10 ways the Trump administration is “making America toxic again”

By Susan Lamontagne (Republished from the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment.)

“Our goal is to get toxins out of the environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.” – President Trump during his State of the Union address, March 4, 2025

We agree. This is a goal we have been working toward since our inception. However, while this administration says removing toxics from the environment and keeping children healthy is their goal, many of their actions are doing the opposite.

10 ways the new administration will expose children to more chemicals that will make them sick:

#1: Put chemical industry lobbyists in charge at EPA, including one who worked for Dupont, a leading manufacturer of PFAS that have now contaminated drinking water supplies around the world. The number two in charge at the Agency fought against banning asbestos. And another EPA appointee lobbied on behalf of cancer-causing and asthma-inducing formaldehyde. And now she’s in charge of regulating…formaldehyde.

#2: Taking steps to roll back a Biden initiative to reduce lead in drinking water. There is no safe level of lead, especially for children.

#3: Announced a delay of a new rule to regulate trichloroethylene (TCE), a chemical used in dry cleaning that is harmful to children’s brains.

#4: Issued an Executive Order to remove Environmental Justice programs and staff that work to help communities most highly impacted from toxic chemicals and pollutants. (A report over the weekend states that some EPA staff who work on Environmental Justice are being reinstated.)

#5: Withdrew a regulation limiting the amount of PFAS industry can discharge into water.

#6: Gutting EPA staff. You can’t protect people from harmful chemicals with 65% fewer scientists and staff to identify and evaluate toxics.

#7: Taking steps to eliminate EPA’s IRIS program, which evaluates chemical risks and hazards. Ending IRIS and the science that goes with it would undermine the Agency’s ability to protect people from harmful chemicals.

#8: Striking the “endangerment finding,” which would undermine EPA’s ability to protect the public from global warming and air pollution.

#9: Attempting to lower EPA’s cancer risk finding of 1,3-butadiene which would let these chemical-emitting facilities spew more toxics into the air. (Here again, under the leadership of former chemical industry lobby staff.)

#10: Loosening rules to avert chemical disasters.

Want to know how the new administration could protect people from harmful chemicals and pollutants?

Our new recommendations for EPA provide a roadmap to prioritize health instead of industry’s wish list. They include for the Agency to:

#1: Protect scientific integrity and stop corporate interference in regulatory decision-making

#2: Update its scientific methods to more accurately quantify real-world risks

#3: Adopt NASEM-approved scientific methods for evaluating chemicals

#4: Restore environmental justice, and

#5: Preserve and improve taxpayer-owned and publicly available data on chemicals, contaminants, and health harms.

This blog column is republished here from the University of California, San Francisco Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment. 

(Opinion columns published in The New Lede represent the views of the individual(s) authoring the columns and not necessarily the perspectives of TNL editors.)

(Featured photo by Getty Images for Unsplash+.)