Citing the Trump administration’s promise to “Make America Healthy Again,” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed microplastics and pharmaceuticals on a draft list of contaminants maintained by the agency.

The Sixth Contaminant Candidate List includes known or likely contaminants in public water systems that are currently unregulated but may be subject to future regulation by the EPA.

In a joint announcement yesterday with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency heralded the move as a “historic” response to concerns raised by Americans over toxic chemicals and plastic pollution in drinking water.

But environmental defense groups, as well as food and water advocacy organizations, have criticized the action as political posturing without any regulatory teeth.

“This is just smoke and mirrors,” said Suzanne Novak, a senior attorney and director of drinking water advocacy at Earthjustice, an environmental public-interest group. “This is the first step in a process that almost always leads to not regulating.”

Placement on the Contaminant Candidate List (CCL) does not guarantee that the agency will eventually regulate microplastics. The Safe Drinking Water Act requires the EPA to publish a new list every five years, which the agency says it uses “to identify priority contaminants for regulatory decision making and information collection.”

But the EPA has set drinking water regulations for an exceedingly small number of new contaminants over the last two decades. And even that small set of recently added regulations has faced aggressive rollback attempts by Trump’s first and second administrations.

In 2011, the EPA decided to regulate perchlorate, a toxin used in rocket fuel and fireworks that has been linked to brain damage in infants. But in 2020, during Trump’s first term, the EPA withdrew its decision before a drinking water standard for the chemical could be set. A federal appeals court overturned the rollback, and the EPA is now required to finalize a maximum contaminant level for perchlorate by May 21, 2027.

Trump’s EPA has also announced plans to roll back Biden-era regulation of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), the only other new compounds to face national drinking water regulations in the last 20 years.

Microplastics do not need to be on the CCL for the EPA to research their potential health impacts, said Novak. And while the announcement touted a dialed-up commitment to microplastics research, the EPA’s research capacity could be limited, given Zeldin’s 2025 decision to eliminate the agency’s Office of Research and Development and to fire thousands of employees.

Nor does placement on the list require the EPA to monitor microplastic levels in drinking water sources. There is a separate list for that, the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR), the latest version of which is due to be finalized by the end of 2026.

If the EPA wishes to tackle the health and environmental threats posed by microplastics, the agency should commit to monitoring and place them on the UCMR list, said Erin Doran, senior attorney for Food & Water Watch, in a statement released by the watchdog group.

“Today’s announcement of including microplastics on CCL 6, while a step in the right direction, ultimately falls short on its own,” Doran said. “It does not reflect the urgent need for a comprehensive nationwide monitoring program for microplastics in drinking water now.”

At the joint EPA and Department of Health and Human Services briefing, HHS officials also announced a $144 million initiative, called STOMP, or Systematic Targeting Of Microplastics, that will invest in technology to monitor and remove microplastics from drinking water and design experiments to understand their effects on human health.

MAHA Action, a nonprofit organization associated with the Make America Health Again movement, listed the HHS initiative as a “MAHA Win” on their site.

It’s an empty victory, Novak said. “This isn’t news. They’re required to put contaminants on this list. And it says something that they’re trying to make this news to distract from all the actual, tangible actions they are taking to undermine people’s health.”