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Fact or Fiction: Media's Tale of an Ideologically and Affectively Polarized SocietyFact or Fiction: Media's Tale of an Ideologically and Affectively Polarized Society](https://www.linkedin.com/in/molly-block-vaseliou-4830b052/overlay/50742418/single-media-viewer?type=DOCUMENT&profileId=ACoAAAsMXaMBQ8GjPi2x9QxygDTLXA7aQDIBxoE)
Deerfield High SchoolDeerfield High School 2007 - 20112007 - 2011
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Endorsed by 6 people who know the skillEndorsed by 6 people who know the skill](https://www.linkedin.com/in/molly-block-vaseliou-4830b052/overlay/urn:li:fsd_skill:%28ACoAAAsMXaMBQ8GjPi2x9QxygDTLXA7aQDIBxoE,1%29/endorsers?profileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAAAsMXaMBQ8GjPi2x9QxygDTLXA7aQDIBxoE&tabIndex=2&modalTabIndex=2)
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Clint WoodsClint Woods • 3rd+Verified • 3rd+Commissioner, Indiana Department of Environmental ManagementCommissioner, Indiana Department of Environmental Management9mo • 9 months ago • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn
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I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Commissioner at Indiana Department of Environmental Management!
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11 25
MAHA Slams “Corporate Capture” While Trump Strips Regulations
between frenzied claims about Tylenol and disparaging remarks about autism, the voices of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement empowered by President Donald Trump have directed criticism at the country’s massive food, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries — still-too-rare targets for the leaders of either political party in the U.S.
When the White House unveiled its comprehensive report on how to “Make Our Children Healthy Again” in May, it slammed “corporate capture” of regulatory bodies and argued that companies responsible for making children less healthy wield undue influence in Washington. A subsequent strategy report, released last month, called to “protect public health from corporate influence.”
“It was one of the first times I saw the federal government actually call out corporate capture and how chemical companies influence regulation,” said Darya Minovi, a senior analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy.
But the Trump administration’s political marriage of unbridled crony capitalism and fringe health conspiracism is not without its contradictions.
While the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement preaches a healthy utopia for the nation’s children free of real and imagined toxins, public health experts say the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive deregulation campaign that has opened the floodgates for toxic chemicals in our food, water, and air — while also defunding vital medical research and spreading dangerous medical misinformation.
“There’s a lot of rhetoric about problems that they’re solving,” Minovi said. “But when I’m looking at the actual actions that the administration is taking, largely, these actions are not making any kids or families healthier.”
A glaring tension between the MAHA movement’s purported goals and the Trump administration’s aggressive deregulatory strategy is the issue of environmental toxins, particularly PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, found in many household items.
These chemicals, which can disrupt liver, kidney, and thyroid functioning, are especially harmful to children.
[
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Trump EPA’s Next Move: Making It Harder to Sue for Getting Cancer from Roundup
https://theintercept.com/2025/03/21/trump-epa-monsanto-roundup-bayer-cancer-chemicals/)
The strategy report, drafted by the Make America Healthy commission led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid out a series of recommendations to “end chronic childhood disease,” which included studying the cumulative effect of chemicals in the environment. But in May, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was rolling back restrictions on the acceptable levels of these forever chemicals within drinking water, which were put in place during the Biden administration. And in the spring, the agency ended a grant to research children’s exposure to chemicals from soil and dust, accordingto the KFF Health News.
“When it comes to actually taking action, we’re not really seeing policies that are getting ahead of corporate capture and holding the chemical industry responsible,” Minovi said.
Over the coming months, the EPA has announced it will take 31 separate deregulatory actions, including loosening restrictions on power plants that emit air pollution and eliminating safeguards put in place during the Biden administration for petrochemical accidents.
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Alongside pursuing a deregulatory strategy that experts predict will introduce more chemicals into the air, water, and food supply, the administration has also moved aggressively to cut research, including on childhood diseases.
For example,in August, the Trump administration announced it was cutting federal funding to a network researching pediatric brain cancer.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai denied cutting cancer research funding, saying HHS canceled grants supporting “DEI and other ideological pet projects,” and that the money was reallocated.
“President Trump made a pledge to Make America Healthy Again by restoring accountability, transparency, and Gold Standard Science in public health decision-making,” wrote Desai. “The President and White House maintain complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and the rest of the HHS team to deliver on this pledge.”
