WASHINGTON – The health of millions of Americans will suffer, thanks to President Donald Trump’s pursuit of the most aggressive assault on environmental and health safeguards in modern history, a peer-reviewed analysis by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine finds.
The review, published in one of the nation’s leading medical journals on March 25, highlights the reasons why actions by Trump and the Republicans are making Americans sicker, not healthier.
These actions directly contradict the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement. The movement, created by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., helped return Trump to office.
MAHA proponents justifiably want to see stronger protections for cleaner air and water, and limits on harmful chemicals like toxic agricultural pesticides.
Instead, the Trump administration is overturning an almost countless number of air, climate, water and other regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies.
The reversals affect utilities, vehicles and more – and free entire industries to pollute without consequence.
“The effect of ongoing environmental rollbacks could be immense and long-lasting – extending over years and even generations,” according to the report. It calls for health professionals to bring attention to “this silent but deadly assault on Americans’ health.”
The senior author of the paper is Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and public health physician who directs the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College.
He said the “impacts of these rollbacks will fall most heavily on the most vulnerable among us – including infants – resulting in brain injury, neurodevelopmental disorders, increased preterm births, and elevated lifelong risk of chronic disease.”
Undoing critical protections
Landrigan and a team of other noted public health experts who contributed to the paper say the rollbacks will increase premature deaths and exacerbate cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.
They also warn the reversals will expose vulnerable populations, including children and underserved communities, to neurotoxic and carcinogenic chemicals such as mercury, arsenic and benzene.
The article is one of the most, if not the most, sweeping looks so far at the unprecedented razing of public safeguards in the first 14 months of the second Trump administration.
Some key findings:
- Air pollution. Reversing stricter fine particulate matter air standards threatens thousands of preventable deaths and hundreds of thousands of lost workdays.
- Power plants. Delaying or repealing carbon and toxic emissions rules puts nearby communities at risk and undermines climate mitigation efforts.
- Motor vehicles. Weakening fuel economy and vehicle tailpipe emissions standards worsens air quality, increases respiratory illness, and slows the transition to electric vehicles.
- Climate policy. Withdrawing from international agreements and suspending industries’ greenhouse gas reporting endangers global climate goals and weakens health protections.
“This is not just a policy shift – it’s a wholesale abandonment of government commitments to the American public and the MAHA movement that helped propel Trump into office,” said EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook.
“What we’re witnessing is a deliberate dismantling of safeguards that protect the air, water and health of nearly every person in this country – all in the service of polluters,” he added.
Trump allies spin anti-MAHA actions for political gain
That disconnect between what Trump promised MAHA and what he’s actually doing on public health protection is becoming impossible to ignore.
In a Feb. 11 memo to the Republican National Committee and GOP congressional leadership, MAHA Action President Tony Lyons urged party officials to treat the movement as “a once in a generation political gift,” emphasizing its political value for the GOP in the 2026 midterms.
Lyons pledged to raise and spend $100 million to boost MAHA congressional candidates who are backed by Trump in the midterms.
Yet recent polling by Politico shows most voters believe Democrats – not Republicans and Trump – are more likely to champion MAHA’s public health agenda.
Despite the scope of Trump’s rollbacks, few if any Republicans in Congress have challenged his anti-MAHA actions. In contrast, Democratic lawmakers are unified in pressing for accountability from the president, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and other officials over the public health and environmental protections they are unraveling.
“The salt on these gaping health and environment policy wounds is an aggressive campaign by MAHA political leaders to raise $100 million in campaign funds solely for Republican candidates in the midterms so they can sustain their control of Congress,” said Cook. “However, it is Democrats who are standing up to the Trump assault on environmental protection and public health.”
Trump targets NEJM, other science journals
The NEJM, founded in 1812, itself was an early and explicit target of the Trump administration’s broader campaign against independent science.
Within months of Trump’s 2025 inauguration, a Department of Justice official wrote the journal, questioning its editorial integrity and alleging bias and improper influence from funders.
At the time, public health experts widely condemned the move as an attempt to intimidate and chill scientific publication.
Kennedy has publicly attacked NEJM and other leading journals as corrupt and threatened to block federally funded researchers from publishing in them altogether.
“No amount of political pressure or intimidation should silence independent science or the experts working to protect public health,” Cook added.
“The NEJM and the study’s authors rightly ignore those threats and lay bare the real-world consequences of the Trump administration’s actions – and the American people deserve to hear it.”
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The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action.
