Researching air quality is key to improving kids’ health, according to a new strategy from the Make America Healthy Again Commission unveiled Tuesday by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
There’s just one problem: EPA, under Zeldin’s leadership, has shuttered the preeminent laboratory in the country studying air pollution’s impact on people. What’s more, it has proposed drastic cuts to the agency’s research staff and moved to rewrite regulations to allow more emissions.
“There will be more air pollution to study, and fewer funds and staff with which to do it,” said Laura Kate Bender, vice president of nationwide advocacy and public policy at the American Lung Association.
The so-called MAHA strategy released Tuesday includes 128 recommendations for improving heath and addressing chronic diseases. It specifically says EPA and the National Institutes of Health “will study air quality impacts on children’s health and utilize existing research programs to improve data collection and analysis.”
Both Kennedy and Zeldin spoke Tuesday about using “gold standard science” to fulfill the report’s objectives, with Zeldin saying that includes “the work of our chemicals, air and water programs.”
EPA’s shuttering of its Human Research Facility in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, this summer undermines that promise, health experts say.
“It was one of the only places in the country where you could put humans in a chamber and measure their reaction to ozone,” Bender said. “Those studies have long informed our understanding of how much of these pollutants are safe to breathe.”
The laboratory was uniquely equipped with nine sealed chambers where volunteers agreed to be exposed to air pollution at the same levels as different major cities around the world. EPA researchers monitored the volunteers’ vital signs and took samples of their blood, allowing them to uncover key information about how different air pollutants, like ozone, vehicle exhaust and wildfire smoke, impact human health.
Before the laboratory’s founding in the 1990s, for example, epidemiologists were able to broadly link increased deaths to high levels of particulate matter in the air. The Human Research Facility’s work helped connect specific pollutants to specific health effects, linking exposure to particulate matter pollution to increased heart rates of people with preexisting cardiac conditions.
The laboratory’s research has helped inform air quality alerts for the public and underpinned major federal air regulations, including those limiting smog-forming emissions.
“We had this state-of-the-art facility, and they canceled the lease,” said Betsy Southerland, who worked at EPA’s Office of Science and Technology for 30 years and now volunteers for the Environmental Protection Network. “Zeldin is acting like he is a full partner in making America healthy, and he shut it down.”
EPA has stymied other air quality research, too. This summer, the agency moved to dissolve its Office of Research and Development, firing a large proportion of its staff, and moving others to a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions within its Office of the Administrator.
HHS referred questions about EPA’s research programs to EPA. Asked about how EPA could fulfill the MAHA report’s directives without those programs, EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch said, “We are confident EPA has the resources needed to accomplish the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment and fulfill all statutory obligations.”
The new applied science and environmental solutions office, she said, “will align research and put science at the forefront of the agency’s rulemakings.”
At a press conference announcing the report Tuesday, Zeldin said, “Protecting human health and the environment while powering America’s comeback isn’t just about serving Americans today, it’s about ensuring future generations inherit clean air, water, and the foundation for healthy lives.”
But EPA under Zeldin has also moved to allow more pollution from burning fossil fuels, proposing to tear up regulations that control emissions of mercury, smog-forming ozone and fine particulate matter.
A carbon rule finalized two years ago would have prevented 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital and emergency room visits, 1,900 new asthma diagnoses, and 360,000 asthma attacks in 2035 by limiting pollution of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, as well as fine particulate pollution and smog-forming nitrogen oxides, EPA estimated.
EPA announced it would rescind that regulation in March, along with 11 other air pollution limits, including one limiting the amount of mercury that can be released into the air. If it remained in place, that regulation would have reduced emissions of the potent neurotoxin by more than 16 percent by 2028, according to an analysis by EPA scientists.
Phil Landrigan, an environmental epidemiologist and pediatrician who leads Boston College’s Global Public Health Program, noted the decades of research underpinning regulations limiting mercury emissions showing how the potent neurotoxin can increase asthma risk, heart disease, stroke and cause brain damage.
“All of that is well-established science, there is nothing new there, and yet the EPA is rolling back the rule,” he said. “And then Kennedy says the EPA and NIH are going to study air quality impacts, it’s like the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”
Air quality is just one environmental issue mentioned in the MAHA strategy. It similarly touts EPA research on the health effects of fluoride in drinking water and microplastics as new directives.
The report has already drawn criticism from environmental groups and even some in the “MAHA movement” for eschewing regulations of pesticides in favor of “[working] to ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in EPA’s pesticide robust review procedures.”
“It looks like pesticide industry lobbyists steamrolled the MAHA Commission’s agenda,” Cook said in a statement Tuesday.
Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney John Walke described the strategy’s call for more study of air quality as one that similarly sidesteps the need for more regulation.
“Air quality and its impact on health is one of the most researched and studied and reported phenomena across the world,” he said. “The MAHA strategy is detouring around EPA, and the MAHA movement should demand to know why.”
