When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was on the campaign trail last year, the conspiracy theorist delivered a promise to voters: If he joined Donald Trump’s team, he’d “ban the worst agricultural chemicals.”
A year later, the Trump administration is advancing a plan to approve agricultural pesticides containing “forever chemicals” as an active ingredient, despite concerns raised by some scientists and environmental activists. The Washington Post reported:
This month, the [Environmental Protection Agency] approved two new pesticides that meet the internationally recognized definition for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or fluorinated substances, and has announced plans for four additional approvals. The authorized pesticides, cyclobutrifluram and isocycloseram, which was approved Thursday, will be used on vegetables such as romaine lettuce, broccoli and potatoes.
The Post’s report added that the Republican administration “also announced plans to relax a rule requiring companies to report all products containing PFAS and has proposed weakening drinking water standards for the chemicals.”
If the circumstances sound familiar, it’s not your imagination. In September, the health secretary who vowed to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals” unveiled a long-awaited “Make America Healthy Again” report that largely ignored pesticides.
“To many scientists — and some of Mr. Kennedy’s own followers — the gap between the health secretary’s use of his authority over food quality and his pummeling of vaccines has created a jarring split screen,” The New York Times reported soon after.
This has been an ongoing issue for months. In June, MS NOW’s Catherine Rampell wrote a memorable Washington Post column along these lines, noting that Kennedy’s MAHA agenda is rooted in part in the idea that Americans’ health would greatly improve through better nutrition and exposure to fewer environmental toxins.
Kennedy, Rampell added, is nevertheless playing a leading role in an administration that’s “taking away nutritional assistance” and “expanding use of environmental toxins.”
The same column noted that the Trump administration “fired everyone at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tasked with fighting lead poisoning. (It has since tried to rehire them.) Officials also attempted to purge toxicology researchers from the Environmental Protection Agency. (Litigation is ongoing.) And they paused a Biden-era rule that provided safeguards to prevent accidents at chemical plants and have proposed shuttering the agency tasked with investigating chemical accidents after the fact.”
Going a step farther down that path, it’s worth emphasizing that Kennedy rose to public prominence decades ago by suing polluters. Now he finds himself part of a Republican administration that’s actively opposed to efforts to reduce pollution — with nary a word from the nation’s health secretary. A cynic might wonder if making Americans healthy again is the principal goal. Indeed, if RFK Jr. and Team Trump wanted to admit that the MAHA agenda was largely focused on undermining vaccines, it would be impolitic, but far closer to the truth. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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