Make America protect children again: EPA’s silence betrays the MAHA promise (by Jean-Marie Kauth)

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.” In that letter, we argue that the lapse of this important committee is inconsistent with the administration’s MAHA agenda.

As MAHA grows unhappier by the day, as promises are broken and ambitions go unfulfilled, a vacant Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee is yet another example of how this administration is abdicating its responsibility to protect our nation’s kids. 

Tragically, it is far too late for my own brilliant, beautiful child. Katherine died a slow, agonizing death at age eight from leukemia. We attribute Katherine’s cancer to unwitting exposure to the toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos. The first move of Trump’s first EPA was to do away with a ban on this chemical.

My beloved daughter’s story is not singular, but it is representative. So many parents have seen their children similarly sicken, and many others worry that what their children eat, drink, breathe or touch will result in ill health or even death. They are right to worry. 

The Public Health community seems increasingly receptive to joining together with MAHA on shared concerns. The first MAHA report correctly identifies that 40 percent of American children suffer from a chronic illness, and appropriately lays the blame on toxic products and pollution — along with corporate interference in our political processes. 

Like many MAHA moms, I have learned about the failings of our regulatory systems through personal experience. In deciphering links between illness and exposures to chlorpyrifos sprayed for mosquitoes, I unraveled a vast body of peer-reviewed literature linking most of the increase in chronic illnesses to widespread contamination with pesticides, PFAS, plastics and the more than 350,000 synthetic chemicals in production today. 

One theme that emerged as I interviewed families and experts for my new book, “Poisoning Our Children: How Petrochemicals Imperil Every Life on Earth,” is how parents are often shamed and blamed for their children’s illnesses.

Yet it is becoming nearly impossible to maintain health given the contaminated and degraded surroundings in which we are all immersed from conception onward. And our regulatory agencies have done precious little to prevent this. 

Many believe that the EPA must protect their children from these chemicals, but they do not realize how harmful industries have insidiously dismantled commonsense protections by infiltrating these institutions. Parents across the political spectrum are now seeing this with their own eyes, and they want our political representatives to do something about it. That is their job — to safeguard the nation’s children and support their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 

If we say we love our children, we should not be poisoning them. Most parents, regardless of political affiliation, are concerned about the same thing: threats to their children’s health and future. Most parents love their children deeply and are ready to challenge institutions and change systems to protect them. 

If the EPA under the current administration will not act to protect children, parents should vote to oust the treacherous perpetrators of widespread poisoning from their positions of power. 

Jean-Marie Kauth, Ph.D., MPH, is a professor at Benedictine University and serves on the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee to the Environmental Protection Agency. Her new book, “Poisoning Our Children,” is due out from Johns Hopkins University Press in February 2027.  Tags children's health Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee Environmental Protection Agency EPA maha Make America Healthy Again

What happened to MAHA?