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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.”

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.”

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