The Department of Health and Human Services and the EPA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
Food assistance and educational programs have also come under fire during the Trump administration. Earlier this year, Republicans enacted the most significant cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programin history. The program provided food assistance to roughly 1 in every 5 children in the United States, as well as nutrition education.
“A lot of this movement is designed to benefit privileged people who have the resources to access certain healthier foods or a community with clean air,” said Minovi, as opposed to “everyday people who might actually depend on public policies to ensure they have healthy food, clean air, clean water in their community.”
“A lot of this movement is designed to benefit privileged people who have the resources to access certain healthier foods or a community with clean air.”
The recommendations emerging from HHS and the MAHA movement about vaccines and autism are particularly troubling, said Jill Rosenthal, director of public health policy at the Center for American Progress. “It’s a matter of promoting a personal agenda that RFK has rather than following decades of good science,” she said.
Riddled throughout the MAHA strategy and separate report are concerns over vaccines and the vaccine schedule, which is used to determine the timing for childhood vaccinations.
Both RFK Jr. and Trump have peddled pseudoscientific conclusions connecting autism to vaccination, suggesting that the vaccine schedule needs to change. During the press conference last week, Trump advised against vaccinating children for Hepatitis B until they’re 12 years old, which runs at odds with medical guidelines.
“They’re making it more difficult for children to get routine childhood vaccinations. We know that vaccination has saved millions of lives, and so any efforts that make it harder for children to access vaccines are really, really jeopardizing kids’ health,” said Rosenthal. “Instead of following the science and believing what evidence we already have, we’re just creating a lot of distrust and making it harder for people to keep their kids healthy.”
The recent recommendations that pregnant women avoid Tylenol also carry risk for pregnant people and their future children.
“In the near term, I think that pregnant patients are going to be worried enough that they seek alternate forms of medication to treat their pain,” said Dr. Mariana Montes, a former pediatrician and obstetric anesthesiologist. “That’s extremely concerning, because there is nothing that’s been proven safe for pregnancy except for acetaminophen.”
Ibuprofen, the active ingredient in Advil, has been known to lower amniotic fluid — the liquid in utero that surrounds and protects the fetus — and can have negative effects on kidney and heart development, said Montes.
“Patients might choose to take ibuprofen without knowing the effects, and then unknowingly actually harm a healthy pregnancy because they’re so worried about taking Tylenol,” she said.
[
Related
RFK Jr. Talks About Public Health, but He’s Joining an Administration That’ll Make Us Sicker Than Ever
https://theintercept.com/2024/11/14/rfk-jr-health-human-services-water-air-project-2025/)
Left with fewer options they believe are safe, Rosenthal warns that pregnant people might forgo medication altogether, even when they have a fever. “If women avoid taking Tylenol, for instance, when they have a fever, it can increase the risk of birth defects,” she said. “So by scaring women away from taking needed medication, it can actually impact their health and the health of their developing babies.”
The stigma these types of pronouncements cause for people with autism is also a serious concern.
“It’s necessary to point out the ableist language in this whole autism debacle,” said Minovi. “Of course, it’s a condition that needs to be understood and studied, and obviously impacts families significantly, but the way in which the administration, particularly RFK, talks about it is dismissive and negative about people’s lived experiences.”
Republicans, who once denounced former First Lady Michelle Obama for attempting to make school lunches moderately healthier, now inhabit a coalition whose purported goals would have instantly launched “nanny state” accusations just a few years prior.
But the MAHA movement has been so successful despite its inherent contradictions, Rosenthal said, because there’s a “kernel of truth” to what it’s preaching.
“For instance, ultra-processed food is not the first choice for how we want to take care of our bodies,” Rosenthal said, “but at the same time, is that the best way to use limited resources and protect or promote child health? Not when we have kids who don’t have enough to eat, right?”
Minovi said it’s understandable that people are drawn to this movement — which only heightens culpability for people like RFK Jr. and Trump.
“These are families that are just trying to do right by their kids, and the concerns that folks are raising are valid,” said Minovi. “The behavior of the leaders in this movement is nothing short of predatory.”
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Kennedy Jr. made health policy the cornerstone of his failed presidential campaign, critiquing America’s health care and public health systems with bold, often controversial proposals.
