Make America protect children again: EPA’s silence betrays the MAHA promise

More than a year ago, members of Environmental Protection Agency’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, on which I serve, were asked to help bring the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda to fruition.  

With a few important caveats, the first MAHA report laid out an argument most of us have been making for years — and who could argue with the desire to protect our children’s health? Despite that agreement, as of this writing, the Trump administration has failed to actualize this bipartisan mission.

The Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee is the one committee that advises the EPA on how to protect our children from environmental health threats. Under the current administration, however, the committee has not been reconvened since that August 2025 meeting. New members should have been named by March, but those of us who would normally resume work have heard nothing. Previously, the committee successfully provided advice on how to protect children from hazards like take-home pesticide exposures, climate change and plastics. Now, it is utterly silent. 

Late last month, more than 70 children’s environmental health leaders, experts and organizations, including former members of the committee, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin calling on him to fulfill the agency’s statutory obligations and scientific mandate by appointing “scientifically credible, varied, and balanced expert viewpoints so it is capable of continuing the important mission to protect children’s health.”........

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