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forever chemicals
The US Kicks Off World’s Largest Naval War Games: RIMPAC, China, and the Cost of War
Rather than making the region safer, the pursuit of “deterrence” risks turning the Pacific into a battlefield while diverting resources away from the urgent challenges that communities are actually facing today.
Jul 14, 2026
June 24 marked the start of the biennial Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, exercises, the world's largest international naval war games. Led by the US, the military exercises bring together 31 countries and include more than 25,000 personnel, 40 surface ships, five submarines, and 140 aircraft. The event, which will run until July 31, marks the newest escalation of US preparations for war on China, further militarizing the Pacific and normalizing the prospect of conflict through increasingly large-scale exercises and an ever-expanding web of alliances and military bases.
At the same time, the US and partner nations kicked off the 10-day Valiant Shield 2026 exercises across Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Japan, and surrounding seas, submerging the entire Pacific into an intensive military operation zone.
At a moment of intensifying climate disasters and growing economic insecurity, the message from Washington is clear: There is always more money for war. RIMPAC comes as Congress is attempting to approve a staggering $1.5 trillion war budget, even as communities across the world are facing deadly heatwaves, floods, and other climate-fueled disasters.
This past week, while US military vessels practiced war off their coasts, super typhoon Bavi pummeled Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Coming only a week into the typical typhoon season, this is already the second major typhoon to hit the islands. Many locals were still without power from the last super typhoon Sinlaku, which killed 17 people and caused over $1.5 billion in damages.
Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.
Climate scientist Kristina Dahl remarked, “In both of these cases we can see the fingerprint of climate change on the storms and that has really devastating consequences for the people who are repeatedly in their paths.”
These overlapping crises reveal a profound imbalance in priorities. As Pacific communities contend with increasingly severe climate disasters, the United States continues to invest staggering sums in military expansion and war preparations. The irony is especially stark given that the US military is the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and one of the largest institutional greenhouse gas emitters, while decades of US military activity have caused lasting environmental and human harm across Pacific Island communities.
Instead of pouring resources into preventing climate change and protecting people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, the US continues to pump money into its bloated war budget. In the Pacific, military expansion is justified by the increasing push toward war on China. The 2026 National Defense Strategy committed to "deterring China in the Indo-Pacific through strength” by “erect(ing) a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain” so that “Joint Force always has the ability to conduct devastating strikes and operations against targets.”
The US conception of “deterrence” is both illogical and hypocritical in nature. In the name of “protecting” the Pacific from a future imaginary threat, the United States is harming the very communities it claims to defend through military buildup, environmental degradation, and the transformation of islands into staging grounds for war. The narrative of an imminent Chinese takeover of the Pacific is often treated as a foregone conclusion despite there being no evidence that China seeks to invade or occupy Pacific nations. Rather than making the region safer, the pursuit of “deterrence” risks turning the Pacific into a battlefield while diverting resources away from the urgent challenges that communities are actually facing today.
A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the US military's economic benefits to Hawaiʻi have been significantly overstated and that local communities bear enormous hidden costs from its presence. The report estimates that military demand for housing drove Oʻahu rents up by 7.1% in 2024 alone, costing non-military renters an additional $234.8 million. It also found that cleaning up PFAS contamination at just three military installations could cost at least $493 million, with broader health and environmental damages potentially reaching into the billions. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has leased more than 46,000 acres of Hawaiian land for just $1 leases, despite the land's estimated fair market value reaching as high as $133.7 billion. Far from protecting Pacific communities, the US military buildup has contributed to housing insecurity, environmental contamination, and the dispossession of Indigenous lands.
Similarly, US militarization of Guam has severely impacted local communities. The US military controls roughly 27% of the island's land, while decades of military activity have left behind contaminated groundwater, hazardous waste, and damaged ecosystems. PFAS" forever chemicals" linked to military firefighting foam have been detected in Guam's drinking water wells, threatening the island's primary freshwater source. Military expansion has also endangered coral reefs, sensitive coastal habitats, and wildlife.
These events, which are just a few of many examples of the environmental and human costs of militarization, reveal the deep hypocrisy of the US strategy of "peace through strength." Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.
The proposed $1.5 trillion war budget will only deepen these harmful priorities, while large-scale military exercises like RIMPAC intensify US-China tensions, heighten the risk of dangerous encounters at sea, and increase the possibility of pulling the Pacific into a devastating war.
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'Telling the Public to Drink Poison': Trump EPA Targets Drinking Water Limits for 'Forever Chemicals'
"You cannot make America healthy again while allowing toxic PFAS to flow freely from our taps," said the Environmental Working Group's president.
May 18, 2026
President Donald Trump is yet again facing accusations of breaking his campaign promise to "Make America Healthy Again" after the US Environmental Protection Agency on Monday proposed repealing and delaying some landmark limits on "forever chemicals" in drinking water.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are commonly called forever chemicals because they persist in the environment, humans, and wildlife for long periods. Despite their links to various health issues, including cancer, they have been used in products such as firefighting foam, food packaging, nonstick pans, and water-resistant fabrics for clothing and furniture.