From vaccine “safety” to food and environmental health, Kennedy’s platform challenged the status quo, calling for sweeping reforms to improve transparency, accountability, and personal freedom in medical decision-making.
He’s raised concerns about the chronic disease epidemic that many are fighting in silence and has been a vocal critic of the industrial food system, pointing to the objective dangers it poses to public health.
He’s coined the slogan #MAHA — Make America Healthy Again — a phrase that has gained more traction in the health-conscious corners of the country than the original MAGA. You can often find it boldly displayed in juice bars, wellness shops, and fitness centers, where it has become emblematic of a movement that purports to prioritize health over the politics of the moment.
And honestly, I get it.
I’m hyperfocused on health. After a grueling battle with long Covid following my infection in 2022 and the many, many years I’ve spent uncovering the grave realities of water contamination, air pollution, and disease outbreaks as a reporter and filmmaker, I’ve fully embraced the mantle of an overprotective, fiercely vigilant mom.
Kennedy aligned himself with an administration committed to weakening the protections that have the most direct impacts on our health.
For the most part, my kid eats whole, organic foods, his water filtered to pristine purity eight times over. His clothing is 100 percent organic cotton, and when there’s pollution or we enter crowded spaces indoors, he wears an N95 mask. By our society’s standards, I might seem extreme. But to me, it’s not madness — it’s what happens when you live in a country that’s dangerously out of step with reality.
So, to Kennedy’s supporters, I understand your fervor. But here’s where I’m lost.
Kennedy has aligned himself with an administration — and been announced as Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services as a reward — that is committed to weakening the very protections that have the most direct, proven impacts on our health, particularly the health of our children.
He has paradoxically placed his support behind a president committed to dismantling the regulatory frameworks that ensure clean air, safe water, toxic-free work environments, and uncontaminated food. These are not just abstract concepts — they are the very protections that shield us and our children from the invisible, insidious dangers that lurk in our environment everyday.
By aligning himself with leaders associated with Project 2025’s radical overhaul of environmental regulations, he is effectively endorsing a future in which corporate interests are prioritized over the health of all Americans, especially children.
Clean Air and Water
Project 2025, an ambitious policy agenda crafted by conservative think tanks for the next Republican president, aims to diminish the Environmental Protection Agency’s role in regulating the environment. At the core of this initiative is the plan to remove the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act, the foundation of the nation’s air quality standards. If enacted, this would severely weaken federal oversight of pollution, undermining decades of progress in protecting public health and the environment.
Without the Clean Air Act’s regulatory framework, fossil fuel companies — along with other industrial sectors — would face far fewer restrictions on emissions, particularly those related to particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and carbon emissions. They would operate with less oversight and fewer penalties for pollution, allowing them to prioritize cost-saving measures over environmental protection.
The consequences would be disastrous for everyone who breathes. Air pollution is linked directly to respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.
Their assault doesn’t end with our air.
Project 2025 also threatens the Clean Water Act, which regulates pollutants in our waterways and drinking water. The Clean Water Act has been instrumental in ensuring that public health is protected from harmful contaminants like lead, arsenic, bacteria, pesticides, industrial chemicals, and substances like PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and dioxins, which are known carcinogens.
Without the law’s protections, municipalities and industries would be emboldened to delay or avoid the necessary actions to replace lead pipes, fix aging infrastructure, or prevent contamination of public water systems.
As a reporter who spent two years in Flint, Michigan, I witnessed firsthand the devastating impact water contamination has on a community. It’s an ongoing public health crisis of epic proportions. Even a decade later, the community grapples with new life-threatening health complications.
Weakening the Clean Water Act would not only exacerbate existing water crises, but also cripple our ability to address emerging and persistent threats like PFAS — chemicals that have already contaminated drinking water systems nationwide, exposing millions of Americans to serious health risks, including liver damage, thyroid issues, infertility, and cancer. Without federal oversight, PFAS and similar pollutants would spread unchecked.
The consequences would be severe for everyone who drinks water.
And without regulations, there’s no objective measure to define what levels of pollution or contamination are dangerous, leaving individuals to navigate complex and often conflicting information on their own.
