The Trump Administration’s Pro-Cancer Agenda

WASHINGTON, D.C.  – The Trump administration is waging a concerted attack on the nation's responsibility to protect the public against toxics and radiation, deliberately ignoring that cancer that kills more than 600,000 Americans every year, according to a new analysis released today by NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). 

The Trump Administration’s Pro-Cancer Agenda details how this administration has undermined protections from cancer, all to help the chemical, oil, coal, and nuclear industries. Americans could face an extraordinary increase in exposure to carcinogens as a result.

“At the behest of the oil, chemical, coal and nuclear industries the Trump administration is systematically dismantling the nation’s cancer protections. It is disregarding science and threatening to supercharge an epidemic of cancer, affecting nearly every family in the country,” said Erik D. Olson, senior strategic director for health at NRDC. “Instead of making America healthy again, with these actions the administration is working on behalf of polluters and chemical makers to expose us all to more carcinogens.”

For five decades the American government has been committed to fighting a War On Cancer, but this administration has switched sides, waging a War to Promote Cancer.

President Trump promised that his administration would “make America healthy again” and would take actions “drastically lowering chronic disease rates and ending childhood chronic disease.” But his administration’s actions tell a very different story, including: 

• Dismantling protections against carcinogenic PFAS “forever chemicals”;
• Rolling back radiation safeguards for nuclear plants and nearby communities;
• Expanding production of the weed killer Roundup and supporting immunity from liability for its manufacturers, despite substantial evidence that the active ingredient glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen;
• Giving producers of carcinogenic ethylene oxide and numerous other cancer-causing toxic chemicals a free pass to keep polluting;
• Revisiting standards that would finally phase out the use of cancer-causing asbestos;
• Gutting the scientific infrastructure at the Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other agencies, thereby weakening their ability to independently determine which pollutants or other agents cause cancer or are otherwise dangerous and how much exposure poses a threat to human health.

The chemical and nuclear industries have long sought to overturn the standard of “no safe level of exposure” to carcinogens, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 outlined much the same goal. For decades, federal health and environmental agencies have generally recognized that exposure to carcinogens – even at very low levels – can carry some degree of cancer risk, so exposure to cancerous agents should be kept as low as feasible. Abandoning that scientific principle is at the foundation of the administration’s pro-cancer agenda.

Cancer is an epidemic in the United States. Rates of breast cancer have been increasing over the past two decades, with younger women facing a steeper increase in diagnosis. People younger than 50 years old have experienced a 2.9 percent increase of colon cancer each year from 2013 to 2022. Cancer is the number one cause of death by disease among children and adolescents. Brain and central nervous system tumors are the leading cause of cancer death in children, and far too many young adults are being diagnosed before the age of 35. 

The Trump administration’s actions could be checked by Congress, which has both the authority and the responsibility to provide oversight of the administration’s actions and to use its power to demand that the government protect the public from cancer-causing agents. 

“The Trump administration remains unconstrained from needlessly exposing Americans to cancer-causing substances and toward rewarding the industries responsible for pollution,” said Olson. “Families and communities are left to bear the consequences on their own.”

Established in 1970, NRDC (the Natural Resources Defense Council) works to safeguard the earth, its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends. Our team of more than 800 lawyers, policy experts, scientists, economists, and communications specialists work across the United States and around the world, from offices in Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Santa Monica, as well as a representative office in Beijing and affiliate offices in New Delhi (through NRDC’s wholly owned for-profit subsidiary, NRDC India Private Limited) and London (through its UK-based partner NRDC International).