The Biden administration was praised for its historic steps to reduce PFAS contamination of tap water and urged to go even further. However, the Trump EPA is now pushing to delay those limits for two common contaminants, PFOA and PFOS, and abandon the restrictions for four others: PFBS, PFHxS, and PFNA, and HFPO-DA—also known as GenX.
Announcing the proposed rules on Monday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed not only that the Biden administration failed to follow federal law in implementing its restrictions, but also that the new proposals are part of the president's Make America Healthy Again pledge. They highlighted "innovative" technologies plus funding for states to address PFAS in tap water.
However, campaigners who have long called for stricter PFAS policies excoriated the Trump administration over its two proposed rules—which are set to be published in the Federal Register with a 60-day public comment period, and the subject of an EPA hearing scheduled for July 7.
"Zeldin and Kennedy are trying to sell potions out of the back of a covered wagon. The millions of Americans demanding safe drinking water are not going to fall for their hocus pocus," said Anna Reade, director of PFAS advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement. "By repealing and delaying PFAS standards, EPA is abandoning communities in desperate need of drinking water protections, especially those who live near polluting industries."
Food and Water Watch's water program director, Mary Grant, declared that "with today's proposals, the Trump administration is telling the public to drink poison. It has once again shown that it represents the interests of billionaire corporate polluters—not the health of people in this country."
"One thing is absolutely clear, we cannot roll back or delay protections against PFAS," she said. "For decades, communities have been sounding the alarm and demanding action on these toxic forever chemicals. Instead of implementing commonsense regulations, Trump's EPA has doubled down on weakening our drinking water protections. Every person deserves and needs clean, safe water, and today's proposed rules are threats to millions of people."
Grant argued that "EPA must not delay or roll back these hard-won limits on toxic PFAS contaminants in drinking water. It must immediately cease these deregulatory actions, stop approving new PFAS chemicals, ban all nonessential uses, hold polluters accountable for clean up, expand protections to regulate the entire class, and ramp up support to ensure that every community has access to safe, affordable water."
Ken Cook, president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which has tracked PFAS contamination across the United States and publicly released its findings, was similarly outraged by the EPA proposals.
"You cannot make America healthy again while allowing toxic PFAS to flow freely from our taps," Cook said. "The Trump EPA is caving to chemical industry lobbyists and water utility pressure—and in doing so, it is condemning millions of Americans to drink contaminated water for years to come."
"The price of this decision will be paid by ordinary people, in the form of more PFAS-related diseases," he warned.
While Trump's agency leaders claimed Monday that the Biden administration ran afoul of the Safe Drinking Water Act, EWG accused them of violating that same law, given its requirement that any revision to a tap water standard "maintain, or provide for greater, protection of the health of persons."
Melanie Benesh, vice president of government affairs at EWG, said that "this is a deliberate decision to expose American families to chemicals linked to cancer and other serious health harms. Rolling back limits on four PFAS and then allowing water systems to push compliance deadlines to 2031, when contamination is ongoing, is unconscionable."
"The communities least able to protect themselves will pay the highest price," she added. "That is not regulatory reform. It is an environmental injustice."
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Infant Death Rate 3 Times Higher Near PFAS-Contaminated Sites in New Hampshire: Study
One scientist said the new research "provides rare causal evidence" and "not just a correlation" of the dangers posed by forever chemicals to infants.
Dec 09, 2025
Infants born to mothers who drank water from wells downstream of sites contaminated by so-called "forever chemicals" in New Hampshire suffered nearly three times the baseline death rate, more premature births, and lower birth weights, a study published Monday revealed.
Researchers at the University of Arizona tracked 11,539 births occurring within 3.1 miles of sites in the New England state known to be contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)—commonly called forever chemicals because they do not biodegrade and accumulate in the human body. They found a 191% increase in first-year deaths among infants born to "mothers receiving water that had flowed beneath a PFAS-contaminated site, as opposed to comparable mothers receiving water that had flowed toward a PFAS-contaminated site."
Mothers in the study zone also experienced a 20% increase in preterm births and a 43% higher incidence of low birth weight. Out of every 100,000 births, this equates to 611 additional deaths by age 1, as well as 2,639 extra underweight births and 1,475 additional preterm births.
Extrapolating to the 48 contiguous US states and the District of Columbia, the study's authors also found that "PFAS contamination imposes annual social costs of approximately $8 billion."
"These health costs are substantially larger than current outside estimates of the cost of removing PFAS from the public water supply," the publication states.
As study authors Derek Lemoine, Ashley Langer, and Bo Guo noted:
PFAS from contaminated sites slowly migrate down through soil into groundwater, where they move downstream with the groundwater’s flow. This created a simple but powerful contrast: Pregnant women whose homes received water from wells that were downstream, in groundwater terms, from the PFAS source were likely to have been exposed to PFAS from the contaminated site, but those who received water from wells that were upstream of those sites should not have been exposed.
Previous research has shown the link between PFAS exposure and reduced birth weight, as well as changes in fetal and newborn metabolism.
