Elizabeth Kolbert

But many, many influential, you know, maha moms, which is itself a sort of not a very technical term, are worried about, you know, what their kids are eating, you know, what they're eating, what their kids are eating, what impact is that having, what's in our food supply, what's in our water.

You know, and for some reason, which I have to confess, I'm not sure I ever fully understood, but I guess had to do with his association with Bobby Kennedy, who at various points in his career has been very vocal about these issues.

They thought that, you know, the Trump administration was going to, you know, finally level with the American people about, you know, these dangerous chemicals in the food supply and do something about it.

Instead, what happened at the EPA, one thing that happened pretty early on, was that several chemical industry lobbyists took very high-ranking positions at the Office of Chemical Safety at the EPA.

So that was one thing that disturbed them to see that the lobbyists who were lobbying to keep a lot of these chemicals around were actually taking these positions at the EPA.

And we have seen their efforts.

influence in various decisions that have come out of that office.

And another thing, what really ticked them off, or what really seemed to precipitate this open sort of rupture, was the EPA approved a bunch of pesticides that have chemicals that could be defined as PFAS, as these forever chemicals.

It gets very technical what molecule actually

makes a PFAS compound, but they're sort of PFAS or PFAS adjacent compounds that could be sprayed, you know, on crops.

And that prompted a Maha mom named Kelly Ryerson to draft a petition to say that Lee Zeldin should be fired.

He really wasn't putting public health first.

And that petition quickly garnered a lot of signatures, including, once again, of some

prominent, you know, Maha influencers.

And that, in turn, prompted Lee Zeldin to invite a bunch of Maha moms to his office to talk to them, and also then prompted a series of announcements that supposedly, once again, supposedly were Maha mom wins.

You know, he kept portraying these decisions as Maha wins, though if you look beneath the surface, it's a lot more doubtful.

What makes it doubtful?

So one of the decisions they were touting as a Maha win had to do with chemicals called phthalates, which are in a tremendous number of consumer products and are thought to be potential endocrine disruptors.

And in that case, they were setting standards, new standards for phthalates, but they involved only workers' exposure, not

consumers' exposure.