CLIMATEWIRE | The last time President Donald Trump tried to roll back a mercury regulation, he faced a high-profile opponent: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy railed against EPA at an August 2017 public hearing for going along with the Trump administration’s demands to repeal wastewater limits. He warned that allowing more power plant pollution to enter waterways would poison people through mercury-contaminated fish — a problem he experienced personally after a period of eating tuna.
“It is really troublesome for those of us who will suffer from your irresponsibility,” Kennedy said at the time. “The law says the waterways of this country, the fisheries of this country, belong to the people.”
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Eight years later, Kennedy has been silent as the Trump administration is again rolling back those same mercury regulations, along with at least a dozen other pollution controls announced last week in what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has called the agency’s “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”
Before Kennedy was confirmed in January to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, he ran a presidential campaign on the promise to “make America healthy again,” in part through getting toxic chemicals out of the nation’s food.
Then, during his confirmation hearing two months ago, Kennedy touted his experience with fighting mercury pollution as an environmental attorney and as the founder of Waterkeeper, an environmental group. “The same chemicals that kill fish make people sick,” Kennedy said at the January hearing.
Kennedy didn’t respond to requests for comment or questions about whether he still believes mercury is a public health threat.
“If he really does care about the issues he used to care about when he was working at the Waterkeeper, you would think he would say something,” said Abel Russ, director of the Environmental Integrity Project’s Center for Applied Environmental Science. “EPA is doing a lot of things that are an anathema to his stated life’s mission.”
If EPA fulfills Zeldin’s promise to roll back at least a dozen pollution controls, more people could be exposed to particulate matter, smog and nitrogen oxides — pollutants that can lead to severe health consequences such as lowered IQ, asthma, increased heart attacks and premature deaths, according to EPA’s own analyses.
Among the threatened rules are two mercury reduction standards. One limits the amount of mercury that’s released into the air and is predicted to reduce emissions of the potent neurotoxin by more than 16 percent by 2028. The other reduces mercury that’s released into rivers and streams, and would help infants avoid losing an estimated 1,377 IQ points annually.
It’s not publicly known whether Kennedy weighed in on EPA’s decisions. Before the election, Trump said he would let Kennedy “make our country so healthy” but that Kennedy “can’t touch” fossil fuels like oil and gas.
“We’re not going to let him get involved,” Trump said in October.
Since then, Trump created a Make America Healthy Commission with the purpose of “ensuring United States food is the healthiest … in the world” and addressing potential contributing causes of childhood chronic disease, “including the American diet, absorption of toxic material … environmental factors [and] government policies.”
The commission, on which Kennedy and Zeldin sit, met for the first time last Tuesday, one day before EPA’s rollbacks were announced. The meeting was held behind closed doors and neither EPA or HHS responded to questions about whether Kennedy and Zeldin had discussed rolling back the rules or how the rollbacks would impact Americans’ health.
EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said in a statement, “No longer will the EPA view the goals of protecting our environment and growing our economy as binary choices.”
She did not respond to a question about what specific steps EPA would take to improve American’s health, saying only that the agency “looks forward to closely collaborating on ways to fulfill President Trump’s goal of removing toxins from the environment and our food supply and keeping our children healthy and strong.”
‘Fish consumption is dangerous now’
Mercury is a neurotoxin that can harm the brain and nervous system, leading to lower IQ and behavioral problems. It primarily enters rivers and lakes through wastewater from power plants and factories, or in air emissions that settle on waterways.
Once in the water, bacteria convert it to a more toxic form called methylmercury that is easily taken up by fish and other aquatic organisms. The mercury remains in their bodies for long periods of time, and can be transferred from prey to predator when other fish or people eat contaminated animals.
Mercury can harm anyone’s cognition, but exposure is especially dangerous for infants and toddlers. Pregnant people are encouraged to avoid eating fish like tuna and swordfish to protect their fetuses’ developing nervous systems.
Kennedy himself has experienced mercury poisoning from fish consumption.
He has said he discovered “dangerous levels of mercury” in his blood after having “word retrieval problems and memory problems that I never had before” in the early 2000s.
“Our fish consumption is dangerous now,” he said in 2017. “In my view, we are living in a science-fiction nightmare at this point in this country.”
Kennedy has not minced words when blaming the coal industry for poisoning the nation’s fish.
After EPA wrote its first-ever limits on mercury air emissions in 2012, Kennedy wrote an op-ed touting the health benefits of the rule, which was projected to prevent 4,000 to 11,000 premature deaths. He argued that it would stop “coal barons and mining magnates … profiting from poisoning the rest of us.”
‘Anti-fish’
Today, Kennedy is perhaps better known for spreading falsehoods about vaccines than he is for environmental advocacy. But his concerns about vaccines were, at least initially, rooted in fears about mercury’s neurotoxic effects. In 2005, Kennedy wrote an article in Rolling Stone magazine to claim that a mercury-based preservative in vaccines was causing autism in healthy children — a link that has been debunked in multiple studies. The magazine article was later retracted.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there is “no evidence of harm” by the preservative, thimerosal, that was in some vaccines. (Thimerosal was removed from U.S. childhood vaccines in 2001 under an agreement involving manufacturers, federal agencies and the American Academy of Pediatrics, four years before Kennedy’s article was published.)
In January, Kennedy drew a connection between vaccines and fish during his confirmation hearing. He told senators who had expressed concern about his promotion of vaccine conspiracy theories that it was unfair to call him an anti-vaxer because, “I worked for years to reduce mercury and toxic chemicals in fish, and nobody called me anti-fish.”
Consuming contaminated seafood is still the most common pathway for mercury exposure. Surveillance testing by the Food and Drug Administration that has examined the presence of chemicals in foods at grocery stores showed that fish contain higher levels of mercury than other foods.
Canned tuna had an average concentration of 230 parts per billion of mercury in tests conducted from 2018 to 2020. Cod had 87 parts per billion and salmon had 21 parts per billion. By comparison, store-bought cornbread had an average mercury concentration of 3.3 parts per billion, the highest level found in a food that was not fish.
Kennedy has used his Cabinet position as health secretary to put food-additive companies on notice about adding dyes and chemicals in food.
But there is a limit to what HHS can do to limit mercury’s presence in fish — because environmental contamination is the main source of the neurotoxin. Though HHS offers advice to consumers on which species of fish would likely to have lower mercury content, actually preventing contamination stems from EPA’s pollution rules.
That those rules are a target of Trump’s rollbacks show the limits of Kennedy’s mission, said John Walke, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Federal Clean Air Program.
“The EPA action to increase toxic mercury pollution speaks far louder than the ‘make America healthy again’ words about mercury’s dangers,” he said. “Whatever talk — and it’s just talk — was had from the MAHA side of this administration about mercury poisoning clearly has no impact on actions at EPA.”
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