Forever chemicals are used in a broad range of products, from nonstick cookware to waterproof clothing and firefighting foam. Bills to limit PFAS have died in Congress under intense lobbying from the chemical industry, which has long known—and tried to conceal—the health and environmental dangers of forever chemicals.
More than 95% of people in the United States have PFAS in their blood, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Around 172 million Americans are believed to consume PFAS in their drinking water.
Forever chemicals have been linked to cancers of the kidneys and testicles, low infant weight, suppressed immune function, and other adverse health effects.
Responding to the new research, Duke University associate research professor in environmental sciences Kate Hoffman told the Washington Post that the study "provides rare causal evidence" and "not just a correlation" of the dangers posed by forever chemicals to infants.
While experts say the study demonstrates the importance of more robust federal regulation of PFAS, the Trump administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is seeking to lift current limits that protect drinking water from four types of forever chemicals.
“This is a betrayal of public health at the highest level," Environmental Working Group president Ken Cook said earlier this year in response to the Trump administration's efforts to roll back PFAS protections. "The EPA is caving to chemical industry lobbyists and pressure by the water utilities, and in doing so, it’s sentencing millions of Americans to drink contaminated water for years to come.”
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Trump's MAHA Report Reads Like a Big Ag Wish List
Making Americans healthy will require confronting the very corporate polluters who got us in this mess—not capitulating to more of their demands.
Sep 13, 2025
US President Donald Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” ploy is more sinister than we have been led to believe. More than disingenuous lip service to a legitimately concerned—and powerful—voting bloc, Trump’s MAHA is a dangerous smokescreen designed to consolidate power with the corporations responsible for harming us all. The release of the White House MAHA Commission strategy report this week put this on full display.
The report, written by a commission chaired by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is designed to convey the Trump administration’s priorities on food and childhood chronic disease. In truth, its deregulatory proposals read like an agriculture industry wish list—Big Ag corporations and trade groups were among the few voices of support.
Making Americans healthy will require confronting the very corporate polluters who got us in this mess—not capitulating to more of their demands. Trump is doing just the opposite, letting some of the nation’s biggest corporations off the hook: pesticide manufacturers, livestock producers, and big chemical companies.
The MAHA Commission report is most notable for what it lacks, including any recommendations to regulate toxic pesticides. An abundance of research links these ubiquitous agricultural chemicals to everything from cancers and Parkinson’s disease, to birth defects and developmental disorders.
In May, Kennedy’s team identified concerns about children’s exposure to pesticides. The backlash from food and farm industry groups was swift. The administration consequently hosted a parade of industry groups including CropLife America, Walmart, and Coca-Cola. In fact, Kennedy testified in a recent Senate hearing that he had entertained 140 farm interest groups since May.
In keeping with White House promises to industry lobbyists, the MAHA strategy report lacks any mention of concern for pesticide exposure, parrots pesticide industry talking points, and pulls punches on pesticide regulation. It even promotes the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) pesticide review process as robust and sufficient, which couldn’t be further from the truth. This review process has routinely been proven vulnerable to corporate influence.
This report is yet another step in Trump’s dangerous deregulatory agenda that will make America very, very sick.
This unwillingness to tackle toxic pesticides goes directly against the demands of voters and Kennedy’s own promises: Fully 71% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans support increasing restrictions on the use of pesticides in agriculture.
Meanwhile, Trump’s congressional allies are plotting with pesticide corporations to hamper EPA's ability to better regulate these toxic chemicals and shield pesticide manufacturers from health related lawsuits.
Food & Water Watch research catalogues the multimillion dollar push to pass Cancer Gag Acts in statehouses and Congress. Bayer has spent over $11 billion settling more than 100,000 cancer lawsuits related to its Roundup pesticide, whose key ingredient glyphosate the World Health Organization defines as a probable carcinogen. The federal Cancer Gag Act, expected to be reintroduced this fall as the “Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act,” is reportedly a House Farm Bill priority; House Republicans included related language in a July appropriations vote to prevent EPA from improving pesticide warning labels.
In another capitulation to industry, the MAHA strategy report also fails to address factory farms’ public health impacts. America has become a factory farming nation, with these industrial animal warehouses pockmarking rural communities from coast to coast. These facilities are often sited right next to homes and schools, releasing a cocktail of dangerous air pollution, including particulate matter, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide. These pollutants are linked to asthma and respiratory disease that gravely impact children’s health.
HHS agencies like the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) have the authority to study this pollution and recommend enforceable exposure limits for hazardous air emissions. This would help force factory farms to clean up their act and protect communities from dangerous health impacts. Any report serious about improving children's health must embrace these reforms.
Factory farms are also known drinking water polluters. Food & Water Watch analysis finds that factory farms produce a whopping 941 billion pounds of untreated waste annually. Much of it finds its way into the water we drink, carrying pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, E. coli bacteria, nitrates, and more into drinking water. These pollutants are linked to everything from cancers to antibiotic resistance. Faced with industry pressure, the MAHA report recommends weakening EPA’s already lax regulation of factory farm waste. Congressional Republicans have also introduced dangerous legislation to further deregulate the sector.
