RFK Jr Is Running Away From the One Thing He’s Ever Been Right About

As recently as last year, denouncing plastics was a key part of RFK Jr.’s political identity. Running for president as an icon of the health-conscious, he called plastic pollution a “crisis for human health and the environment.” He promised to support an international plastics reduction treaty and to limit the domestic production of plastic. He castigated President Biden for failing to fix the problem. He espoused ambitious solutions to the problem, alarming the plastics industry.

These positions, along with concern for food safety and commitment to Making America Healthy Again, won support for his presidential campaign from yoga moms and fitness bros alike. Many of these supporters were then excited when Trump appointed him head of Health and Human Services. His microplastics concern even won him some grudging credit from us here at TNR, alongside sharp criticism of his anti-vaccine actions and other dangerous quackery, which have indeed only gotten more troubling with the death of an unvaccinated child in Texas last month—a tragedy that RFK seemed to minimize in a string of bewildering falsehoods.

Now, RFK’s alarmist stance on microplastics is going mainstream. Just as RFK Jr. himself gets quieter on this topic, a host of scientific studies are suggesting that the problem of microplastics may be far worse than we thought—even approaching the scale of climate change as a threat to life on earth.

A preliminary Chinese study published on Monday found that microplastics are interfering with plant photosynthesis, a problem that could put more than 400 million people at risk of starvation. Another study, published the next day and authored by researchers at Boston University,  found that microplastics could be contributing to the proliferation of dangerous antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Last month, researchers analyzing the brains of dead humans found, on average, a spoonful of microplastics, which can’t be good. Another new paper found that microplastics were increasingly entering our food supply through fertilizers. All this is especially alarming given that microplastics emitted into our bodies and into the environment have sharply increased over the last decade and, if they continue unchecked, are expected to double by 2040.

If this were a normal administration and RFK Jr. a normal activist, such reports would lend momentum and legitimacy to his crusade, perhaps even leading to significant policy change. But this is not a normal administration, and Kennedy is not a normal activist.

Despite reports that one of his pet issues is even more urgent than previously supposed, Kennedy seems to have changed the subject. Last week he called anti-Semitism a “malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” as his administration ignores or mishandles both bird flu and measles. (All forms of bigotry can affect human health, but that statement, timed with Trump’s unprecedented crackdowns on universities and on pro-Palestine student protesters, looked more like apologetics for Trump’s authoritarianism.) Another moral panic RFK Jr has been vocal about is “men playing women’s sports” by which he means the tiny number of transgender athletes joining their peers on a ballfield, another bit of rightwing grandstanding irrelevant to public health.

He has not issued a single tweet, press release, or policy on microplastics since assuming charge of HHS.

Not only is Kennedy saying little about microplastics, even as science mounts to confirm that he has been right to sound the alarm on this issue, but he’s part of an administration that is doing more than any in history to dismantle every mechanism that we could use to address this problem. The Trump administration has decimated the Environmental Protection Agency, are attempting to gut the Endangered Species Act, and are wrecking all the provisions for water protections that they can possibly find. On Wednesday,  in what EPA hatchet man Lee Zeldin called “the most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” the administration began rolling back the Clean Water Act itself, lifting most oversight of the nation’s wetlands and waterways in a dramatic reversal not just of Biden policy but of most other presidents since Nixon.

Another policy that will badly hamper any plastic-fighting efforts is the withdrawal of more than a billion in National Institutes of Health dollars for scientific research. Some of these cuts are being delayed by a court challenge but the policy has already disrupted medical research on many levels. In the case of Columbia, RFK celebrated the cuts on his X account and on the HHS website (because of alleged antisemitism). Research is inextricable from finding solutions to the microplastics problem, since it is so new and there is still so much that we don’t even understand about it: for example, why do people with dementia have much more plastic in their brains? Is the plastic causing the problem or is there a quality to the brain tissue -or the blood-brain barrier -- that makes it more absorbent or weaker? Without support for science, we won’t even have enough information to attack this problem.

The truth is, if RFK Jr were sincere about addressing food and environmental problems, he probably would never have joined the Trump administration in the first place. Indeed, the longer he stays in it, the more he just looks like yet another rich guy with a weird personality helping to sabotage our government. Despite a lifetime of environmentalism and vocal concern for public health, it is his own administration that is the biggest threat right now to our health and our planet. At this point he’s going to be lucky if history remembers him as the freak who left a dead bear in the park. He could go down as the guy who sounded the alarm on microplastics, only to sit back and let them addle our brains and threaten our food supply.