This creates particular challenges for the 35 percent of Americans who rent, as they are at the mercy of landlords when it comes to addressing issues like lead in water or radon in the air. If a landlord dismisses these hazards as subjective opinions, tenants have little recourse without enforceable legal standards, leaving families vulnerable to significant health risks caused by negligence or greed.
The fight for health begins with the most fundamental right: clean air and water.
The fight for health begins with the most fundamental right: clean air and water. Without them, all else falls away.
Yet, in a striking irony, the very man championing the cause of public health, which inspired so many to support him and consequently Trump, seems poised to support policies that dismantle the protections vital to preserving that health. So I call on the latest Kennedy to gain power in Washington to address the stark contradictions between the values he claims to champion — our society’s health and well-being — and the policy framework laid out in Project 2025, which threatens to undermine those very ideals.
Kennedy speaks of prioritizing the health of the American people, but Project 2025’s proposals promote deregulation and weaken critical environmental protections, putting our air, water, food, and future at risk.
Now that his chosen candidate empowered him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, it’s time for Kennedy to confront this glaring dissonance head-on and make clear where his true priorities lie.
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trump-epa-monsanto-roundup-bayer-cancer-chemicals
Every spring, summer, and fall, Jimmy Draeger would walk the length of his 11-acre property with a hand sprayer and a tub of Roundup. He’d mist around the flower beds, the patio, the fence line, diluting the concentrated herbicide with water as the label directed.
Nestled deep in the woods of the Missouri Ozarks, Draeger was used to seeing an explosion of weeds and shrubs in the warm months at the home he’s shared with his wife, Brenda, for more than 30 years. He didn’t think much of using Roundup to keep them at bay.
Then he was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin lymphoma. According to a lawsuit filed by the Draegers in 2022, Jimmy had a chemotherapy port installed in his chest, developed neuropathy in his hands and feet, and lost control of his bowels, coordination, and sexual function. He became clinically depressed, vision-impaired, and unable to bathe without Brenda’s help.
[
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The Playbook for Poisoning the Earth
https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/bees-insecticides-pesticides-neonicotinoids-bayer-monsanto-syngenta/)
Monsanto, the agrochemical company behind Roundup, was to blame for Jimmy’s lymphoma, the Draegers contended. In November 2023, a jury agreed. Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, was ordered to pay the Draegers and two other plaintiffs a combined $1.56 billion in damages. (A judge later cut the payout for punitive damages, reducing the total awards to $611 million.)
The Draegers’ case is one of more than 160,000 Roundup lawsuits filed against Monsanto or Bayer since 2015, when the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate, a key ingredient in Roundup, as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
Most of the lawsuits hinged on failure-to-warn claims: the allegation that Monsanto, and later Bayer, failed to adequately notify customers of glyphosate’s potential cancer risk. Bayer has paid roughly $11 billion to settle these claims while denying any wrongdoing.
Now, the Environmental Protection Agency is considering a Bayer-backed rule that could significantly curtail the lawsuits.
Enter the EPA
Unlike the WHO, the EPA — which, headed by Trump appointee Lee Zeldin, has already announced massive regulatory rollbacks — does not consider glyphosate to be a likely human carcinogen.
“EPA’s cancer classification is consistent with most other international expert panels and regulatory authorities,” EPA Associate Administrator for Public Affairs Molly Vaseliou said in a statement to The Intercept. “EPA does not agree with IARC’s conclusion that glyphosate is ‘probably carcinogenic to humans.’”
Last August, 11 industry-friendly red states, led by Nebraska and Iowa, submitted a 436-page petition asking the agency to amend its labeling rules under the Federal Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act, or FIFRA. The proposed rule change would explicitly prohibit states from labeling pesticides and herbicides with warnings about cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm if those notices contradict the EPA’s risk assessment.
The states made clear that their ultimate goal is to thwart future lawsuits against pesticide manufacturers. Their petition argued that recent court rulings have created a “gap in FIFRA’s regulatory framework” that the proposed rule change would plug.
“It’s telling of the lengths that pesticide manufacturers will go to make sure that nothing interferes with their profit margins.”
In January, in a move initiated by the Biden administration, the EPA took a first step of accepting public comment on the rule-making petition, with a deadline of March 24 — though this step is exploratory and does not mean a new rule will be issued. Still, the EPA’s decision could have disastrous consequences if Donald Trump’s second administration is as friendly to the chemical industryas it was in his first.
