When It Comes to Clean Water, Trump Is Betraying MAHA
The Make America Healthy Again movement is rightly concerned with the contamination of our drinking water. To clean it up, we need enhanced corporate regulation and massive public investment to overhaul our water systems. Donald Trump won’t do any of that.
In an effort to appeal to the Trump-aligned MAHA movement, the administration initially promised to crack down on PFAS. Instead, it’s reducing regulatory pressure on manufacturers and water utilities to eliminate them.(Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)
One week after his presidential victory in 2024, Donald Trump promised that the United States would soon have “the cleanest air and water on the planet.” In the very same sentence, he vowed to deregulate the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and “unleash the power of American business.”
To critical observers, it was always obvious which of these mutually exclusive prospects would win out. It comes as no surprise to us on the Left that the Trump administration has spent the last seven months rolling back regulations protecting streams and wetlands, withdrawing limits on PFAS (or “forever chemicals”) pumped into the water supply by chemical companies, and slashing EPA enforcement budgets. In an effort to appeal to the Trump-aligned Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, the administration initially promised to crack down on PFAS. Instead, it’s reducing regulatory pressure on manufacturers and water utilities to eliminate them.
The MAHA movement gives quarter to a motley crew of fringe theories, like the conviction that autism is caused by vaccines and/or Wi-Fi. But it also gives voice to entirely legitimate concerns, like the prevalence of dangerous pesticides and toxic chemicals in Americans’ water supply.
Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is attempting to placate the more marginal elements of the MAHA-sphere with side quests about fluoride in the water and colorful stunts like doing raw milk shots with podcasters in the White House. But he’s leaving the saner elements out to dry, setting them up for bitter disappointment. After railing against PFAS for years, for example, Kennedy’s response to the regulatory rollback on forever chemicals has been muted. In recent months, he’s limited his crusade to recommending consumer education and voluntary corporate action over actual chemical regulation.
Americans’ water supply is, in fact, dangerously contaminated. And the truth, which many in the MAHA-sphere are poised to learn the hard way over the coming years, is that our water can’t be cleaned up by a political party that is simultaneously determined to deregulate corporations and slash public funding, as the Republicans are openly and shamelessly devoted to doing.
Corporations vs. Clean Water
There are two big reasons the modern GOP was never going to clean up our water supply.
First, it is simply impossible to simultaneously have clean water and an unrestrained corporate sector, two things Donald Trump promised in the same breath. The reason our water supply is contaminated to begin with is that private companies, in an effort to maximize profits, commonly do three things, often in combination: produce dangerous chemicals that should not be allowed in the first place, use them operationally to lower costs and improve their margins, and discard them without taking any precautions.
In the movie Erin Brockovich, as in the real-life story it was based on, a private utility company gets caught using a carcinogenic chemical to preserve its equipment and eliminate repair and replacement costs and dumping it without proper regulatory oversight. That’s often how water contamination happens, and no political force that is committed to “unleashing the power of American business” by rolling back government regulations is going to be any help in stopping it.
Second, and too seldom discussed in the MAHA movement, is the fact that American water systems currently suffer from catastrophic underfunding, resulting in shocking levels of contaminants leaking into millions of Americans’ tap water every day. Eighty-seven percent of Americans get their water from a public utility, directly linking public funding and public safety on this issue. The Trump administration is currently in the process of slashing public benefits and gutting the federal workforce under the banner of “efficiency,” gleefully embracing the exact opposite political impulse of that necessary to make American water safe to drink.
Under President Joe Biden, the EPA took the water infrastructure problem seriously, releasing a report that determined that the United States faces a mounting water infrastructure crisis requiring $625 billion in investments over the next twenty years. The nation’s aging water systems are deteriorating fast, causing storage tanks to degrade, water mains to falter, sanitation systems to malfunction, rust and sediment to accumulate, and pipes to corrode, break, or build up slimy layers inside (“biofilms”).
As these systems break down, they allow harmful substances like lead, arsenic, iron, PFAS, bacteria, and microplastics to get into tap water. Sometimes the contaminants come directly from the outdated water infrastructure itself.
High levels of these toxins can cause gastrointestinal illnesses, developmental harm in children, and elevated cancer risk for everyone. Major media outlets typically only cover the dangers of water system degradation when it leads to major outbreaks of deadly bacterial illnesses. But the transmission of harmful substances through poor water infrastructure is happening all the time. Any administration that was serious about improving water quality and protecting Americans’ health, as MAHA demands, would thus launch a massive public investment project to overhaul our water systems.
Invest in Clean Water
The Biden administration, to its credit, was oriented in the right direction on this issue: that is, toward public funding to fix our water systems, instead of aggressively away from it like the Trump administration. Unfortunately, its efforts were too small-bore to truly address the crisis and were in any case aborted by the Democratic Party’s failure to elect a successor.
One issue, for example, is that many old pipes made of lead are still in use today. Of the nine million lead pipes the Biden administration identified for replacement, it was only able to replace 367,000 of them. Trump’s EPA, under deregulation zealot Lee Zeldin, is attempting to freeze funding for that program altogether, just as it has frozen funding for the EPA’s regulation of PFAS.
To actually make American drinking water safe, we need a gargantuan tax-funded initiative on the order of the New Deal’s public works projects. It would certainly be worth it: What better way to spend our collective money than on un-poisoning ourselves? But not even a timidly reform-minded Democratic administration would be able to pull it off, much less an austerity-crazed Republican administration. The only political force capable of actually cleaning up our drinking water will be a left-wing movement that’s bent on progressively taxing the rich to build functional public infrastructure, providing good union jobs along the way.
If that all sounds a bit like a Green New Deal, well, yes, it is. MAHA-ers truly who want to ensure high water (and air and food) quality will eventually have to rethink their priors and line up behind political figures like Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders — that is, if they’re sincere about improving public health, not just engaged in convoluted ideological posturing with a dash of quackery.
More than at any time in our nation’s history, American politics is a kaleidoscope of floating signifiers and convoluted culture-war metonyms. Imagine explaining to someone thirty years ago how suntanning your testicles is now connected to right-wing pseudo-populism or how beef tallow is deeply implicated in the resurgence of traditional gender roles.
This dizzying political climate obscures basic axiomatic truths. One such truth is that you can’t have clean air, safe water, and healthy food if you don’t constrain corporate power and increase public investment. And these are undertakings that definitionally belong to the Left.
So to any MAHA moms of the future who may, after years of political betrayals and disillusionment, decide to make like their crunchy forebears and link up with the anti-corporate left: welcome. Now let’s tax the rich and fix those pipes.