In yet another giveaway, the MAHA strategy report fails to adequately address the crisis that Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) contamination is wreaking on our health. These lab-made “forever chemicals,” found in drinking water nationwide, are linked to a large range of health problems including various cancers, altered hormone levels, decreased birth weights, digestive inflammation, and reduced vaccine response.
A full 97% of US residents have PFAS in their blood. Even still, the report makes only a passing mention of this rampant health concern, while simultaneously disregarding the Trump administration’s plan to gut recently-established common-sense PFAS drinking water safety rules. Food & Water Watch research tracks the tens of millions of dollars chemical corporations have spent on a campaign to conceal the health concerns of these forever chemicals—a concealment in which it appears the MAHA Commission is complicit.
The MAHA strategy report is, at best, a reckless industry giveaway. But a close reading belies the truth: This report is yet another step in Trump’s dangerous deregulatory agenda that will make America very, very sick. Trump’s budget cuts, which have gutted food safety oversight and closed food safety labs, stand in stark contrast to the few report takeaways where we agree. Take food chemicals and ultra processed foods for example.
Food & Water Watch has repeatedly called for overhaul of the federal Generally Recognized as Safe Loophole (GRAS) loophole—this report is right to endorse that reform. For years, food companies have self policed which chemicals make it into the food we eat, through this Food and Drug Administration (FDA) loophole. Today, hundreds if not thousands of chemicals are in our food because of this lack of oversight.
Food chemicals like titanium dioxide, potassium bromate, certain food dyes, and meat curing agents are part of a long list of chemicals that advocacy groups have been watching for years enter our food system. Critically, many of these chemicals are banned in other countries, yet still exist today on America’s grocery shelves.
It’s hard to believe Trump is serious about GRAS reform, when he’s busy gutting the very agency that would carry it out. His elimination of 3,500 FDA staff will leave the agency hamstrung, unable to implement even the few positive aspects of the MAHA strategy report.
Ultimately, the White House’s MAHA strategy will only deepen America’s industrial agriculture-driven health crisis. Any administration serious about public health must strictly regulate the corporations putting our food and water supplies at risk. Instead, Trump appears poised to do the very opposite.
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Trump EPA Seeks to Reverse Rules Protecting Drinking Water From Carcinogenic 'Forever Chemicals'
One environmental attorney said that the EPA proposal "prioritizes chemical industry profits and utility companies' bottom line over the health of children and families across the country."
Sep 12, 2025
Public health and environment defenders on Friday condemned the Trump administration's announcement that it will no longer uphold Environmental Protection Agency rules that protect people from unsafe levels of so-called "forever chemicals" in the nation's drinking water.
In addition to no longer defending rules meant to protect people from dangerous quantities of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)—called forever chemicals because they do not biodegrade and accumulate in the human body—the EPA is asking a federal court to toss out current limits that protect drinking water from four types of PFAS: PFNA, PFHxS, GenX, and PFBS.
The EPA first announced its intent to roll back limits on the four chemicals in May, while vowing to retain maximum limits for two other types of PFAS. The agency said the move is meant to “provide regulatory flexibility and holistically address these contaminants in drinking water.”
However, critics accuse the EPA and Administrator Lee Zeldin—a former Republican congressman from New York with an abysmal 14% lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters—of trying to circumvent the Safe Drinking Water Act's robust anti-backsliding provision, which bars the EPA from rolling back any established drinking water standard.
"In essence, EPA is asking the court to do what EPA itself is not allowed to do," Earthjustice said in a statement.
"Administrator Zeldin promised to protect the American people from PFAS-contaminated drinking water, but he’s doing the opposite,” Earthjustice attorney Katherine O'Brien alleged. “Zeldin’s plan to delay and roll back the first national limits on these forever chemicals prioritizes chemical industry profits and utility companies’ bottom line over the health of children and families across the country."
Jared Thompson, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said that "the EPA’s request to jettison rules intended to keep drinking water safe from toxic PFAS forever chemicals is an attempted end run around the protections that Congress placed in the Safe Drinking Water Act."
"It is also alarming, given what we know about the health harms caused by exposure to these chemicals," Thompson added. "No one wants to drink PFAS. We will continue to defend these commonsense, lawfully enacted standards in court."
PFAS have myriad uses, from nonstick cookware to waterproof clothing to firefighting foam. Increasing use of forever chemicals has resulted in the detection of PFAS in the blood of nearly every person in the United States and around the world.
Approximately half of the U.S. population is drinking PFAS-contaminated water, “including as many as 105 million whose water violates the new standards,” according to the NRDC, which added that “the EPA has known for decades that PFAS endangers human health, including kidney and testicular cancer, liver damage, and harm to the nervous and reproductive systems.”
Betsy Southerland, a former director of the Office of Science and Technology in the EPA's Office of Water, said in a statement Friday:
The impact of these chemicals is clear. We know that this is significant for pregnant women who are drinking water contaminated with PFAS, because it can cause low birth weight in children. We know children have developmental effects from being exposed to it. We know there’s an increased incidence of cardiovascular disease and cancer with these chemicals.
