What A Zicklin Prof’s Research Taught Us About the Make America Healthy Again Movement
January 27, 2026Are there toxins in those tater tots? Probably, if recent research by a Zicklin School of Business professor is any indication. But what she subsequently learned about the new leadership in Washington was worse, galvanizing her to pen an article that was just published in the prestigious medical journal, JAMA Pediatrics.
Let’s back up a few months. In October of 2025, Professor Valerie Watnick (Department of Law) had just published evidence in the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics showing that for the past 20 years, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has failed to protect U.S. children from pesticide residues on food.
At about the same time, the Trump Administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission published its own report, Make Children Healthy Again. The document emphasized the special risks kids face from exposure to toxic chemicals in the environment.
Children are uniquely susceptible to pesticide harm because of several factors, Watnick explains. They’re closer to the ground, where toxic substances tend to settle. Their bodies are smaller, meaning they ingest more food and water per pound of body weight. They also eat a less varied diet: “If apples, for example, are tainted with pesticide residue, a lot of kids will be ingesting it,” Watnick says.
For these reasons, the landmark Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) of 1996 mandated that the EPA must set a residue limit known as a tolerance (i.e., the amount of pesticide residue that can safely remain on food that is sold to consumers) for every pesticide on the market. The FQPA further mandated a 10x “child safety factor,” meaning that to protect children, the tolerance limit must be ten times safer if there is evidence of toxicity or if research is incomplete.
Prof. Watnick and Zicklin alumna SJ Beaumont, Esq. (left to right)
Watnick’s Yale Law School-published research—which she co-wrote with SJ Beaumont, Esq. (MS, ’25), a Zicklin alumna who is a legal researcher and dual U.S.- and UK-qualified lawyer—reviewed thousands of EPA decisions published since the 1996 FQPA legislation. Watnick and Beaumont found that the extra child safety factor was only applied in about 15 percent of tolerance decisions. So, when MAHA released its own report on toxic substances and protecting children, Watnick thought the government might be changing its tune.
“The MAHA report catalogues the terrible health effects of these pesticides—increases in childhood asthma, cancers, ADHD, autism, and so forth,” Watnick notes. “As I was reading it, I was hoping it indicated that the new administration was genuinely concerned about kids’ health and that the EPA would be ramping up enforcement of the child safety factor under the Food Quality Protection Act.”
But as she continued reading, she found her hopes dashed.
“The MAHA report refers to pesticides as ‘crop protection tools,’ and cautions against any robust protective action,” Watnick says. “And what’s even worse than this euphemistic rebranding of what is essentially poison, the report also hints that the cost of food production should be considered when setting pesticide tolerance levels. This is extraordinary, because the original FQPA legislation didn’t allow for cost-benefit analysis for most pesticides. It said that tolerances must be set so that they are safe for children, period.”
Despite her discouragement with the MAHA report, Watnick was heartened by two events that occurred after she read it.
A conversation with a pediatrician about her research on EPA enforcement and the MAHA report convinced her to submit a paper on the topic to a medical journal—a novelty for a law professor accustomed to publishing in top legal journals. “This children’s doctor said, ‘You should write something on this and submit it for publication,’” Watnick remembers. “He told me, ‘Our doctors would want to know about this and read about this.’”
Fast forward a couple of months. In December, JAMA Pediatrics, a publication of the American Medical Association, published Watnick’s position paper after peer review that reiterated that the topic would be of broad interest to pediatricians and policymakers. The paper, “Change in U.S. Pesticide Policy Still Needed to Protect Children,” concluded that “the MAHA report signals no real change in pesticide policy to better protect children.”
The second event further heartened Watnick. A representative of an EPA-adjacent group asked her for a copy of all her research related to pesticide regulation and the most recent Yale paper demonstrating the EPA’s two decades of failure to enforce the 10x child safety factor to protect children from for pesticide residues on food.
“This was legitimately someone with a professional interest in having the EPA do better,” Watnick offers. “I found that encouraging.”
In the meantime, Watnick will continue with her research and keep a close eye on further regulatory developments in this area.