Blowback from MAHA activists has prompted new scrutiny of smaller, less consequential decisions coming out of EPA’s chemical’s office, a reworking that has led to significant delays, multiple sources say.
The added reviews stem from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s push to quell criticism from a faction of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” grassroots base upset about pesticide approvals, chemical evaluations and personnel choices.
“Not only are they unable to figure out what to do about MAHA in a way that will feel meaningful to the MAHA people, they are also now failing at the basic, day-to-day processing of pesticide actions that aren’t even on MAHA’s radar in the first place, because they’re just so paralyzed by the whole thing,” said a chemical industry source. Sources have been granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal agency processes.
Zeldin is under political pressure to appease the MAHA base, which gathered thousands of signatures late last year on a petition asking President Donald Trump to remove the administrator over inconsistencies with the MAHA agenda.
“Before the petition, he really wasn’t very engaged with them at all,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “I think for a while there was kind of this hope that MAHA would just forget about pesticides and wander away. And I think that that’s proving not to be the case.”
MAHA political action groups, such as MAHA Action, have largely focused their energies on food and vaccine reforms and other issues directly under Kennedy’s control at the Health and Human Services Department.
But thought leaders within the growingly influential movement have increasingly been shifting their focuses to Zeldin, whose leads the agency in charge of reviewing and regulating MAHA-targeted pesticides and is a member of the White House’s interagency MAHA Commission.
Zeldin “wants to be sure that he’s being responsive to the Trump coalition,” said a chemical lobbyist. “But he came into the role with ideas of his own and an agenda of his own, and he’s pursuing that pretty relentlessly.”
MAHA is a movement rooted in skepticism over the revolving door between industry and federal agencies — so much so that the MAHA Commission’s first report, released last May, named corporate capture as one of the potential factors driving childhood chronic disease. Trump himself said the White House “will not be silenced or intimidated by the corporate lobbyists and special interests.”
But the four highest-ranking officials in the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention each previously worked for big chemical or agricultural trade groups: OCSPP Assistant Administrator Doug Troutman came from the American Cleaning Institute; principal deputy Nancy Beck and deputy Lynn Dekleva held jobs with the American Chemistry Council; and deputy Kyle Kunkler was a lobbyist for the American Soybean Association.
‘Zeldin’s on a short leash’
MAHA activists have called out the industry backgrounds among EPA officials.
As a result, agency officials are “terrified that they’ll get hammered by RFK Jr. That somehow there’ll be blowback and they’ll be told, ‘you need to change your focus to be more aligned with the MAHA agenda.’ That may just cloud their ability to figure out what direction to go in,” said a second chemical lobbyist.
“Zeldin’s on a short leash at times,” the chemical industry source said, and officials are on thin ice.
In a bid to fend off backlash, Zeldin’s office has started reviewing every decision out of OCSPP.
“He’s reviewing stuff that normally would not go anywhere near that level,” Burd said. “I think he, hopefully, is correctly recognizing that the industry lobbyists that are running that office are putting his neck out on the line.”
“They’re scared and worried about what’s gonna bite them, and they don’t know what it may be,” said a chemical industry consultant. “I think Zeldin and his team are just a little less sure of what’s controversial, what’s not, and what may upset MAHA or not. … So the easy thing, at least initially, is to send it all upstairs. It’s bureaucrat 101.”
But having the administrator’s office review every decision is bogging down the already-backlogged chemical and pesticide review processes that Zeldin and his top officials have pledged to expedite.
“It’s making industry crazy, for sure, and all they can do is lose their minds behind closed doors and get all worried about hurting these people’s feelings,” said the first chemical industry source. “These people are scared of their own shadow.”
CropLife America CEO Alexandra Dunn, who led the agency’s chemicals office during Trump’s first term, echoed concerns about delays in a recent op-ed arguing fast reviews are crucial to MAHA’s goals.
“Even after extensive human health and ecological reviews are completed and show no unreasonable risk, the agency is reluctant to finalize registration decisions,” Dunn wrote.
‘Serious trust issues’
Officials were already on thin ice.
“I think there’s some serious trust issues between the political leaders of the agency, because he’s [Zeldin] been screwed over by their judgment so many times,” the chemical industry source said, pointing to a snafu last June over asbestos.
Dekleva announced via court filings the agency would reconsider its rule banning the remaining asbestos uses in the U.S. Three weeks later, following numerous meetings between Zeldin and OCSPP and a slew of negative media coverage, Dekleva backtracked and said the agency would instead defend the rule.
“Zeldin was completely blindsided by that,” the chemical industry source said. “He seems like he has some appreciation for the political consequences of those sorts of actions.”
Dekleva rejected the premise that the reversal was a change in policy, rather because “the administrator didn’t want to wait three years,” she said during a press gaggle at a U.S. Chamber of Conference conference last fall, referencing the estimated time it would take to pull the rule and propose a new one.
EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch said Zeldin is “working closely with Secretaries Kennedy and Rollins and other partners,” adding “the Trump EPA is advancing the President’s Executive Order on Restoring Gold Standard Science, expanding research into chronic disease links, and delivering measurable results that families can see in their daily lives.”
Whether grassroots MAHA activists adopt Zeldin’s point of view remains to be seen.
“It’s going to be really hard to make MAHA folks happy,” said the second chemical lobbyist. “Zeldin’s trying to meet with them and maybe quiet the storm, but he’s in a bit of a bind … how do you get to a middle ground? They’re diametrically opposed views of the world.”
‘MAHA washing’
Zeldin’s PR efforts have not won over MAHA activists, either.
“It’s been disappointing to see that they’ve just started MAHA washing,” said Alexandra Muñoz, an independent toxicologist and MAHA activist. “Everything that they’re announcing is just clearly not a MAHA win.”
Those inside and outside the agency familiar with discussions say the agency repackaging its latest actions as “MAHA wins” is a PR strategy to appear closer to MAHA without substantially changing his pro-business agenda.
“It [MAHA] has not really changed their agenda,” a chemical lobbyist said. “In addition to just announcing what they’re doing, if it coincides with it, they’re not going to miss an opportunity to talk about how it’s a MAHA accomplishment.”
For example, EPA in November requested more data from paraquat’s manufacturer relating to the herbicide’s health risks first gleaned under the Biden administration.
This run-of-the-mill procedure typically wouldn’t get much attention from the agency’s top boss. But Zeldin said it was “more MAHA progress” in a post on X.
He championed a set of risk evaluations on phthalates — which concluded that the plastics chemicals don’t pose any unreasonable risks to consumers — as a “massive MAHA win.”
But the agency hasn’t budged when it comes to pesticides MAHA activists care most about — glyphosate, atrazine, dicamba, to name a few. In fact, the Trump administration has moved in the opposite direction.
“I think they thought we were going to be a lot easier to trick than we have been,” Muñoz said. “That we would just believe whatever they said if they wrapped it in the right language.”
The White House recently sided with chemical manufacturer Bayer in its appeal to the Supreme Court to reconsider a lower court’s decision over the company’s need to include a label on its herbicide Roundup warning consumers of cancer risks from its main ingredient, glyphosate.
EPA earlier this month announced it would reregister the cancer-linked weedkiller dicamba, despite MAHA opposition in response to a draft press release leaked to The Washington Post a week earlier.
Hirsch said, “EPA’s decisions are grounded in gold‑standard science. That remains the foundation of our work under the MAHA banner.”
Reach the reporter on Signal at eborst.64.
