The Official National Strategy Document of 36 pages carries the presidential seal and involves 10 agencies throughout the federal government.
It is not government policy on tariffs or border security. It is President Trump’s master plan to eradicate paper straws and bring plastic.
“My administration is compromised,” says the document, to “get rid of the pulposo and soaked disaster that torments many of our citizens every time they drink through a paper straw.”
It is an opportunity in cultural wars, critics say, and another example of the casual policies of an administration guided by Trump’s whims and dislikes, either for paper straws, wind turbines or low flow shower heads.
But there is a turn: another bigger public health question complicates in the impulse of the administration to make the regulations.
In his attack on paper straws, the document dedicates eight robust pages to highlight their health and environment hazards. He points out, in particular, the dangers of the PFA, a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals that are used to make paper straws and other water -resistant daily products, but are also linked to serious health problems and are appearing in the tap water throughout the country.
The Biden administration established new strict federal standards last year that harden the restrictions on the PFA, also known as “chemical products forever” because they are not easily broken into the environment. But industry groups and public services demanded, calling “unattainable” and “burdensome” standards, and have urged the Trump administration to delay them.
It is not clear if Lee Zeldin, who runs the Environmental Protection Agency, will force him. The Administration faces a deadline of May 12 to decide whether to continue defending the standards in the Court.
“Does Zeldin are going to reverse the drinking water standards of PFAS when there is this anti-capass expedition out of the White House?” Matthew Tejada said, who directs environmental health policy in the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If the White House is worried about the PFA in Pajitas, can Zeldin pretend that there is no problem with the PFA in drinking water?”
According to Mr. Zeldin, the agency has embarked on a deregulator impulse, aiming to repeal dozens of environmental regulations that limit toxic pollution. And has filled the agency leadership ranks with lobbyists and industry lawyers that have opposed the environmental regulations.
At a news conference with journalists on Monday, Mr. Zeldin said science on PFAS “was not declared as established.”
“We have discovered some of the questions related to the PFA, but the investigation is important to continue,” said Zeldin. And the regulations should be based on “less assumptions and more facts,” he said.
However, Trump’s Antipaper-Straw strategy document is more explicit about chemicals.
“Scientists and regulators have had substantial concerns about PFA chemicals for decades,” says the White House document. “PFAs are harmful to human health, and have been related to damage that affect reproductive health, development delays, cancer, hormonal imbalance, obesity and other dangerous health conditions.”
This week, the White House repeated those warnings. “Paper straws contain dangerous PFA chemicals: ‘Forever Chemicals’ linked to long -term significant health conditions, which are infiltrated in the water supply,” the administration said Monday in a statement on Earth Day.
Another wild card is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directing a forum on the health and environmental effects of plastics on Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy listed the PFA among the chemicals that he hoped to eliminate from the food system. “We are going to get rid of the complete categories of chemicals in our foods that we have good reasons to believe that they are harmful to human health,” he said.
Both the White House and the EPA said there was no gap between their approaches to the PFA.
“President Trump and administrator Zeldin are working on the passage of locks to eliminate the harmful toxins of the environment,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesman. “The Trump administration, including administrator Zeldin, has made it clear that PFAs are harmful to human health and greater research on the danger of PFAS is essential to ensure that we are making the United States again healthy.”
Molly Vaselu, a spokeswoman for the EPA, refused to specifically comment if the agency would try to reverse PFA drinking water standards, but pointed out Mr. Zeldin’s long experience with PFA’s problems.
Before joining the Trump administration, Mr. Zeldin turned four periods as a congressman of Long Island, who has fought with PFAS pollution. In 2020, he was one of the 23 Republicans of the House of Representatives who voted to approve the PFAS Action Law, a broad bill defended by the Democrats that required that the Environmental Protection Agency limit the chemical products in the drinking water and hold the pollutants of the cleaning.
“It was, and it remains, a firm defender of protecting Long islanders and all Americans from contaminated drinking water,” said Vaselou.
Mr. Zeldin is right that more research is needed to specify the effects on the health of exposure to PFA. Even so, the evidence of chemical damage is assembly, especially for the most studied types of PFA. The Strategy of the White House in straw lists that evidence, backed by a seven -page bibliography.
“The EPA conducted an analysis of scientific studies reviewed by current peers and discovered that exposure to PFA is linked to health risks,” says the document.
They also include, according to the White House: decrease in fertility, high blood pressure in pregnant women, low birth weight, accelerated puberty, behavioral changes in children, diminished immune systems and increased cholesterol.
Plastic also contains harmful chemicals. Microplastics are everywhere, polluting ecosystems and potentially damaging human health. And critics point out how the promotion of plastic helps the fossil fuel industry, which produces the basic plastic components.
Even so, Linda Birnbaum, toxicologist and former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences that has been playing PFA’s alarm for decades, agreed with aspects of the White House document. “His statements of all these adverse effects are well founded,” he said.
But if the Trump administration was concerned about the effects on the health of the PFA, they should worry about the presence of chemicals around us, he said, in food and food containers, for example, and in drinking water. “On the other hand, they are spending all this effort trying to gather people around straws,” he said.
The debate on plastic straws dates back to the mid -2010 decade, when they suddenly became a couple for their role in an explosive plastic waste crisis. Some cities and retailers banned plastic straws, and some states imposed restrictions. (Disability rights groups have expressed concern about prohibitions, noting that some people need straws to drink safely).
Alternatives to proliferated plastic: stainless or glass steel straws, as well as peak tapas. But paper straws quickly became the main replacement. And, with the same speed, they were ridiculed by their tendency to disintegrate in a soft disaster.
Almost at the same time, scientists began to detect PFA in a variety of paper and plants straws, which raised the concern that they were exposing people to harmful chemicals and that they were becoming another source of water pollution.
The president has portrayed the measures of the Biden era as “a mandate of paper straws”, although those plans did not specifically require a change to paper straws.
His disdain for paper straws dates back to years. His campaign for 2020 elections sold packages of 10 brand plastic straws for $ 15 with the motto, “Liberal paper straws do not work.”
In its great strategy, Mr. Trump orders federal agencies to “be creative and use all policies available to put an end to the use of paper straws throughout the country.” In addition, “taxpayers should never be wasted, so there are no federal contracts or subsidies to finance paper straws or support any entity that prohibits plastic straws.”
Christine Figgener, marine conservation biologist (which, a decade ago, published a viral video of a marine turtle with a plastic straw trapped in one of her nostrils), said the bite paper against plastic ignored the easiest solution of all: avoid straws.
The straws have become “the symbol of everything that is unnecessary that we use in a society so dictated by convenience,” he said. “Why is the United States so obsessed with straws? Most people don’t need them.”
Lisa Friedman Contributed reports.