Two of the four chemicals targeted in this motion are the ones that we expect to be the most prevalent, and only increasing contamination in the future. With this rollback, those standards would be gone.
Responding to Thursday's developments, Environmental Advocates NY director of clean water Rob Hayes said that "the EPA’s announcement is a big win for corporate polluters and an enormous loss for New York families."
"Administrator Zeldin wants to strip clean water protections away from millions of New Yorkers, leaving them at risk of exposure to toxic PFAS chemicals every time they turn on the tap," he added. "New Yorkers will pay the price of this disastrous plan through medical bills—and deaths—tied to kidney cancer, thyroid disease, and other harmful illnesses linked to PFAS."
While Trump administration officials including Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have claimed they want to "make America healthy again" by ending PFAS use, the EPA is apparently moving in the opposite direction. Between April and June of this year, the agency sought approval of four new pesticides considered PFAS under a definition backed by experts.
“What we’re seeing right now is the new generation of pesticides, and it’s genuinely frightening,” Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Civil Eats earlier this week. “At a time when most industries are transitioning away from PFAS, the pesticide industry is doubling down. They’re firmly in the business of selling PFAS.”
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Progressives Blast MAHA Report That 'Echoes the Pesticide Industry's Talking Points'
One critic called the report "a slap in the face to the millions of Americans, from health-conscious moms to environmental advocates to farmers, who have been calling for meaningful action on pesticides."
Sep 09, 2025
Health and environmental advocates are hammering a new report issued Tuesday by the Trump administration's Make America Health Again Commission for papering over dangers posed by pesticides and replicating the positions of powerful corporate interests.
According to StatNews, the MAHA report takes a "cautious line" on pesticides, and even includes a section recommending that the Environmental Protection Agency work "with food and agricultural stakeholders... to ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in [the Environmental Protection Agency's] pesticide robust review procedures."
As StatNews noted, this section in particular drew the ire of organic food advocate Elizabeth Kucinich—the spouse of Dennis Kucinich, who served as presidential campaign manager for Trump Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who said that it "reads like it was written by Bayer and Monsanto."
Zen Honeycutt, founder of the pro-MAHA group Moms Across America, similarly told StatNews that "we are deeply disappointed that the committee allowed the chemical companies to influence the report," even as she praised other parts of it.
Public interest advocacy groups, meanwhile, slammed the MAHA report, which they called wholly deferential to major industries.
"The MAHA Commission report is a gift to Big Ag," said Food & Water Watch senior policy analyst Rebecca Wolf. "Its deregulatory proposals read like an industry wish list. The truth is, industrial agriculture is making us sick. Making America healthy again will require confronting Big Ag corporations head on—instead, the Trump administration has capitulated."
Wolf added that the MAHA report lacks "any real action on toxic pesticides linked to rising cancer rates nationwide" and called it "shameful but not surprising" that the report barely mentioned so-called "forever chemicals" contaminating drinking water "while disregarding how elsewhere in the administration common-sense water safety rules are being weakened and canceled."
Sarah Starman, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, was even more scathing in her assessment of the report, which she called "a slap in the face to the millions of Americans, from health-conscious moms to environmental advocates to farmers, who have been calling for meaningful action on pesticides."
Like other critics, Starman heaped particular scorn upon the report's section on pesticides.
"Laughably, the report calls the EPA's lax, flawed, and notoriously industry-friendly pesticide regulation process 'robust,'" she said. "This, in spite of the fact that EPA currently allows more than 1 billion pounds of pesticide use on US crops each year, including the use of 85 pesticides that are banned in other countries because of the serious risks they pose to human health and the environment."
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) said that the MAHA report offered "a few crumbs" to health advocates, but was mostly filled with "hollow rhetoric."
George Kimbrell, legal director and co-executive director of CFS, also called out the report's claims about the EPA having a "robust" procedure for approving pesticides.
"There is nothing 'robust' about EPA's regulation of pesticides," he said. "In reality it is the antithesis of robust: it is an oversight system filled with data holes and regulation loopholes, lacking in public transparency, which has instead required decades of dogged public interest litigation to get EPA to do its most basic duties."
Environmental Working Group co-founder and president Ken Cook said that the report made a mockery of Kennedy's past promises to use his power to take on powerful industries.
"It looks like pesticide industry lobbyists steamrolled the MAHA Commission's agenda," he commented. "Secretary Kennedy and President Trump cynically convinced millions they'd protect children from harmful farm chemicals—promises now exposed as hollow."
Cook also took aim at the leaders of the MAHA movement, whom he described as "grifters exploiting the hopes and fears of health-conscious Americans in their quest for power jobs in Washington."
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How Forever Chemicals 'Poisoned the World'
A new book tells the history of how U.S. corporations sold the country on toxic chemicals, while lying about the harm they posed.
Jul 27, 2025
Every child is born pre-polluted—polluted with dangerous, human-made chemicals.
So writes Mariah Blake in the preface to her important book, They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals. The United States is the place where she writes that every child is born pre-polluted, but I think merely because she's writing about the United States, not because it isn't also true of everywhere else on Earth. In fact, Blake quotes Rachel Carson as having written in 1962 that every human everywhere is subjected to dangerous chemicals from the moment of conception.
