This month, the U.S. Air Force made a surprise announcement that it is refusing to comply with an order to clean up drinking water that it contaminated with PFAS “forever chemicals”—substances that have been linked to hormone disruption, liver damage, and a range of other health problems. The rationale for halting the cleanup was this year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine, in which courts typically deferred to the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies’ authority to interpret and enforce environmental and consumer safety rules.
Overturning Chevron was one of the most consequential moves that former President Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees have made to date. But there’s now strong evidence that the former president would go further than his own justices in a second term, giving industry a freer hand to pollute with PFAS, pesticides, microplastics, and other toxic substances that have been shown to have, among other severe health effects, significant negative impacts on male fertility.
Trump is positioning himself as the candidate of unbridled masculinity. He’s depending on strong electoral support from young men. The former president sauntered into the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee to the tune of “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and accepted the nomination following a speech in which Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt and declared him a “gladiator.” J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has cited falling fertility rates as an existential threat to the nation’s future.
Yet—in the name of reducing bureaucratic red tape—Trump is proposing to deregulate substances that could make it harder to conceive children and could cause Americans’ testosterone levels to plummet. In seeking to shrink the administrative state, Trump could also shrink the testicles of American men.
While the former president has tried to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprints, environmental policies in the document were written by his current and former appointees and align directly with his own promises to gut environmental agencies in order to unleash industry from costly rules and regulations. The dismantling of the Chevron doctrine would have never been possible without Trump’s appointments to the high court—and he’s promising to appoint more judges with similar views and commitments.
The conservatives’ 2025 playbook would remove the “hazardous substances” classification of human-made PFAS chemicals—perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl, among other forever chemicals. Federal regulators just finalized the classification of these chemicals in April, owing to conclusive research that such chemicals present a danger to human health—including cancer, immune dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, liver problems, and fetus development issues. A growing range of research shows how such chemicals undermine the functioning of the endocrine system and undercut testosterone and sperm health. The plans from Trump advisers also seek to eliminate the government’s authority to track Americans’ cumulative exposure to toxic chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act—an essential tool for managing endocrine disrupters.
Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” document also explicitly encourages the next administration to approve pesticides more quickly, give industry the benefit of the doubt in terms of how the pesticides will be applied, and consider “the beneficial effects of pesticides.” Animal studies have found that some pesticides, for example, atrazine, can “demasculinize” male gonads. Another recent study suggested such chemicals may be contributing to a dramatic decline in sperm count among men globally.
Rolling back environmental and food safety regulation would likely boost profits for some industrial companies. It could arguably promote some short-term job creation. But these decisions could have serious long-term consequences for human health and for the lives of future generations. And, notably, these moves would go directly against the core interests and priorities of some important members of Trump’s new electoral coalition.
Today, male online influencers—many of whom obsess over the maximization of testosterone—are a source of high-octane support for Trump. Following Covid-19 lockdowns, scores of famous wellness influencers and members of now-sizable health-focused demographic subsets—organic moms, natural parenting advocates, fitness bros—turned away from Democrats, supporting third-party candidates, and, in many cases, supporting Trump. When the former president makes claims, as he did at the first presidential debate, that he had achieved “immaculate clean water and absolutely clean air” during his term in office, he’s signaling to a subset of supporters that he stands up for personal health and wellness, even if he rejects action on bigger-scale environmental issues like climate change.
But this is misleading. As president, Trump appointed chemical and plastics industry lobbyists to key roles in the oversight of food and water safety—giving Big Ag and other corporate profiteers a wish list of policy concessions at the expense of human health. And Project 2025’s plans to liberate “forever chemicals” like PFAS, cut staff at the EPA, and even defund and eliminate the Integrated Risk Information System that the U.S. government uses to assess risks from pesticides and other dangerous substances would take this even further. These plans—which are based on the agendas of industry lobbyists—would likely prevent federal authorities from taking precautionary actions against a variety of threats to the safety of food and water.
It’s understandable to see health and wellness as matters of personal responsibility. But government safeguards are essential, too. Even if you buy exclusively organic food and use the best possible water filtration, it’s impossible to fully defend yourself against a mass proliferation of microplastics and other chemicals that would come with widespread deregulation.
Male health and wellness influencers erupted in a collective freak-out earlier this year when academic research emerged showing the near-omnipresence of microplastics in human testicles—a situation that may be contributing to low sperm counts around the world. People are right to be concerned. But that concern should translate into political momentum against microplastics and toxic chemicals. While Trump panders to a base that wants men to be manly, he’s bowing to industry profiteers who have different interests.