“It’s telling of the lengths that pesticide manufacturers will go to make sure that nothing interferes with their profit margins,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s a reality that the industry itself generates much of the data, and they say it’s safe, and then EPA approves that determination.”
“If we’re not limited to the industry-created data set,” he said, “they see it as a larger threat to their ability to control the universe of science and data that go into the pesticide regulatory review process.”
Warning Labels
The EPA petition follows in the path of other efforts at both the state and federal level to shield Bayer from civil liability.
Last year, state legislatures in Florida, Idaho, Iowa, and Missouri introduced bills that would make pesticide manufacturers immune to failure-to-warn lawsuits if their product labels match EPA assessments. And House Republicans introduced similar language in the discussion draft of the 2024 Farm Bill.
Though all the bills failed, allies of the chemical industry are expected to redouble their efforts this year. Advocates expect at least 21 states to introduce pesticide immunity legislation in 2025. The Florida Senate already has.
Bayer itself bankrolled the push, spending nearly $8.5 million to lobby the federal government in 2024, including to advocate for the “uniformity of pesticide labeling” under FIFRA.
FIFRA already prohibits the sale of “misbranded” pesticides, which includes requiring state health warnings to conform with EPA-approved labels.
“We are very pleased to see the EPA and several state Attorneys General take this step to reinforce that any state labeling requirements inconsistent with EPA’s own findings and conclusions regarding human health, such as a pesticide’s likelihood to cause cancer, constitute misbranding,” Bayer said in a statement to The Intercept. “It reinforces the urgent need for a solution to this issue created by the litigation industry.”
The raft of litigation over Roundup, however, has not always ended badly for Bayer. Federal appeals courts disagree on whether the FIFRA misbranding statute trumps state laws that may require manufacturers to go farther in adequately warning consumers about their products.
The 9th and 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled in plaintiffs’ favor in recent years, finding that failure-to-warn claims against Bayer in state courts are consistent with FIFRA’s intent; the 3rd Circuit, meanwhile, found the opposite. The split could set the stage for a Supreme Court battle.
The EPA rule change proposed in the states’ petition aims to remedy the circuit split by explicitly classifying labels as “misbranded” if they include health warnings that exceed the EPA’s risk assessment.
The agency’s position on glyphosate has been mired in controversy for decades. In 1991, the EPA mysteriously changed its classification from “suggestive evidence” of glyphosate’s carcinogenic potential to “no evidence.”
Related
Emails Show Monsanto Orchestrated GOP Effort to Intimidate Cancer Researchers
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/23/monsanto-republicans-cancer-research/)
Since then, documents released in Roundup litigation have shown Monsanto cozying up to EPA regulators, ghostwriting scientific papers on glyphosate’s safety, and actively working to discredit journalists and WHO.
In 2015 — the same year the international body’s cancer bureau classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen — The Intercept reported that the EPA had overwhelmingly used Monsanto’s own research to conclude that glyphosate was not an endocrine disruptor.
In 2016, an internal EPA analysis noted an association between glyphosate exposure and an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in four epidemiological studies, The Intercept reported. The EPA analysis was never made public. Instead, the agency drew from industry-backed studies in 2016 to conclude that glyphosate was “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”
“The industry itself generates and pays for much of this data, so that is very different of course than peer-reviewed, hypothesis-based, independent science,” said Hartl, of the Center for Biological Diversity. “That creates an inherent tension and conflict of interest.”
“EPA’s long-standing practice is to seek input from a variety of stakeholders and use the best available science,” said Vaseliou, the EPA public affairs official. “EPA evaluates information from all kinds of sources — pesticide companies, other governments, academia, and the published scientific literature.”
[
Related
How Pesticide Companies Corrupted the EPA and Poisoned America
https://theintercept.com/2021/06/30/epa-pesticides-exposure-opp/)
In 2020, during the periodic pesticide review process mandated by FIFRA, the EPA issued an interim decision to reregister glyphosate with a risk assessment that did not identify “any human health risks of concern.” But in June 2022, in a separate case from the FIFRA ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the EPA’s assessment, noting the decision had been made without following the agency’s own cancer guidelines, and ordered the EPA to reevaluate its findings.
The new analysis is still forthcoming.
