RFK Jr. wants more scrutiny of chemicals, but Trump’s EPA did the opposite

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

But two former and two current staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency told NBC News that stance contrasts starkly with how the agency operated under Trump. During the Trump administration, they said, the EPA — the government’s lead regulator of toxic substances — was keen to approve new chemicals and remove regulations on existing ones despite evidence of potential harms.

“There was a huge amount of pressure to approve chemicals despite the risks that were clearly associated with the chemicals,” said Maria Doa, who directed the EPA’s Chemical Control Division during the first year of the Trump administration and is now senior director of chemicals 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, which determined that some EPA scientists were retaliated against during the Trump administration for expressing “differing 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 employee names). They allege that they received negative performance reviews and were reassigned to new roles after resisting pressure to conceal evidence of certain chemicals’ harms. 

Remmington Belford, an EPA spokesperson hired last year, said the Trump administration “placed intense pressure on both career managers and scientists in EPA’s new chemicals program to more quickly review and approve new chemicals.” 

In one of the inspector general’s reports, an EPA staffer described the pressure to speed up reviews as “pushing us like animals on a farm.”

Those actions “definitely conflict” with RFK Jr.’s call for greater oversight, Doa said, adding that the Trump administration was “trying to limit any regulatory action on some extremely toxic chemicals.” 

Before Trump left office, for instance, 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. from 1980 to 2018, many due to asphyxiation or heart attacks among workers who inhaled it.

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

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

Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said in a statement that Trump will “work alongside passionate voices like RFK Jr. to Make America Healthy Again by providing families with safe food and ending the chronic disease epidemic plaguing our children.”

Kennedy has spent much of his career pushing for stricter regulations on chemicals — a key part of his campaign. Although some of his statements about links between chemicals and disease are backed by scientific research, 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 illness in children.

After endorsing Trump, Kennedy wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the U.S. could “revisit pesticide and other chemical-use standards” 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 the Trump administration, the EPA pressured its scientists to approve potentially hazardous chemicals and alter scientific results to make them seem safer. Lerner first published her findings when she worked for The Intercept, revealing that EPA staffers deleted information about potential hazards from agency assessments. At the time, the EPA said it would investigate any alleged violations of scientific integrity and take appropriate action.

Michal Freedhoff, assistant administrator​ of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said that part of the pressure employees felt under Trump was linked to a 2016 amendment to the Toxic Substances Control Act, which required the EPA to evaluate all new chemicals before they reached the market and set deadlines for those evaluations. Prior to that, the EPA only formally reviewed the safety of around 20% of new chemicals. Freedhoff said the EPA under Trump failed to seek additional funding for the increased workload.

“It was that perfect storm of a brand-new law that no one knew how to implement yet, a failure to ask Congress for more money with which to implement the new law, and a real push to make sure chemical companies got what they wanted,” said Freedhoff, who was appointed by President Biden.

He added that the culture at the EPA has changed, and that the agency has worked to restore scientific integrity. 

Karen McCormack, a retired EPA employee, said the agency had a decades-long culture of penalizing employees who expressed dissenting opinions about the harms of some chemicals. But that culture got worse during Trump’s presidency, she said. 

“The EPA was sort of paralyzed under the Trump administration,” she said. 

McCormack worked at the EPA for more than 40 years, in roles including scientist and communications officer, before retiring in 2017, Trump’s first year in office. That year, she said, EPA employees who wanted to publish information about certain chemicals in the Federal Register — the government’s hub for rules, proposals and public notices — were required to fill out a form describing how that information would impact chemical companies and whether the companies agreed with it. 

“We were constantly being told to be careful — that, with this administration, some things probably wouldn’t go through” to be published, McCormack said. 

Freedhoff said she inherited a backlog of more than 200 unpublished Federal Register notices when she took office in 2021, though she wasn’t sure of the reasons each had remained unpublished.

Kennedy has been a vocal critic of “regulatory capture” — the idea that regulatory agencies too often act according to corporate interests. He told Tucker Carlson last week that Trump had asked him to “unravel the capture of the agencies by corrupt influence.”

But under the Trump administration, the “EPA was doing the bidding of the entities that they are charged under law with regulating,” said Eve Gartner, a director of toxic strategies at Earthjustice, an environmental law group.

Trump has not outlined a policy platform about regulating chemicals. Project 2025, a collection of proposals assembled in part by former Trump administration staffers, calls for fast-tracking evaluations of new chemicals and revisiting the designation of PFAS, a known carcinogen, as a hazardous substance. 

“The whole thing is just trying to weaken the science so that you don’t have as robust regulations,” Doa said.

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

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

Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, said formal discussions on who might serve in the administration are premature.

Even with Kennedy’s ties to Trump, Gartner said she would expect the EPA under a second Trump administration to act similarly to the first one.  

“Anyone who thinks it would be different I think is fooling themselves,” she said.