In the days since flash floods killed more than 100 people in Central Texas, various conspiracy theories have circulated on the right arguing that the storms were in fact the result of clandestine weather manipulation efforts. According to some—including former national security adviser Mike Flynn—those deadly rains were cooked up as a means to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency. “I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS,” far-right former special forces commander Pete Chambers posted on X. “WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?” (Cloud seeding—a long-held object of fascination on the right, not to be confused with cloudbusting—refers to the experimental practice of scattering dust particles through clouds to trigger rain and snow, the effects of which in the United States are currently much too limited to produce the scale of deluge that happened over the July 4 weekend.)
Perhaps in response to these sorts of conspiratorial MAGA-world concerns, Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin on Thursday morning announced an effort to “compile everything we know about contrails and geoengineering” and release it to the public. Contrails are cloud-like trails of condensation left behind by aircraft, known as “chemtrails” to those who believe they’re signs of the government clandestinely drugging the population with dangerous chemicals for the purposes of population control. Geoengineering is something of a catchall term that often refers to various controversial methods for deflecting solar radiation so as to cool the earth’s surface temperature. Zeldin is certainly giving chemtrail theorists more credence than they’ve enjoyed in previous administrations, and arguably elevating some crackpot theories as legitimate lines of inquiry. But the resources EPA links to largely debunk the fringe theories.
The real scandal, though, isn’t that Zeldin is talking about chemtrails, or even that the EPA seems to have devoted some amount of state resources to disproving the more conspiratorial beliefs of the MAGA coalition. Out in the open, Zeldin’s EPA has been dismantling protections against precisely the sorts of dangers that right-wingers warn are coming from alleged deep-state conspiracies: toxic, cancer-causing chemicals that corporations have lobbied to freely inject into our air, water, food, and bodies.
Earlier this week, for instance, the EPA withdrew a Biden-era proposal that would require plastics produced by Chevron and other major Republican donors to be free of 18 chemical contaminants. The rule was proposed in response to warnings about the so-called “chemical recycling” of plastics, pushed by the petrochemicals industry as a means to allay mounting concerns about plastic waste and its effects on human health. Among those was a substance intended to be used as “climate-friendly” jet fuel, the production of which—as The Guardian and ProPublica reported in 2022—would cause cancer in one out of four people exposed to it over the course of their lifetimes. Another plastic-based chemical that Zeldin’s EPA has just moved to greenlight is so risky that everyone exposed over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer, according to a document obtained via a public records request by ProPublica’s Sharon Lerner. The EPA has further terminated grants for research into the dangers of microplastics, including to a team of researchers at the University of Oregon that found they were present in 99 percent of seafood scientists sampled.
Despite pledging in 2019 to tackle “forever chemicals” known as PFAS and PFOS, certain types of which have been linked to cancer, the EPA announced in May that it would delay enforcing limits on their presence in drinking water until 2031. Among the broader suite of regulations Zeldin’s EPA has promised to roll back is one that would require coal-fired power plant operators to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities, limiting their ability to freely discharge toxins like mercury, arsenic, selenium, lead, and bromide and to threaten local drinking water supplies.
The above are just a few of the ways that Zeldin and the rest of the Trump administration are putting the public’s health and well-being at risk. Meanwhile, the White House’s wider attacks on the administrative state are threatening state capacities essential to protecting more people from disasters like the Hill Country rainstorms. Texas Senator Ted Cruz—who was on vacation in Greece over the holiday weekend—joined his party in voting for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which will slash funding to weather forecasting operations, as well as a $50 million grant program for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to study climate-related impacts on oceans, weather systems, and coastal ecosystems. The Trump administration has targeted NOAA—including the National Weather Service—for a 20 percent staffing cut.
Whether the theories are about Jeffrey Epstein or environmental threats, the Trump administration is willing to entertain speculation about government conspiracies so long as it doesn’t implicate it or its corporate donors. The most dangerous conspiracies, meanwhile, are broadcast proudly as White House achievements.
