In Wisconsin, where late last year Donald Trump said at a campaign stop, “I’m an environmentalist … I want clean air and clean water—really clean water,” many people want that too. Like Americans across the country, many Wisconsinites have in recent years come to understand that they have been drinking water contaminated by highly toxic “forever chemicals,” compounds known as PFAS, for decades.  

This is a challenge for Trump the environmentalist, whose administration is widely expected to gut many environmental regulations and has already suspended work that would have put limits on PFAS. Yet Lee Zeldin, now the EPA’s administrator, said in his confirmation hearing last month that PFAS would be a “top priority” for the agency, and as a member of Congress, he sided with Democrats to back rules that would limit the chemicals in drinking water and make polluters pay for cleanup.

PFAS are the rare environmental issue that might evoke the bipartisan zeitgeist in which Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972. By then, President Richard Nixon had already overseen the creation of the EPA but vetoed the landmark water bill, which he thought was too expensive. But 17 Republicans joined with Democrats to override his veto. “If we cannot swim in our lakes and rivers, if we cannot breathe the air God has given us, what other comforts can life offer us?” Senator Howard Baker, a Republican of Tennessee, said on the October morning of the vote.

In this century, some Republicans have argued that PFAS measures are costly and come with legal burdens for businesses; the chemical industry has lobbied heavily against regulation in the U.S. and abroad. But like the environmental disasters of the 1970s, this one is alarming enough that politicians who might otherwise oppose regulation want the government to do something about it.

In his first term, Trump’s EPA issued a PFAS Action Plan to designate the compounds as hazardous, set limits, and make cleanup recommendations. But the White House also opposed a PFAS bill in Congress after the chemical industry objected to it, and the closest the administration came to fulfilling its own plans was submitting a proposal to regulate PFAS in drinking water on its very last day. In the next four years, PFAS could test whether Trump’s version of the EPA—stripped of many career employees and staffed with industry lobbyists—can do the job millions of Americans may want it to.

PFAS, as I’ve written before, are the DDT of this era, though perhaps it is more accurate to say they’re worse: Where DDT was a single compound with a single use, PFAS is an umbrella term for thousands of compounds used in a plethora of quotidian ways. They are often the reason “performance” fabrics on couches can resist stains, a rice cooker wipes clean so easily, and boots are waterproof. They make paper plates grease-resistant and conditioner extra silky. In the places where they are manufactured or are used to manufacture other things, decades of effluent have contaminated groundwater and fed into municipal water supplies. No one has figured out how to destroy the compounds, whose fluorine-carbon bond is the single most stable in organic chemistry, at scale.

And so they persist, virtually forever, cycling through the water system and accumulating in our bodies. PFAS weren’t a known concern when the Clean Water Act was created, nor were they on anyone’s radar when the Safe Drinking Water Act came into force in 1974. By the ’70s, however, 3M knew that a PFAS compound it had invented, and sold to DuPont to make Teflon, was accumulating in employees’ blood.

Now nearly every American has PFAS in theirs. Over the past half century, these compounds have been used in dozens of industries to manufacture thousands of products globally, creating a noxious waste stream that has infiltrated countless communities. Studies have linked exposure to PFAS with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, decreased fertility, and developmental problems in children, among other issues.

Last year, some two decades after the EPA began investigating these compounds, the Biden administration ordered water utilities to test for several kinds of PFAS in their water, and then begin all but eliminating those compounds, for the first time. The agency says that, much like for lead, there is no safe level of two of the most common of these compounds. It also released a report warning of the dangers of spreading sewage sludge—often highly contaminated by PFAS—on fields as fertilizer, a practice that continues in many states. And it was about to set the first discharge limits for PFAS in industrial wastewater—a rule the Trump administration has now put on pause. (An EPA spokesperson told me this action was part of “common transition procedures.”) This means municipal water systems will have to test for PFAS, but manufacturers will not need to measure or limit PFAS in the wastewater they release to those systems.

In the meantime, American towns and cities are trying to deal with PFAS’s threat piecemeal. In Campbell, Wisconsin, a town on a riverine island where people watch bald eagles hunt for fish, and raise their kids in the houses where they were raised, water samples from residents’ wells first came back positive for PFAS in 2020. Firefighting foam, made of PFAS, was used to put out plane-crash fires and to train firefighters at a nearby airport for decades. Residents now wonder if that explains the many unusual diagnoses among their neighbors, Lee Donahue, a Campbell town supervisor, told me: testicular cancer in a 20-year-old, or an ovarian cancer that usually strikes later in life in a woman in her 30s.

