The 36-page official national strategy document bears the presidential seal and involves 10 agencies from across the federal government.
It isn’t the government’s policy on tariffs or border security. It’s President Trump’s master plan to eradicate paper straws and bring back plastic.
“My Administration is committed,” the document declares, to “ridding us of the pulpy, soggy mess that torments too many of our citizens whenever they drink through a paper straw.”
It’s a shot in the culture wars, critics say, and another example of the haphazard policies of an administration guided by Mr. Trump’s whims and dislikes, whether for paper straws, wind turbines or low-flow shower heads.
But there’s a twist: It complicates another, bigger public health question in the administration’s drive to roll back regulations.
In its attack on paper straws, the document devotes a robust eight pages to highlighting their health and environmental dangers. It points out, in particular, the dangers of PFAS, a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals that are used to make paper straws and other everyday products water-resistant but are also linked to serious health problems and are turning up in tap water around the country.
The Biden administration set strict new federal standards last year that tightened restrictions on PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily in the environment. But industry and utility groups sued, calling the standards “unattainable” and “onerous,” and have urged the Trump administration to roll them back.
It’s unclear whether Lee Zeldin, who leads Environmental Protection Agency, will oblige. The administration faces a May 12 deadline to decide whether to continue to defend the standards in court.
“Is Zeldin going to roll back PFAS drinking water standards when there’s this anti-PFAS screed out of the White House?” said Matthew Tejada, who leads environmental health policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If the White House is concerned about PFAS in straws, then can Zeldin pretend there’s no problem with PFAS in drinking water?”
Under Mr. Zeldin, the agency has embarked on a deregulatory push, targeting for repeal dozens of environmental regulations that limit toxic pollution. And he has filled the agency’s leadership ranks with lobbyists and lawyers from industries that have opposed environmental regulations.
At a news briefing with reporters on Monday, Mr. Zeldin said that the science on PFAS “was not declared as settled.”
“We’ve figured out some of the questions related to PFAS, but the research is important to continue,” Mr. Zeldin said. And regulations needed to be based on “less assumptions and more facts,” he said.
Yet Mr. Trump’s anti-paper-straw strategy document is more explicit about the chemicals.
“Scientists and regulators have had substantial concerns about PFAS chemicals for decades,” the White House paper says. “PFAS are harmful to human health, and they have been linked to harms affecting reproductive health, developmental delays in children, cancer, hormone imbalance, obesity, and other dangerous health conditions.”
This week, the White House repeated those warnings. “Paper straws contain dangerous PFAS chemicals — ‘forever chemicals’ linked to significant long-term health conditions — that infiltrate the water supply,” the administration said on Monday in an Earth Day statement.
Another wild card is the secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Addressing a forum on the health and the environmental effects of plastics on Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy listed PFAS among the chemicals he hoped to eliminate from the food system. “We’re going to get rid of whole categories of chemicals in our food that we have good reason to believe are harmful to human health,” he said.
Both the White House and the E.P.A. said there was no gap between their approaches to PFAS.
“President Trump and Administrator Zeldin are working lock-step to remove harmful toxins from the environment,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said. “The Trump administration, including Administrator Zeldin, has made it clear that PFAS are harmful to human health and further research on the danger of PFAS is critical to ensure we are making America healthy again.”
Molly Vaseliou, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., declined to comment specifically on whether the agency would seek to roll back PFAS drinking water standards, but she pointed to Mr. Zeldin’s long experience with PFAS issues.
Before joining the Trump administration, Mr. Zeldin served four terms as a congressman from Long Island, which has struggled with PFAS contamination. In 2020, he was one of 23 House Republicans who voted to pass the PFAS Action Act, a sweeping bill championed by Democrats that required the Environmental Protection Agency to limit the chemicals in drinking water and hold polluters responsible for cleanups.
“He was, and remains, a staunch advocate for protecting Long Islanders and all Americans from contaminated drinking water,” Ms. Vaseliou said.
Mr. Zeldin is correct that more research is needed to pin down the health effects of exposure to PFAS. Still, the evidence of the chemicals’ harm is mounting, especially for the most-studied kinds of PFAS. The White House strategy on straws lists that evidence, backed up by a seven-page bibliography.
“The E.P.A. conducted an analysis of current peer-reviewed scientific studies and found that PFAS exposure is linked to concerning health risks,” the document says.
They also include, according to the White House: decreased fertility, high blood pressure in pregnant women, low birth weight, accelerated puberty, behavioral changes in children, diminished immune systems and increased cholesterol.
Plastic also contains harmful chemicals. Microplastics are everywhere, polluting ecosystems and potentially harming human health. And critics point to how promoting plastic helps the fossil fuel industry, which produces the building blocks of plastic.
Still, Linda Birnbaum, a toxicologist and a former director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences who has been sounding the alarm on PFAS for decades, agreed with aspects of the White House document. “Their statements of all these adverse effects are well founded,” she said.
But if the Trump administration was concerned about the health effects of PFAS, they should be concerned about the chemicals’ presence all around us, she said, in food and food packaging, for example, and in drinking water. “Instead they’re spending all this effort trying to rally people around straws,” she said.
The debate over plastic straws reaches back to the mid-2010s, when they suddenly became a pariah for their role in an exploding plastic waste crisis. Some cities and retailers banned plastic straws, and a few states imposed restrictions. (Disability rights groups have expressed concerns about the bans, noting that some people need straws to drink safely.)
Alternatives to plastic proliferated: stainless steel or glass straws, as well as lids with spouts. But paper straws quickly became the main replacement. And, just as quickly, they were derided for their tendency to disintegrate into a mushy mess.
Around the same time, scientists started detecting PFAS in a variety of paper and plant-based straws, raising concerns that they were exposing people to harmful chemicals and that they were becoming yet another source of water pollution.
The president has portrayed the Biden-era measures as “a paper straws mandate,” though those plans didn’t specifically require a switch to paper straws.
His disdain for paper straws goes back years. His campaign for the 2020 election sold packs of 10 branded plastic straws for $15 with the tagline, “Liberal Paper Straws Don’t Work.”
In his grand strategy, Mr. Trump orders federal agencies to “be creative and use every available policy lever to end the use of paper straws nationwide.” Moreover, “taxpayer dollars should never be wasted, so no federal contracts or grants should fund paper straws or support any entities that ban plastic straws.”
Christine Figgener, a marine conservation biologist (who, a decade ago, posted a viral video of a sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck in one of its nostrils), said pitting paper against plastic ignored the easiest solution of all: Avoid straws.
Straws have become “the symbol of everything that’s unnecessary that we use in a society so dictated by convenience,” she said. “Why is America so obsessed with straws? Most people don’t need them.”
Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.
