Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the helm of the nation’s health agency this month with a promise to “Make America Healthy Again” by purging the Department of Health and Human Services of industry influence while reducing kids’ exposure to toxic chemicals.
But it’s a different story at EPA, the agency tasked with regulating environmental and industrial chemicals.
Political appointees who spent much of President Donald Trump’s first term rolling back regulations that prevent chemical exposure and other forms of pollution are back at the agency, in some cases bringing with them more ties to industry than they had the first time around.
The appointments highlight an underlying tension inherent in Trump’s partnership with Kennedy. While Trump has vowed that EPA will enact “fair and swift deregulatory decisions,” Kennedy, a former environmental attorney turned anti-vaccine advocate, staked much of his own presidential campaign on promises to root out corporate influence across the federal government and reduce chronic diseases, in part, by reducing chemicals exposure.
Now, Kennedy and EPA are partnered up on the “Make America Healthy Again Commission” created by an executive order earlier this month.
Chaired by Kennedy, the commission includes members from most federal agencies, including EPA, and is meant to reduce chronic disease rates through a number of means.
One of those is by studying “any potential contributing causes” to childhood chronic diseases, including “corporate influence or cronyism.” The order also tells the commission to assess the “threat potential” of “certain chemicals and certain other exposure pose to children with respect to chronic inflammation or other established mechanisms of disease.”
Tasking EPA with rooting out corporate influence is ironic, says the Center for Biological Diversity’s Government Affairs Director Brett Hartl, who notes that returning appointees to the agency “were incredibly aggressive when it came to weakening protections for pesticides.”
“How do they deal with the fact that EPA is now part of this commission, and that Trump is saying we need to make our food the healthiest food in the world?” he asked. “It’s very unclear.”
Returning alumni
Take for example Nancy Beck.
During the last Trump administration, she oversaw EPA’s chemical policy. In that role, she directed EPA civil servants to downplay ecological damage caused by pesticides and weedkillers like atrazine. She later moved to the Trump White House and pressured EPA to write loopholes into “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, regulations.
Atrazine and many PFAS are endocrine-disrupting chemicals that harm hormone development that Kennedy has specifically highlighted as hurting Americans’ health, even posting on the social media site X during his own presidential campaign that getting PFAS out of the environment is “one of my top priorities.”
But Beck has been reappointed to EPA as a senior adviser to the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.
Beck is not the only Trump alumna returning for round two.
Joining her in the chemicals office is Lynn Ann Dekleva, who was the associate deputy assistant administrator for new chemicals under the first Trump administration. Prior to joining EPA the first time, Dekleva had previously worked for PFAS manufacturer DuPont. She spent the Biden administration working for the American Chemistry Council.
EPA did not respond to questions about how it plans to achieve the mission of the commission, or who will represent the agency on the commission, given the number of deregulatory champions now stationed there. But spokesperson Molly Vaseliou wrote in a statement that the agency will “proudly do its part.”
“Through our oversight and regulations of chemicals, pesticides and more, our agency will play a critical role in achieving this mission,” Vaseliou wrote.
The reach of appointees who have advocated rolling back such regulations is extensive, and includes Trump’s pick to be second-in-command at EPA, David Fotouhi, who served at the agency as principal deputy general counsel during the last Trump administration. In the intervening years, he became a partner at Washington-area law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, representing large companies in the energy, car, airline and chemical industries, according to ethics disclosures.
As of Friday morning, Fotouhi was still listed as an attorney representing an alliance of car companies in support of groups challenging EPA’s ban of chrysotile asbestos, which causes an aggressive type of cancer called mesothelioma. He was also the counsel of record for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in its petition against the agency’s framework for evaluating existing toxic substances.
‘Drain the swamp’?
The returning appointees will be subject to fewer ethics rules aimed at limiting conflicts of interest than last time. At the start of his first term, Trump issued an executive order on “ethics commitments” barring political appointees from participating “in any particular matter” they had lobbied on during the previous two years. So far, the White House has issued no such recusal requirement for Trump’s current term. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields did not directly address a question about whether Trump plans to again require such recusals, only writing in an email that “all executive branch employees including appointees remain subject to the robust ethics obligations and restrictions in existing law.”
Ethics agreements show Fotouhi and one other appointee — Aaron Szabo — have agreed to recuse themselves from matters involving former clients for one year after their respective resignations, or until Fotouhi receives his last payment from the firm.
Szabo, Trump’s current nominee to lead EPA’s air office, was a senior counsel for the White House Council on Environmental Quality during Trump’s first term. In between Trump administrations, Szabo lobbied EPA on behalf of medical device manufacturers challenging proposed restrictions on releases of ethylene oxide, which is emitted by plants that sterilize medical equipment.
Joining Szabo in the air office as deputy assistant administrators are two other former lobbyists, both with oil industry ties. Alex Dominguez once worked for the American Petroleum Institute; Abbie Tardif was with Marathon Petroleum. Neither post requires Senate confirmation.
Steven Cook has returned to his role as deputy assistant administrator for the agency’s Office of Land and Emergency Management.
After Trump’s first term, he took a job as counsel for the law firm Bracewell, where he represented American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers in the ongoing lawsuit over the waste office’s rule designating two PFAS as hazardous substances under the federal Superfund law. He withdrew as an attorney on the case three days before Inauguration.
HHS did not respond to requests for comment. But Kennedy has acknowledged that he disagreed with federal actions taken during Trump’s first term.
Speaking at an event with Tucker Carlson in September, shortly after endorsing Trump’s reelection, Kennedy said he “absolutely” holds Trump “culpable” for federal programs that helped spur development of the coronavirus vaccine “and for a lot of other things I disagreed with in the first Trump administration,” including “coal lobbyists running EPA.”
“President Trump has said to me that we’re going to do something different this time,” Kennedy said.
Also in September, prior to being nominated to lead HHS, Kennedy said he envisioned his role in the upcoming Trump administration as being one to “unravel the capture of the agencies by corrupt influence.”
“In other words, to drain the swamp,” he said.
Reporters Sean Reilly and Kevin Bogardus contributed.
