she had harsh criticisms for how the new strategy document handled the issue of pesticides. The new report, she says, is “blatant pandering to the pesticide companies.”
The May MAHA commission report called out two popular pesticides—glyphosate and atrazine—by name as potentially harmful to human health. (As other outlets have asserted that the report possibly used AI to create false research, WIRED checked the footnotes in the sections on these two chemicals; all of the studies cited exist.) While multiple international bodies, including the EPA, have deemed these pesticides safe for use, some research has linked exposure to these chemicals to a variety of health issues, including cancer.
The MAHA movement has largely united around the need to keep pesticides out of the food supply, with many, including Honeycutt, naming these two pesticides as a particular problem. RFK Jr, the MAHA movement’s leader and current secretary of health and human services, has a long history with glyphosate in particular. In 2018, Kennedy was part of a team of lawyers who successfully won a suit against agribusiness giant Monsanto on behalf of a terminally ill man who claimed exposure to Roundup, a weed killer whose main ingredient is glyphosate, caused his cancer.
The May report garnered criticism from multiple industry groups, including powerful farmers’ and growers’ groups, who called out the inclusion of pesticides in the report. The White House invited nearly 50 farm and food groups to discuss the report over the summer.
The new strategy report, released this week, steps back from its previous explicit takes on pesticides by not mentioning glyphosate and atrazine by name, and only makes a few mentions of concrete actions on pesticides. The report says that the EPA will “work to ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in EPA’s pesticide robust review procedures”—a promise that doesn’t pass muster with Honeycutt.
“A few words on a website explaining the pesticide review process to the American people is not going to reduce my children’s allergies, or their autoimmune issues, or their mental health issues,” Honeycutt says. “The only thing that would reduce our children’s chronic health issues and mental health issues would be if they reduced the exposure to our children of those pesticides.”
Honeycutt’s critiques are echoed by David Murphy, who worked on Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He called the strategy report “a major missed opportunity for the Trump administration,” telling Politico that “the pesticide industry are firmly embedded in the White House and intentionally short-circuiting Trump’s campaign promise to the millions of MAHA voters who helped him return to power.” (“The Trump administration is committed to continuing to work with our stakeholders to deliver more MAHA wins for the American people,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told WIRED.)
The final report may actually signal the opposite of what MAHA wants. Under a section titled “Process Efficiencies and Deregulation,” the strategy document says that the agency will “work to reform the approval process” for both chemical and biological pesticides. However, Zeldin has said that under his supervision, the agency has new “expedited review processes” for pesticides and chemicals.
“It looks like they’re actually trying to speed up the approval process,” says Betsy Southerland, a 33-year veteran of the EPA who became a whistleblower during the first Trump administration. “But that’s not what MAHA supporters were thinking they were going to do. They were thinking they were actually going to do more health protection through the review of these pesticides, not just speed it up and put more ones out there.”
The EPA did not respond to a question as to whether or not it intends to initiate new reforms based on the MAHA agenda, and directed questions on the strategy document to the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House. HHS did not reply to specific questions about the strategy. “HHS is advancing bold reforms to make America healthy again,” HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon told WIRED. “We won’t be swayed by partisan critics. Our focus is on transparency, science, and delivering results for the American people.”
Three of the key people currently leading the EPA’s chemical work have extensive ties to the chemicals and pesticides industry. The New York Times reported in May that the leader of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, Nancy Beck, pushed behind the scenes to exclude pesticides from the original MAHA commission report.
“President Trump made a fantastic choice in selecting Dr. Beck, who has never been a lobbyist in her life, by the way—no lamestream media outlet has reported that correctly,” EPA press secretary Bridget Hirsch told WIRED in a statement. Beck and her colleagues, Hirsch said, “remain committed to being led by the science, unlike Biden EPA appointees with major ethical issues that were beholden to radical groups.”
Zeldin’s public calendar shows that he has met at least six times over the past seven months with chemical and plastics companies and lobbying groups—including a meeting in June with Bayer AG, which bought Monsanto in 2018.
“It’s a disservice to your readers to cherry-pick six of Administrator Zeldin’s many meetings over the last nine months from his very full calendar to paint an inaccurate picture and bolster your false narrative,” Hirsch said. “Administrator Zeldin is committed to protecting human health and the environment 100 percent—any implication otherwise is your opinion and nothing more.”
Brian Leake, the director of external communications for Bayer, said in an email that the company was “pleased to see feedback provided by the agriculture industry—in particular, farmers—was solicited and received by the commission, helping inform the report.
“Bayer stands behind the safety of our glyphosate-based products, which have been tested extensively, approved by regulators, and used around the globe for 50 years,” Leake said. “The EPA has an extremely rigorous review process which spans multiple years, considers thousands of studies, and involves many independent risk assessment experts at the EPA.”
As of May, 3,000 employees had already left the agency. That month, EPA leadership announced its intent to dissolve the Office of Research and Development, its independent scientific arm that employed more than 1,000 scientists at the start of the year, redistributing some to other areas of the agency while laying others off. That reorganization began in July. (Hirsch said that the reorganization will “improve the effectiveness and efficiency of EPA operations and align core statutory requirements with its organizational structure.”)
These crises, employees say, may be affecting the agency’s work with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), colloquially called forever chemicals, which are another area of concern for the MAHA movement. A growing body of research has linked these chemicals, which don’t degrade in the environment, to a variety of health concerns. The strategy document released this week says that the EPA and National Institutes of Health will help the CDC “update recommendations” regarding the health risks of PFAS in water.
It’s unclear how robust such a review will be. In 2024, the Biden administration put limits on six PFAS chemicals in drinking water. In May, the EPA announced that it would be reconsidering limits on four of those.
Two EPA employees working on PFAS issues told WIRED that thanks to shake-ups at the agency, they are struggling to procure supplies, hire lab techs, and do their work. These employees spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to speak to the press. (“We are confident EPA has the resources needed to accomplish the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment, fulfill all statutory obligations, and make the best-informed decisions based on the gold standard of science,” Hirsch, the EPA press secretary, told WIRED.)
“I’ve been here for several years,” one employee told WIRED. “It is the least productive period for me, including Covid, and it seems like everyone else is in the same boat.”