“In accordance with the court’s decision related to human health, EPA is currently updating its evaluation of the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate to better explain its findings and include the current relevant scientific information,” said Vaseliou. “EPA’s underlying scientific findings regarding glyphosate, including its finding that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, remain the same.”
Trump’s MAHA Promise
How the EPA decides to proceed with the glyphosate petition will in many ways be a canary in the coal mine for this administration’s approach to chemical regulation.
While Trump’s first term was marked by severe deference to industry, his recent rhetoric has promoted Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, agenda.
In a February executive order, the president pledged to eliminate “undue industry influence” and “establish a framework for transparency and ethics review in industry-funded projects” — the same reforms that advocates have long said would strengthen the EPA’s glyphosate review.
Kennedy is a longtime critic of the pesticide industry; in an October
, he railed against the country’s agriculture policy for “tilting the playing field in favor of more chemicals, more herbicides, more insecticides” and promised to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals that are already prohibited in other countries.” As a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading nonprofit environmental law group, he took Monsanto to task, helping secure a multimillion-dollar settlement in a Roundup cancer lawsuit in 2018.
There are indications, of course, that the MAHA promise is a smokescreen.
In 2017, Trump’s EPA rejected a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to increased cancer risk. He appointed former American Chemistry Council executive Nancy Beck to oversee toxic chemical regulation. Beck is once again slated to take a senior EPA position; Lynn Dekleva, another ACC lobbyist who fought the EPA’s efforts to regulate formaldehyde, will now run the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.
Vaseliou said, “Your questions regarding Dr. Beck and Dr. Dekleva are insulting and unfounded. This is yet another question based on false accusations that left propaganda also known as media take as gospel. President Trump made a fantastic choice in selecting Dr. Beck and Dr. Dekleva to work at EPA.”
On March 12, Zeldin, Trump’s EPA chief, announced the agency would begin rolling back 31 environmental regulations — “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” he said — including rules aimed at preventing disasters at hazardous chemical facilities and restricting the industrial pollution of mercury.
“It strikes me that there’s a very significant tension between what the president has promised relating to the overuse of pesticides in this country versus the other elements of his own administration that reflexively do what industry wants no matter what,” said Hartl. “He’s going to have to decide who he’s going to let down: whether it’s his own supporters that believe in his MAHA agenda or his industry benefactors.”
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good e
Do what y’all need to do’: How EPA fired its science advisers
:{By Sean Reilly | 07/24/2025
The consequences for the President Donald Trump’s environmental agenda may crystallize as replacements are picked for the two advisory panels.
Top EPA appointees acted swiftly and provided virtually no written explanation internally for firing members of two science advisory committees, a hardball move that could have significant implications for hallmark environmental and public health protections.
“All good–Do what y’all need to do,” then-Assistant Deputy Administrator Travis Voyles wrote in a Jan. 28 email roughly an hour before the agency began informing dozens of members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and the Science Advisory Board that they were being cashiered as part of a wholesale “reset.”
“It is done,” Voyles added later that day, minutes after getting confirmation that the notifications were complete. The emails were included in roughly 100 pages of emails released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from POLITICO’s E&E News.
The firings were among EPA’s first official acts under President Donald Trump’s second administration, which has since trumpeted plans for thousands of job cuts and an unprecedented wave of regulatory rollbacks.
Notably absent from the records is any discussion of the rationale for the removals, which furthered a trend dating back to Trump’s first term of treating science advisers more like disposable political appointees instead of neutral experts in their fields.
The consequences for the administration’s environmental agenda may now become clear only when EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin names replacement members for both panels.
His choices could be particularly pivotal for the CASAC, which is charged with providing outside expertise to high-stakes reviews of ambient air quality standards for a half-dozen pollutants.
Those assessments, which take years, rank among EPA’s weightiest regulatory tasks under the Clean Air Act.
They have the potential to drive life-saving improvements to national air quality, but may also lead to stricter pollution control requirements on a wide swath of businesses. Three such reviews — for airborne lead, smog-forming nitrogen oxides and ozone — were launched either during Trump’s first term or former President Joe Biden’s tenure. It will now be up to the second Trump administration to continue them.
