‘It Is Hard to Imagine a More Sweeping Agenda to Make Americans Less Healthy’

In his address to a joint session of Congress on March 4, President Trump declared, “Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.”

But that does not appear to be Trump’s primary goal.

Philip J. Landrigan is a pediatrician and epidemiologist. He is the director of the program for global public health at Boston College and was the chairman of a National Academy of Sciences committee on pesticides and children that documented the extraordinary vulnerability of children to pesticides. Landrigan replied by email to my inquiries concerning the consequences of Trump’s actual policies, as opposed to his soaring language:

Scott Faber, an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center and senior vice-president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, was just as direct in his emailed reply:

Asked about the discrepancy between Trump’s speech on toxic chemicals and the actions taken by the administration, Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesman, told The Hill:

In a concrete example of Trump deregulatory policy, the Trump Justice Department announced on March 7 the dismissal of a 2023 lawsuit “against Denka Performance Elastomer LLC concerning its neoprene manufacturing facility in LaPlace, Louisiana. The dismissal fulfills President Trump’s day one executive order, ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing,’ designed to eliminate ideological overreach and restore impartial enforcement of federal laws.”

The Biden administration filed suit against Denka two years ago, charging that the factory presented an unacceptable cancer risk to the nearby majority-Black community.

According to findings posted on the E.P.A. website:

Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, emailed me in response to my queries. “It is hard to imagine a more sweeping agenda to make Americans less healthy,” she wrote.

I asked Dillen which policy concerned her the most. She replied:

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Dillen did point to specific Trump initiatives that are underway or on the near horizon:

Turning to the issue of medical research, Duke University provides a case study of the problems facing higher education institutions that are struggling to maintain research budgets under the Trump administration.

In 2024, Duke received $580 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health — about 61 percent of which went to the university for such indirect costs as utilities and buildings. In 2025, Duke suffered a drop in the number of grants, down to 64 compared with 166 in January and February of 2024, according to The Associated Press.