But U.S. corporations—chiefly Dupont and 3M—are the source of the problem. Well, them and the U.S. government or lack thereof. Forever chemicals, like standing armies, carpet bombings, nuclear weapons, income taxes, and so many of the things we hold dear, come from World War II, upon the end of which, as Blake notes, poison gases became pesticides, explosives became fertilizers, and military plastics became consumer goods. It's just possible that the respectable consumerism kicked off in the 1950s was a lot more reckless and damaging than any 1960s counterculture.
The origins of plastics—and of forever chemicals—goes back to research by DuPont prior to and during WWII. And the government's coverup of the dangers was part of the Manhattan Project—as was the public-relations campaign around the benefits of fluoride. The original sites that proximity to which could put cancer-causing forever chemicals into your body were Manhattan Project sites, and the Atomic Energy Commission covered up the dangers at the time, as did corporate profiteers, which have run denial and misinformation campaigns ever since. Before the first no-stick frying pan landed on the first shelf of the first U.S. store, Dupont was strategizing to minimize its financial risk for the harm and suffering expected to result. The tobacco and fossil fuel liars learned from the plastics liars, but were not as good at it.
I applaud Mariah Blake for telling moving, personal stories, and framing them in the broadest context.
Two big players drove the demand for fluorochemicals in the 1960s and 70s, as the dangers became more widely known, Blake writes. One was the U.S. Navy, which worked with 3M to develop PFOA-containing fire-fighting foam that Blake writes would be deployed at military bases across the country. (More accurate would be across the world.) The other was a former DuPont engineer named Bill Gore who had worked on military uses of Teflon but would go on to create Gore-Tex.
Blake's book does a tremendous job shaped around the familiar outline of interspersing particular personal stories with broader history. Her primary focus is on individuals in Hoosick Falls, New York, who become victims and activists, though stories from Parkersburg, West Virginia (perhaps known from the film Dark Waters) and North Bennington, Vermont, and elsewhere are also included. The corporate poisoners in Hoosick include Honeywell, which some readers will be aware is a major weapons maker. These stories are crushingly tragic with far too much detail to be statistics. But the statistics are also in the book. In 2016, over 5 million people in 19 U.S. states and several U.S. territories were informed their drinking water had unsafe levels of chemicals. I can hardly begin to imagine reading each of their stories, stories of death, suffering, birth defects, mothers giving birth in U.S. hospitals—like mothers near U.S. bases in Iraq—expecting birth defects; stories of choices being made between job security and challenging the poisoning of water by corporations that had known what would happen before they did it and had done it anyway.
Also chronicled here is the history of military and corporate control of environmental regulation, if it even merited that name prior to the sprees of deregulation indulged in since the era of the Teflon President Ronald Reagan (may his nickname evolve to mean deadly poisoner rather than impunity). Blake takes the history back to my neighbor enslaver Thomas Jefferson who gave DuPont government contracts for gunpowder long before Dupont's WWI merchandising of death, or (not mentioned in the book) its funding of fascist groups in the U.S., or its investment in both sides of WWII including GM's production of Nazi trucks and IG Farben's production of poison gas for concentration camps. The "regulation" history includes the Dupont-led establishment of the principle that all new chemicals are safe until proven otherwise. This, Blake notes, is why the vast majority of over 80,000 chemicals circulating in the United States (and presumably indifferent to borders) have never been tested for safety by the U.S. government.
Forever chemicals come from ground water, smokestacks, landfills, wastewater treatment plants, sewage sludge spread on farmland, firefighting foam, poisoned fish eaten by humans, and all variety of consumer goods. The particular ones that are subject to countless lawsuits are being replaced by new ones, less known and possibly more dangerous, but legal by virtue of not having been made illegal. They saturate the world before anyone begins studying them. Congress changed the absurd legal practice of approving all new chemicals in 2016, just in time for Trump 1.0 to illegally change it back.
I applaud Mariah Blake for telling moving, personal stories, and framing them in the broadest context. I quibble with a single sentence in the book, the one claiming that the bombing of Nagasaki "ended the war" which is a falsehood marketed by some of the very same people who told the world forever chemicals were good for us.
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House GOP Wants to Stop a Ban That Would Keep Toxic 'Forever Chemicals' Off Food Crops
"Across the country, farms have had to be condemned and livestock slaughtered due to PFAS pollution from fertilizers," said a lawyer at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
Jul 15, 2025
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are pushing to block action that would protect farms from toxic "forever chemicals" found in fertilizers made from sewage sludge.
The provision, introduced as part of a government spending bill unveiled Monday, would bar the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from enforcing the findings from a January risk assessment, which found that the sludge contains dangerous amounts of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
According to the environmental advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the act could cause agricultural losses and pose serious risks to public health.
For decades, the federal government encouraged farmers to spread municipal sewage onto their farmland, as it was a good source of nutrients and a preferable alternative to putting the sludge in landfills.
Nearly 20% of U.S. agricultural land is estimated to use this sludge, commonly known as "biosolids," in fertilizer, and 70 million acres of farmland may be contaminated.