Nearly five years after those water tests, residents are still drinking bottled water while the town board works to reroute the drinking-water supply away from contaminated wells and toward a new source. That switch is partly funded by grants from President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Trump has put on pause, and partly by EPA grants secured by Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, and the town’s representative, Derrick Van Orden, a Republican. “This isn’t the most popular Republican position, I don’t really care,” Van Orden told the local ABC affiliate at the time the grant was announced. “When you turn on your faucet, it doesn’t ask if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”

Campbell is a microcosm of a swing state: It split its vote almost exactly 50–50 between Trump and Kamala Harris, Donahue, who is also a town election worker, told me. On the other side of the state, Marinette, a city of 11,000, is an “extremely red community” that is dealing with its own PFAS problems, Cindy Boyle, a former town-board chairperson, told me. At 53, Boyle realizes she may have been drinking water tainted with PFAS her whole life: Tyco Fire Products tested its firefighting foam on land a half mile from the house where she raised her three sons, and its effluent was spread as sludge on fields within a mile of the house she grew up in, she said. The company was sued by the state, public water systems, and some residents in the area. Boyle was not one of them; still, the company is now providing a whole-house filter at her home, and distributing bottled water. (Tyco settled the suits with the water systems and residents without admitting wrongdoing; the state’s suit is on pause.)

But damage may have already been done. She had her thyroid removed in her 30s; her sister has thyroid disease now, and her mother had kidney cancer. Her husband has Parkinson’s disease; recent research shows that PFAS can accumulate in the brain and links them to neurological disorders. Boyle is registered independent from a conservative family, and she’d “take a Bush any day now,” she told me. But she says she can’t vote for anyone who isn’t interested in clamping down on PFAS.

In Wisconsin, Democrats and Republicans are currently locked in a battle at the statehouse over how to do that. Republicans have been holding up a proposed fund for testing and remediation out of fears it could force landowners to pay for cleanups of pollution they didn’t cause; on Tuesday Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, announced a state budget meant to resolve their concerns and release the funds—if the legislature passes it.

In the absence of federal regulation, states’ efforts to address PFAS have been patchwork and politically unpredictable. In West Virginia, which voted for Trump by a ratio of 7 to 3 and is arguably the birthplace of the PFAS crisis in the U.S., former Governor Jim Justice, a Republican, passed legislation to curb it. In North Carolina, where an estimated 2.5 million residents have PFAS in their tap water, Republican appointees to a state commission have stalled rule making that would set clear limits on PFAS’s presence there. Maine, which has a Democrat-controlled legislature and a widespread PFAS crisis, has passed some of the most stringent PFAS bills in the nation. New York was among the first states to declare certain PFAS hazardous substances, but it also plans to double the volume of sludge it spreads on fields by 2050.   

Tackling PFAS contamination meaningfully will require federal effort. During Trump’s previous term, he appointed a former chemical-industry executive to oversee toxic chemicals at the EPA, where she rewrote rules, making it harder to track their health impacts. Back then, Americans in some states were just beginning to understand the threats PFAS posed. Now, eight years later, the landscape is very different—and states are watching. In his time as a congressional representative from New York, Zeldin was in favor of getting rid of PFAS contamination, going so far as to urge the EPA to move faster to regulate it. At his confirmation hearing, he gave no details of how he would proceed on PFAS as EPA administrator, and when I asked the EPA for more specifics, a spokesperson pointed me to the action plan from the first term. Whatever steps Zeldin does take will show what making an issue a priority looks like for Trump’s EPA in this term, and define how far this administration’s environmentalism actually goes.

From inside the room, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings felt at times more like an awards show than a job interview. While the health-secretary nominee testified, his fans in the audience hooted and hollered in support. Even a five-minute bathroom break was punctuated by a standing ovation from spectators and cheers of “We love you, Bobby!” There were some detractors as well—one protester was ushered out after screaming “He lies!” and interrupting the proceedings—but they were dramatically outnumbered by people wearing Make America Healthy Again T-shirts and Confirm RFK Jr. hats.

The MAHA faithful have plenty of reason to be excited. If confirmed, RFK Jr. would oversee an agency that manages nearly $2 trillion, with the authority to remake public health in his image. “He just represents the exact opposite of all these establishment agencies,” Brandon Matlack, a 34-year-old who worked on Kennedy’s presidential campaign, told me on Wednesday. We chatted as he waited in a line of more than 150 people that snaked down a flight of stairs—all of whom were hoping to get a seat for the hearing. Many of them were relegated to an overflow room.

Of course, Matlack and other RFK Jr. fans could be in for a letdown. Whether Kennedy will actually be confirmed as health secretary is still up in the air. There was less raucous cheering during the hearing on Thursday, as Kennedy faced tough questions from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, whose vote could be decisive in determining whether Kennedy gets confirmed. But the realization of RFK Jr.’s vision for health care in America may not hinge on his confirmation. The MAHA movement has turned the issue of chronic disease into such a potent political talking point that people like Matlack are willing to trek from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., just to support Kennedy. Politicians across the country are hearing from self-proclaimed “MAHA moms” (and likely some dads too) urging them to enact reforms. They’re starting to listen.

