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The Trump administration wrecked my footnotes. It may seem petty amid all the wreckage to bring up bibliographic details, but scientific literature is based on the stability of citations. A threat to a reference list is significant in itself, but it also stands as symbolic of the ongoing assaults on science and health. I’ll explain, but first, some context.
Concerned Health Professionals of New York (CHPNY) is the program I direct within SEHN. For many years, we have generated public health reports that compile—and translate into plain English—all the relevant peer-reviewed science on topics of urgent interest to the communities with which we work, from the indoor air pollution created by gas stoves to radioactive wastewater generated by fracking wells. Our reports make an evidence-based case for ending our dependency on natural gas and played a role in winning a statewide ban on fracking in New York. The conclusions of our fully referenced fracking science Compendium were even echoed by New York State's Health Commissioner when he announced the ban in December 2014.
That particular report has since been updated six more times. In October 2023, we released the 9th edition of the Compendium, with all of its 2,557 footnotes.
Now let's jump to 2025. Last year, after 53 years of publication by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) went dark. EHP was one of the few peer-reviewed journals that was funded and published by the federal government. NIEHS is situated within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, headed up, since February of last year, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Research published in that journal is cited widely in our reports.
EHP had been going strong, with a consistently high “impact factor” (a measurement of a journal’s prestige or importance within its field, based on how often it is cited) and, as stated by its Editor-in-Chief Joel Kaufman, MD, at its half-century mark in 2022, demonstrably continuing to “support improvements in environmental health.”
In April 2025, EHP announced that it would not be accepting new manuscript submissions, “due to recent changes in operational resources.” The whole site, with its entire archive of back volumes, disappeared in December. But—likely because public access to government documents is the law, and EHP articles are government documents—access to the over 18,000 articles can still be found at their secondary PubMed Central web addresses.
Good news: EHP has returned, with its first edition in nearly a year published this month. The journal was taken in by the American Chemical Society (ACS), publisher of over 90 peer-reviewed journals, with Kaufman in place as Editor-in-Chief and commitments by ACS to maintaining EHP’s open access and to “preserving its editorial independence and ensuring its continuity for the global scientific community.” Some people are rightfully concerned that ACS “receives significant chemical industry contributions for its awards and collaborative research initiatives and suggests this could pose a conflict of interest.” We join them in urging “a firewall between such private donors and the editorial processes of its publications.”
Meanwhile, the many dozens of EHP footnotes in our reports currently contain dead links as they reflect the original EHP web addresses, now gone. These web addresses were based on the DOI, the digital object identifier. All journal articles get a DOI; meant to be “a persistent identifier, it is a long-lasting reference to an object or to information about an object.” Well, they’re not so persistent and long-lasting when the Trump administration gets a hold of them.
Good news again: ACS intends to load the full EHP archive onto its platform in the coming months. I’ve been in touch with staff there about the footnote problem, and they’re on it. It’s sounding promising that some technical gymnastics will eventually redirect these references to the appropriate place on their new site.
From a public and environmental health lens, a lot of waste we can’t afford is taking place within this administration and because of it: wasted expertise, wasted momentum, wasted time. Mucking up the accessibility of scientific literature, even temporarily, is a waste. I may have spent a few afternoons researching what happened to my footnotes—thanks to this administration’s contempt for environmental health—but this pales compared to other impacts of their undermining of federal science and health agencies. From the 10,000 lost science positions, to the thousands of stalled or destroyed experiments and clinical trials due to cancelled or suspended grants, the harm is immeasurable.
We persevere in our mission to forge law, ethics, and science into tools for action, and we have remarkable role models and colleagues with whom to do so. This month we welcome a guest contribution by one of those people: Robert M. Gould, MD, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), San Francisco Bay Chapter (please see his further affiliations at the end of his piece). Dr. Gould reflects on a 65-year journey from the founding of PSR during a time of escalating danger of nuclear catastrophe to our current moment of “the Trump administration’s full-scale assault on planetary health.” You’ll read about the inspiring campaigns and accomplishments of PSR and its range of partners, with real guideposts for all of us moving forward.
In her complementary column, this month Sandra Steingraber brings her voice to the lessons of the campaign for nuclear disarmament and the folly of backyard bomb shelters, coupled with the lessons of the Silence = Death AIDS era that revealed the need for systems thinking to combat epidemics.
Toward justice, peace, and health,
Carmi Orenstein, MPH
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