These biosolids contain large amounts of PFAS, which are absorbed through the roots of plants and contaminate plant and animal products that end up on store shelves.
These chemicals are known to accumulate in the body for years without degrading and cause increased rates of cancer, decreased fertility, and developmental delays in children.
The EPA's January study found that the risks associated with PFAS in these sewage sludge-based fertilizers "exceed EPA's acceptable thresholds, sometimes by several orders of magnitude." Even very small quantities of these chemicals, it found, could pose major risks.
The GOP bill, however, forbids the EPA from using any funding to "finalize, implement, administer, or enforce" that risk assessment.
"Preventing EPA from protecting public health and our food supply from toxic contamination epitomizes special interest politics at their worst," said PEER science policy director Kyla Bennett, a scientist and attorney formerly with the EPA. "If finalized, this ban will leave ill-equipped state agricultural agencies to deal with a rapidly spreading chemical disaster."
Republicans have faced pressure from chemical manufacturing groups to kill PFAS regulations. In 2023, a report from Food & Water Watch found that eight major companies, including Dow and DuPont, spent a combined $55.7 million to lobby against bills to rein in PFAS between 2019 and 2022. The American Chemistry Council, the industry's lobbying arm, spent over $58.7 million during that same period.
The rule banning action on PFAS is part of a broader effort by Republicans to gut environmental regulations. The bill released Monday slashes EPA spending by over $2 billion, nearly 25%.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has also weakened standards on PFAS in drinking water, which were adopted during the Biden administration.
"Across the country, farms have had to be condemned and livestock slaughtered due to PFAS pollution from fertilizers," said PEER staff counsel Laura Dumais, who filed a lawsuit against the EPA last year for its slow rollout of PFAS regulations. "Further delay in preventing more of these needless tragedies would be unconscionable."
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As Federal Leaders Are Failing on PFAS, States Must Step up—Here’s How
I encourage leaders to look to Maine as a model to follow: Maine has emerged as a national leader in addressing PFAS contamination through comprehensive state-level initiatives that demonstrate the urgent need for federal action.
May 31, 2025
The Environmental Protection Agency is rolling back critical protections that ensure safe drinking water. These regulations help ensure that our water is free of PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” an especially hazardous form of industrial chemicals that linger in the environment indefinitely.
PFAS are damaging to human health at even the lowest doses. Exposure to PFAS can contribute to serious illnesses including kidney cancer, liver disease, thyroid disorders, or autoimmune disorders. There are no current treatments to remove PFAS from the body.
Despite the evidence of these dire health risks, the administration is shirking their responsibility to protect people across the country from PFAS exposure.
At the end of the day, we should all be able to agree that the health and safety of our communities starts with clean water and safe food, and make this work a priority.
Now, it is more urgent than ever for state and local leaders to step up, fill this gap, and protect their communities from PFAS exposure. It’s a massive undertaking, but fortunately, there is a clear path forward.
Advocates and experts across the country have already begun to chart the way—because they’ve had to. Even though prior PFAS regulations were important, they’ve never been enough to fully protect our water, our land, or our bodies from pollution.
I encourage leaders to look to Maine as a model to follow: Maine has emerged as a national leader in addressing PFAS contamination through comprehensive state-level initiatives that demonstrate the urgent need for federal action. We're the first state to require manufacturers to report intentionally added forever chemicals in products. Perhaps most significantly, the state is working toward the elimination of PFAS from consumer products, addressing the problem at its source rather than merely managing its consequences. Maine's regulatory approach has implemented some of the nation's most protective drinking water standards for PFAS compounds, recognizing that even minute concentrations pose serious health risks.
My own work in Maine has focused on advancing programs to monitor, test, and limit PFAS in our water and food supply. Over the years, we’ve realized that establishing strong drinking water standards is just the beginning of ridding our communities of PFAS. Now, we’re tackling contamination in the food supply by working with farmers to test their land and crops and make the technical changes necessary to produce safe crops and livestock.
Our state's PFAS Advisory Fund provides critical support to farmers whose agricultural operations have been devastated by PFAS contamination, primarily through the historical application of contaminated biosolids to farmland. Complementing this effort, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) established their PFAS Emergency Relief Fund to offer direct assistance to organic producers facing immediate financial hardship from crop losses and farm closures due to contamination.
Maine has also taken the bold step of banning the land application of sludge, eliminating a primary pathway for PFAS contamination of agricultural soils.
These comprehensive regulations serve multiple critical purposes: protecting the health of farmers who work the land and face direct exposure to contaminated soils, safeguarding consumers with safe food, and preserving our most treasured and irreplaceable resources—soil and water.
I urge more local leaders to champion these initiatives with your own representatives. Every town and state has a unique political landscape, and some of these programs might not advance easily. We need new innovation and lots of legwork to develop and advance the right solutions for everyone. But at the end of the day, we should all be able to agree that the health and safety of our communities starts with clean water and safe food, and make this work a priority.