Kennedy is best known as an anti-vaccine activist who spreads conspiracy theories. His more outlandish ideas are shared by some MAHA supporters, but the movement itself is primarily oriented around improving America’s diet and the health problems it causes us. Some of the ways MAHA wants to go about that, such as pressuring food companies to not use seed oils, are not exactly scientific; others do have some research behind them. Consider artificial food dyes, a major MAHA rallying cry. Multiple food dyes have been shown in animal studies to be carcinogenic. And although a candy-corn aficionado likely isn’t going to die from the product’s red dye, the additive is effectively banned in the European Union. (Kennedy claims that food dyes are driving down America’s life expectancy. There’s no evidence directly linking food dyes to declining human life expectancy, though one study did show that they cut short the life of fruit flies.)

Until recently, concerns over food additives, such as artificial dyes, were the domain of Democrats. In 2023, California became the first state in the nation to ban certain food additives: red dye 3, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil, and propylparaben. But now food-additive bans are being proposed in Donald Trump country, including West Virginia, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Some of the efforts, such as the Make Arkansas Healthy Again Act, are an explicit attempt to enact Kennedy’s agenda.

In other states, something a bit more Schoolhouse Rock is happening: The purported dangers of food ingredients are riling up Americans, who are then going to their lawmakers seeking change. Eric Brooks, a Republican state legislator in West Virginia, told me that he decided to copy California’s food-additive bill after being prodded by a constituent. “I said, Well, I don’t normally look out West, especially out to California, for policy ideas, to be honest with you,” he told me. “But once I had done the research and I saw the validity of the issue, I said, Okay.” Although his bill, which was first introduced in January 2024, did not move forward in the previous legislative session because, in his words, “there were bigger fish to fry,” Brooks hopes the national interest coming from the MAHA movement will motivate West Virginia legislators to take another look at the proposal.

Other red-state efforts to follow California’s lead have similarly not yet been passed into law, but the fact that the bills have been introduced at all signifies how motivated Republicans are on the topic. The MAHA moms may be enough to propel Kennedy to the job of health secretary. One Republican, Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, told Kennedy on Thursday that he plans to vote to confirm him because doing anything else “would be thumbing my nose at that movement.” Republicans are not only introducing bills to ban food additives; they’re also taking up Kennedy’s other MAHA priorities. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently asked the federal government for permission to forbid food-stamp recipients in her state from using their benefits to buy junk food—a policy Kennedy has repeatedly called for.

Over the past two days, senators seemed shocked at just how loyal a following Kennedy has amassed. One pejoratively called him a prophet. MAHA believers I spoke with made clear that they want RFK Jr.—and only RFK Jr.—to lead this movement. Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer who goes by “Food Babe” on Instagram, told me that, if Kennedy fails to be confirmed, there “will be an uprising like you have never seen.”

But at this point, it seems that the movement could live on even without Kennedy. On Wednesday, the Heritage Foundation hosted a press gaggle with MAHA surrogates. Heritage, an intellectual home of the modern conservative movement, is now praising the banning of food dyes. This is the same pro-business think tank that a decade ago warned that should the FDA ban partially hydrogenated oils, trans fats that were contributing to heart attacks, the agency “would be taking away choices,” “disrespecting” Americans’ autonomy, and mounting “an attack on dietary decisions.”

Republicans have generally been a bulwark for the food industry against policies that could hurt its bottom line. Democrats and Republicans in Washington today seem more aligned on food issues than ever before. “When you have members on both sides of the aisle whose constituencies are now extremely interested in understanding fully what’s in their food products, it does shift the game a bit,” Brandon Lipps, a food lobbyist and a former USDA official under Trump, told me. After all, even Bernie Sanders, despite chastising Kennedy multiple times during this week’s confirmation hearings, professed his support for aspects of the MAHA movement. “I agree with you,” Sanders told Kennedy on Thursday, that America needs “a revolution in the nature of food.” During the same hearing, Cassidy said that he is struggling with Kennedy’s candidacy because, despite their deep disagreements on vaccine policy, on “ultra-processed foods, obesity, we are simpatico. We are completely aligned.”

Although MAHA has shown itself to be a unifying message, the real test will come down to the brass tacks of any political movement: passing actual legislation. How willing lawmakers—especially those with pro-business proclivities—will be to buck the status quo remains to be seen. Politicians have proved eager to speak out against ultra-processed foods; in that sense, MAHA is winning. But policy victories may still be a ways off.