When Jean-Marie Kauth first read the Make America Healthy Again commission report, released by the White House in May, she was “thrilled about some of the things they identified,” she says. “They clearly called out industry as a pernicious influence on why EPA has not been very successful in regulating chemicals, especially pesticides.”
Kauth’s daughter died of leukemia at age 8 after, Kauth says, she was exposed to the insecticide chlorpyrifos, which the EPA banned in 2021. (That ban was overturned by a court order in 2023.) Kauth, a professor at Benedictine University in Illinois, now serves as a member of the EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC), a group of outside experts who advise the agency on children’s health issues.
In late August, the committee met to discuss a new document: a draft strategy road map written as a follow-up to the May MAHA report, intended to execute its agenda. But Kauth’s optimism about parts of MAHA’s potential mission was undercut when EPA leadership—some of whom previously worked for and with the chemical and agricultural industries—had few answers for CHPAC about how the agency’s numerous recent regulatory rollbacks around chemicals would help to protect children’s health.
“By what mechanism are they going to actually accomplish anything when they’ve rolled back the meager protections we had at EPA?” Kauth says.
The final MAHA strategy report, with input from multiple agencies, was released from the White House on Tuesday. Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said in a statement that the strategy outlined in the document would “ensure our kids and our environment are protected.” But critics—including some in the MAHA movement—are questioning how the EPA can truly protect public health when it is so friendly to corporate interests.
Zen Honeycutt is the executive director of Moms Across America, a grassroots advocacy group at the core of the MAHA movement. (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is on the board of advisers.) Honeycutt says she has been overall “very encouraged by the collaborative initiatives of this administration to welcome bipartisan experts.” But she had harsh criticisms for how the new strategy document handled the issue of pesticides. The new report, she says, is “blatant pandering to the pesticide companies.”
The May MAHA commission report called out two popular pesticides—glyphosate and atrazine—by name as potentially harmful to human health. (As other outlets have asserted that the report possibly used AI to create false research, WIRED checked the footnotes in the sections on these two chemicals; all of the studies cited exist.) While multiple international bodies, including the EPA, have deemed these pesticides safe for use, some research has linked exposure to these chemicals to a variety of health issues, including cancer.
The MAHA movement has largely united around the need to keep pesticides out of the food supply, with many, including Honeycutt, naming these two pesticides as a particular problem. RFK Jr, the MAHA movement’s leader and current secretary of health and human services, has a long history with glyphosate in particular. In 2018, Kennedy was part of a team of lawyers who successfully won a suit against agribusiness giant Monsanto on behalf of a terminally ill man who claimed exposure to Roundup, a weed killer whose main ingredient is glyphosate, caused his cancer.