On a Friday evening this July, the Trump administration announced it would lay off all of the health research scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. Hundreds of investigators who try to understand how toxic pollution affects the human body would be gone.

That wasn’t a surprise. The EPA — which had a founding mission to protect “the air we breathe and the water we drink,” as President Richard Nixon put it — has been busy dismantling policies that are in place to ensure environmental and public health.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that the agency is drafting a plan that would repeal its recognition of climate change as a threat to human health, potentially limiting the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has relaxed existing standards for mercury and lead pollution — two toxins that can lead to developmental problems in children. And the EPA has postponed its implementation of new Biden-era regulations that were supposed to reduce the amount of dangerous chemicals Americans are exposed to.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are attempting to grant widespread liability relief to pesticide companies and restrict EPA regulation of PFAS “forever chemicals” through provisions that have been tucked into the spending bills currently moving through Congress. (Democrats, for their part, have offered opposing legislation that would protect an individual’s right to sue over any harm from pesticides.)

This collective assault upon America’s environmental regulations targets not just the environment, but human health as well. Which means it sits oddly with the work of another Trump official whose office at the Department of Health and Human Safety is just a 15-minute walk from EPA headquarters: Robert F. Kennedy Jr, whose Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement seeks to, obviously, make Americans healthier.

But Kennedy hasn’t spoken up about these contradictions — and his supporters are beginning to notice.

In response to the pro-pesticide industry proposals in Congress, MAHA leaders wrote a letter to Kennedy and Zeldin voicing opposition to a bill that they believe “would ensure that Americans have no power to prevent pesticide exposure, and no path to justice after harm occurs.” In the letter, they also urged the EPA to ban two pesticides — atrazine and glyphosate — that have been linked to birth defects and liver and kidney problems.

What you’ll learn from this story:

• The Make America Healthy Again movement depends on not only improving the US food supply but eliminating environmental pollution.
• President Donald Trump’s EPA has taken actions to deregulate pesticides, microplastics, mercury and lead pollution, and more substances that the MAHA movement has identified as dangerous to human health.
• Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing pressure from leaders in the MAHA movement to reconcile the gap between their shared goals and Trump’s environmental agenda.

“These toxic substances are in our food, rain, air, and water, and most disturbingly, in our children’s bodies,” the MAHA letter says. “It is time to take a firm stand.”

Kennedy is no stranger to these issues: Earlier this year, the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again Commission report, which sought to document and explain the dramatic increase in chronic diseases like obesity among US children, identified both chemicals as health risks. Zeldin, however, has been working to deregulate both atrazine and glyphosate in........

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