Zeldin’s picks for the committee “will have a significant impact on where this comes out,” David Amerikaner, a partner with law firm Duane Morris, said in an interview. It would be “on brand,” Amerikaner said, if the reconstituted committee “leans towards retaining existing standards, rather than tightening anything.”
The repercussions could be less pronounced, but still significant for the Science Advisory Board, which usually encompasses between 40 and 50 members from a range of disciplines and serves as an in-house think tank for EPA on scientific and technical issues.
The board also has the authority to scrutinize the quality of the science underlying EPA regulatory proposals. During Trump’s first term, the panel irked administration appointees with stinging critiques of various draft rollbacks. In what some members saw as payback, then-EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler stripped rank-and-file board members of any role in deciding which proposed rules warranted attention.
Wheeler’s policy was discarded under Biden. Six months into Trump’s second term, however, concerns are simmering that the administration is again maneuvering to undercut the two panels’ independence.
“We’ve seen the process attempted to be compromised in the past and I’m concerned that it might be happening again,” said Chris Zarba, who headed the EPA office that provides staff support for the panels before retiring in 2018. He then joined the Environmental Protection Network, a group made up mostly of former agency employees opposed to Trump administration policies.
‘Reverse the politicization’
Trump had been back in office barely a week when Voyles, whose title is now associate deputy administrator, and a handful of other appointees moved to disband both panels.
Besides Voyles, the officials involved included Chad McIntosh, then the agency’s acting deputy administrator; James Payne, an EPA attorney at that point serving as acting administrator; and Aaron Szabo, who on Wednesday won Senate confirmation to head EPA’s air office.
Exactly what prompted them to act even before Zeldin was sworn in as administrator is not specified in their emails. EPA declined to allow any of them to be interviewed.
But the EPA chapter of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation governing blueprint that has served as a cue for many administration policies, recommended “Resetting science advisory boards to expand opportunities for a diversity of scientific viewpoints free of potential conflicts of interest.”
What that means in practice is still to be seen. EPA has since sought nominations to restock both the CASAC and the Science Advisory Board, but has not specified a timetable for Zeldin to make his final choices.
In response to emailed questions, EPA spokesperson Carolyn Holran said the administration is seeking to “to reverse the politicization” of the two panels during Biden’s tenure.
She was referring to then-Administrator Michael Regan’s March 2021 decisionto fire all CASAC and SAB members in what was also labeled a reset.
Regan eventually reappointed some of the ousted members. As grounds for the removals he also alluded a federal court’s decision to strike down a policy from Trump’s first term that barred EPA grant recipients from serving on agency advisory committees and Wheeler’s 2018 decision to dismiss an adjunct CASAC panel that was helping with a review of national soot standards.
The second Trump administration has not flagged any specific irregularities in how Regan then proceeded to reconstitute the two panels. Once Trump returned to office in January, their fate was clearly high on the administration’s agenda.
‘They have been let go’
Only a week had passed since Trump’s inauguration when Voyles and several other appointees got a Jan. 27 briefing on the advisers’ work from Tom Brennan, a career official who had succeeded Zarba as director of what is formally known as the Science Advisory Board Staff Office.
“Thank you for the time today Tom!” Voyles wrote back.
By the next day, rapid-fire discussions were underway between the appointees to craft what would eventually become a boilerplate, three-paragraph email informing the advisers of their dismissals. What appear to be drafts of the emails are redacted under an exemption that allows agencies to withhold information used in internal deliberations, the documents received under FOIA show.
There was a quick move to run the wording by EPA lawyers. “The plan is then for me to send it to Tom Brennan this aft or tonight,” Payne wrote late on the afternoon of Jan. 28, using an abbreviation for afternoon.
Cut out of the loop was Brennan, who was charged with making the actual notifications to dozens of researchers that their three-year assignments as “special government employees” were ending — in some cases just months after they were appointed.
“Hello teammates,” he wrote afterward to staff office colleagues. “Today, I [forwarded an] email from Acting Administrator Payne to all SAB and CASAC members (and active Panel members) informing them they have been let go from their service as SGEs. I just learned about that decision late in the day today.”
Brennan, who has since left EPA under one of its early retirement offerings, declined to comment. Many of the records released by the agency reflect ensuing email traffic between him and panel members from the University of Texas, Cornell University and other schools.