Where the federal government won’t protect us, we will take action ourselves—by raising awareness, pushing for strong state-level responses, and stopping PFAS contamination before it causes further harm.
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Trump EPA Guts Rules Against Toxic Forever Chemicals in Drinking Water
"Once again, the Trump administration has demonstrated that its priority is bending to corporate interests, not protecting the safety and well-being of everyday people," said one critic.
May 14, 2025
Bowing to industry pressure, the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to roll back limits on so-called "forever chemicals" in drinking water—a move that critics said belies President Donald Trump's dubious pledge to "ensure that America has among the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet."
In a misleading announcement, the EPA said Wednesday that it will "keep maximum contaminant levels" (MCLs) for two per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)—PFOA and PFOS—as part of an effort to "provide regulatory flexibility and holistically address these contaminants in drinking water."
However, the EPA plans to scrap MCLs for four other forever chemicals: PFNA, PFHxS, GenX, and PFBS.
"These four chemicals are the ones currently in use because industry developed them to replace PFOA and PFOS, so they are the chemicals most likely to increase contamination in the future," explained former senior EPA water official Betsy Southerland in a statement issued by the Environmental Protection Network on Wednesday.
"It is incredibly inefficient to regulate them years after the treatment has been installed only for PFOA and PFOS," Southerland added. "[EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin's announcement on PFAS drinking water standards ensures that America's children will be drinking PFAS for another decade while he slows drinking water and wastewater PFAS treatment for years."
The EPA just announced its decision on PFAS, toxic forever chemicals, that reverses course on most of a crucial public health rule from just last year. We need more action, not less, to protect Americans from PFAS.
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— NRDC (@nrdc.org) May 14, 2025 at 7:34 AM
The EPA also pushed back the deadline for compliance with a Biden administration rule finalized last year aimed at ensuring polluters pay forever chemical cleanup costs, from 2029 to 2031. Earlier this week, the EPA said it is delaying a key PFAS reporting rule by one year.
"This is a betrayal of public health at the highest level," Environmental Working Group president Ken Cook said in response to Wednesday's announcement. "You can't make America healthy while allowing toxic chemicals to flow freely from our taps. The EPA is caving to chemical industry lobbyists and pressure by the water utilities, and in doing so, it's sentencing millions of Americans to drink contaminated water for years to come."
"The cost of PFAS pollution will fall on ordinary people, who will pay in the form of polluted water and more sickness, more suffering, and more deaths from PFAS-related diseases," Cook added.
"Zeldin's announcement on PFAS drinking water standards ensures that America's children will be drinking PFAS for another decade."
Approximately half of the U.S. population is drinking PFAS-contaminated water, "including as many as 105 million whose water violates the new standards," according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which added that "the EPA has known for decades that PFAS endangers human health, including kidney and testicular cancer, liver damage, and harm to the nervous and reproductive systems."
Forever chemicals—so called because some of them take up to 1,000 years to break down in the environment—have myriad uses, from nonstick cookware to waterproof clothing to firefighting foam. Increasing use of forever chemicals has resulted in the detection of PFAS in the blood of nearly every person in the United States and around the world.
"The PFAS contamination crisis is much larger than just two chemicals, and there is increasing evidence that other PFAS chemicals that pollute water harm health," Cook said. "Eliminating all PFAS chemicals from drinking water is an urgent public health priority."
"If this administration is serious about making America healthier, it needs to prove it by stopping PFAS from contaminating our drinking water," he added.
NRDC senior strategic director of health Erik Olson said Wednesday that "with a stroke of the pen, the EPA is making a mockery of the Trump administration's promise to deliver clean water for Americans."
"With this action, the EPA is making clear that it's willing to ignore Americans who just want to turn on their kitchen taps and have clean, safe water," Olson asserted. "The EPA's plan to retain but delay standards for two legacy forever chemicals may offer modest consolation to some, but throwing out protections against four others will be devastating."
"The law is very clear that the EPA can't repeal or weaken the drinking water standard. This action is not only harmful, it's illegal," Olson stressed. The Safe Drinking Water Act contains an "anti-backsliding" provision prohibiting the EPA from repealing or weakening the standard.
"With a stroke of the pen, the EPA is making a mockery of the Trump administration's promise to deliver clean water for Americans."
Kelly Moser, senior attorney and leader of the Water Program at the Southern Environmental Law Center—which successfully sued the industrial chemicals giant Chemours to stop PFAS contamination in North Carolina—said Wednesday that "when this administration talks about deregulation, this is what they mean—allowing toxic chemicals in drinking water at the request of polluters."
"This action also undercuts Administrator Zeldin's acknowledgment of the severe health harms of PFAS; what people need are protections from pollution, not press releases feigning concern," Moser added.
Food & Water Watch water program director Mary Grant said Wednesday that "today's decision is a shameful and dangerous capitulation to industry pressure that will allow continued contamination of our drinking water with toxic PFAS."
"Once again, the Trump administration has demonstrated that its priority is bending to corporate interests, not protecting the safety and well-being of everyday people," Grant continued. "Nothing is safe from Trump's greed-driven agenda—not even our drinking water."
"This will cost lives," she warned.
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