RFK Jr. Wants More Control Over Chemicals, But Trump’s EPA Did the Opposite

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump, he suggested that Trump’s health policies could include reconsidering standards for chemicals and pesticides — part of an agenda Kennedy called “Make America Healthy Again.”

But two former and two current EPA employees told NBC News that this position stands in stark contrast to how the agency operated under Trump. During the Trump administration, they said, the EPA — the government’s top regulator of toxics — was interested in approving new chemicals and removing regulations from existing ones, despite evidence of potential harm.

“There was tremendous pressure to approve chemicals despite the risks that were clearly associated with those chemicals,” said Maria Doa, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency’s Chemical Control Division in the first year of the Trump administration and is now senior director for chemical policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, an organization that advocates for restrictions on toxic chemicals.

Such accounts align with three reports released last week by the EPA’s Office of Inspector General that found that some EPA scientists were repressed during the Trump administration for expressing “dissenting scientific opinions.” The inspector general, Sean O’Donnell, was appointed by Trump.

Three EPA whistleblowers told ProPublica on Thursday that their complaints were the subject of the reports (which redact the names of the employees). They say they received negative performance reviews and were reassigned to new positions after resisting pressure to hide evidence of the harmful effects of certain chemicals.

Remmington Belford, an EPA spokesman hired last year, said the Trump administration “has put enormous pressure on both career managers and scientists in EPA’s Emerging Chemicals Program to review and approve new chemicals more quickly.”

In one inspector general report, an EPA official described the pressure to speed up reviews as “pushing us around like animals on a farm.”

Doa said the actions “definitely fly in the face” of RFK Jr.’s call for greater oversight, adding that the Trump administration is “trying to curtail any regulatory action on certain extremely toxic chemicals.”

For example, before Trump left office, the EPA withdrew a proposed ban on methylene chloride, which is used in paint strippers. The chemical was linked to 85 deaths in the U.S. between 1980 and 2018, many from suffocation or heart attacks among workers who inhaled it.

Representatives for Kennedy — now part of the team preparing a possible Trump transition — did not respond to requests for comment.

During an onstage discussion with Tucker Carlson in Milwaukee last week, Kennedy said Trump “was surrounded by bureaucrats and seasoned experts” during his presidency, which “got us into some policies that I think were really bad for our country.” He added that Trump “will not do that again.”

Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in a statement that Trump “will work with passionate people like RFK Jr. to make America healthy again by ensuring families have safe food and ending the epidemic of chronic diseases plaguing our children.”

Kennedy has spent much of his career pushing for tougher chemical regulations—a key part of his campaign. While some of his claims about links between chemicals and disease are supported by science, he has also repeated unsubstantiated ideas and conspiracy theories. Kennedy has falsely suggested that vaccines contain harmful chemicals and are among a nebulous group of so-called environmental toxins that cause chronic disease in children.

After endorsing Trump, Kennedy wrote in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that the United States could “reconsider standards for pesticides and other chemicals” if Trump wins. He pointed to a 2019 study that listed 72 pesticides approved in the U.S. that are banned or in the process of being phased out in the European Union.

But ProPublica reporter Sharon Lerner found that under Trump, the EPA pressured its own scientists to approve potentially dangerous chemicals and changed scientific research to make them seem safer. Lerner first published her findings while she was working for The Intercept, revealing that EPA employees were removing information about potential hazards from the agency’s assessments. At the time, the EPA said it would investigate any alleged breaches of scientific integrity and take appropriate action.

Michal Freedhoff, deputy administrator for the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said part of the pressure employees felt under Trump was related to a 2016 amendment to the Toxic Substances Control Act that required the EPA to evaluate all new chemicals before they were released to the market and set deadlines for those evaluations. Previously, the EPA formally reviewed the safety of only about 20% of new chemicals. Freedhoff said the EPA under Trump did not seek additional funding for the increased workload.

“It was the perfect storm of a brand new law that nobody knew how to implement yet, no request to Congress for additional funding to implement the new law, and a real push to make sure that the chemical companies got what they wanted,” said Freedhoff, who was appointed by President Biden.

She added that the culture at EPA had changed and that the agency had taken steps to restore scientific integrity.

Karen McCormack, a retired EPA employee, said the agency has had a decades-long culture of punishing employees who express dissent about the harmfulness of certain chemicals. But that culture has gotten worse under Trump, she said.

“The EPA has been kind of paralyzed under Trump,” she said.

McCormack worked at the EPA for more than 40 years, serving as a scientist and communications officer, among other positions, before retiring in 2017, Trump’s first year in office. This year, she said, EPA employees who wanted to publish information about certain chemicals in the Federal Register — the government’s home for rules, proposals and public notices — had to fill out a form describing how the information would affect chemical companies and whether the companies agreed with it.

“We’ve been told all along to be careful — that under this administration, certain things probably won’t be” released, McCormack said.

Freedhoff said that when she took office in 2021, she inherited a backlog of more than 200 unpublished Federal Register notices, though she wasn’t sure why any of them had not been published.

Kennedy has been a vocal critic of “regulatory capture” — the idea that regulatory agencies too often work in alignment with corporate interests. Last week, he told Tucker Carlson that Trump had asked him to “decode the capture of agencies by corrupt influence.”

But under Trump, “the EPA has been following orders from entities that it is required to regulate under the law,” said Eve Gartner, director of toxics strategies at Earthjustice, an environmental law group.

Trump has not offered a policy platform on regulating chemicals. Project 2025, a collection of proposals assembled in part by former Trump administration staffers, calls for expediting reviews of new chemicals and reconsidering whether to designate PFAS, a known carcinogen, as a hazardous substance.

“This whole thing is about diluting the science so that there aren’t such stringent regulations,” Doa said.

Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the 2025 Project does not reflect Trump’s policy plans.

It’s not yet clear what Kennedy’s role might be in a potential Trump administration or what decisions he would help make as part of the transition team. In his conversation with Carlson, Kennedy indicated he expects to be “deeply involved” in selecting the leaders of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His team did not respond to questions about whether he might play a role in appointing EPA officials.

Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign communications director, said formal discussions about potential administration nominees were premature.

Gartner said that even given Kennedy’s ties to Trump, one would expect the EPA in a second Trump term to act much like it did in the first.

“I think anyone who thinks it will be any different is fooling themselves,” she said.