STEVE MILLOY: Microplastics Hysteria Will Waste Taxpayer Money

The Trump administration announced a new initiative to tackle microplastics in the environment. It is a waste of time and taxpayer money, and worse.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. said that the federal government would spend $144 million “to measure, understand and to remove microplastics from the human body.”

Microplastics are microscopic bits of plastic ubiquitous in our environment. We’ve been manufacturing plastic, which is essential to modern society, for more than 100 years. There is no modern world without plastic.

As plastic slowly degrades in the environment, its tiny particles get everywhere – in our air, water and food. Human exposure to microplastics is unavoidable.

With respect to the human body and environment, plastics are essentially inert and non-reactive. That’s one reason they are so useful. The body manages microplastics by excreting them.

The microplastics scare became headline news in February 2025 when researchers reported that human brains contained as much as two plastic spoons’ worth of microplastics. But the study results were totally misleading.

The researchers reportedly examined the amount of microplastic particles in a few dozen human brains from autopsies occurring between 2016 and 2024. But as I showed at the time, even the study’s graph of the results contradicted the scary headlines.

The hypothesis of the microplastics scare is that microplastics accumulate in the body over time. But the graph showed that a 5-year-old who was autopsied in 2016 had more microplastics in the brain than a 75-year-old who was autopsied in 2024.