In the notifications forwarded by Brennan, those researchers were told that “EPA is working to update these federal advisory committees to ensure that the agency receives scientific advice consistent with its legal obligations to advance our core mission.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” one researcher told Brennan.
Elsewhere at EPA, press aides were working after hours to come up with a prepared response to media inquiries after news of the firings quickly became public.
“I’ve got one,” Molly Vaseliou, now the Office of Public Affairs’ associate administrator, wrote at 7:05 p.m. on the 28th.
Vaseliou’s statement, which recycled some of the language in the dismissal email, said that EPA was working to update the two panels “to ensure that the agency receives scientific advice consistent with its legal obligations to advance our core mission.”
It worked for Voyles.
“Not responding, but still agree with just sticking to the statement Molly provided,” he wrote after getting a request for comment from E&E News. “Coverage so far doesn’t prompt me to suggest otherwise.”
*This reporter can be reached on Signal at SeanReilly.70.
---
ggl 11 25
[### Molly Vaseliou - U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ... LegiStorm
https://www.legistorm.com › bio › Molly_Block_Vaseliou](https://www.legistorm.com/person/bio/245817/Molly_Block_Vaseliou.html)
Contact Information. Email, work: *****@epa.gov. Main Office Mail Code 1701A 1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Washington, District of Columbia 20460
[### About the Office of External Affairs | US EPA
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (.gov)
https://www.epa.gov › aboutepa › about-office-external...](https://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/about-office-external-affairs)
Oct 20, 2025 — Molly Vaseliou, Principal Deputy Associate Administrator. Cora Mandy, Deputy Associate Administrator for Public Affairs. Lauren Lauman, Deputy ...
[### Molly Vaseliou (@mollyerinb) / Posts ...
X · mollyerinb
1.4K+ followers](https://x.com/mollyerinb)
“The American people deserve an EPA that effectively balances environmental protection with economic prosperity. Through this reorganization, we're positioning ...
[### 'Do what y'all need to do': How EPA fired its science advisers
E&E News by POLITICO
https://www.eenews.net › Articles](https://www.eenews.net/articles/do-what-yall-need-to-do-how-epa-fired-its-science-advisers/)
Jul 24, 2025 — “I've got one,” Molly Vaseliou, now the Office of Public Affairs' associate administrator, wrote at 7:05 p.m. on the 28th. Vaseliou's ...
[### Colleagues, This week, we welcome to EPA members of ...
National Association of Clean Air Agencies
https://www.4cleanair.org › wp-content › uploads](https://www.4cleanair.org/wp-content/uploads/Staff-announcement-email.pdf)
Molly Vaseliou, Associate Administrator for Public Affairs. • Molly hails from the Great Lakes and previously served at EPA in the Office of Public Affairs for.
3 pages
[### 5 "Vaseliou" profiles
https://www.linkedin.com › pub › dir › Vaseliou](https://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/+/Vaseliou)
Molly (Block) Vaseliou. Communications Director at ... US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), +14 more. University of Michigan ...
[### Molly Vaseliou
Click2Houston
https://www.click2houston.com › topic › Molly_Vaseliou](https://www.click2houston.com/topic/Molly_Vaseliou/)
MOLLY VASELIOU · EPA fires employees who publicly criticized agency policies under Trump · EPA eliminates research and development office, begins layoffs · Trump ...
[### Beware the Reassuring Slogans
Association to Preserve Cape Cod
https://apcc.org › beware-the-reassuring-slogans](https://apcc.org/beware-the-reassuring-slogans/)
Mar 19, 2025 — “We are committed to enhancing our ability to deliver clean air, water, and land for all Americans,” wrote Molly Vaseliou, EPA spokeswoman ...
[### Inside EPA's meeting with stunned science staffers
E&E News by POLITICO
https://www.eenews.net › Articles](https://www.eenews.net/articles/inside-epas-meeting-with-stunned-science-staffers/)
Mar 18, 2025 — Asked about the internal meeting Tuesday afternoon, EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said in an email, “I wonder if managers don't have ...
[### EPA Scientific Research Arm is being targeted : r/labrats
Reddit · r/labrats
8 comments · 7 months ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/labrats/comments/1jdvdgs/epa_scientific_research_arm_is_being_targeted/)
Molly Vaseliou, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said in a statement that the agency “is taking exciting steps as we enter the next phase of ...
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