Last week, on May 21, the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure adopted measures to shore up safety of the nation’s freight trains by requiring two-man crews on high-hazard trains, better protections to identify defects on trains, and mandating much greater oversight by the Secretary of Transportation over the nation’s privately owned railroads, especially over high-hazard trains.

The entire bill was amended to the BUILD America 250 Act before it passed out of the House Committee by a vote of 54-11. It’s headed to the full House for a vote, and then to the Senate.

In East Palestine, Ohio – the site of one of America’s worst railroad crashes – an investigation revealed that a wheel bearing on one of the train cars had overheated and ignited a fire under the car – a fire that was visible on a Ring camera 20 miles before the train cars derailed on February 3, 2023.

“That disaster did not happen in a vacuum,” said Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, the committee member who introduced the changes. “It exposed serious weaknesses in the freight rails industry safety practices, particularly when it comes to transporting hazardous materials through our communities.”

The safety measures were part of the Railway Safety Act, introduced by Rep. Nehls and modeled on a bill of the same name introduced in March 2023 by then Ohio Senator, JD Vance.

At the markup of the BUILD Act, Rep. Nehls said that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has been on the scene of 53 rail accidents since 2024 – accidents that have involved 17 deaths and 10 injuries. Of these, he said, 27 were “worker-related.”

The NTSB saw a 33% increase in rail investigations in 2025 compared to 2024.

The railroads subject to the new safety measures are what’s called the Class 1 railroads – the six major companies that operate trains between states. They are: CSX, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe), Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Kansas City.

Through their association, the American Association of Railroads, they opposed the new protections, while the railroad workers’ union supported them.

The new safety measures also include a confidential reporting system that Class 1 railroads will be required to adopt and that will allow employees of railroads to report dangerous incidents and close-calls without fear of reprisals.

Rep. Nehls said his amendment would help prevent wheel bearing failures by requiring Class 1 railroads to “deploy better detection technology and install additional sensors near populated areas” and would improve safety by prohibiting arbitrary time limits on safety inspections.

But Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure, opposed the Nehls railway safety language, saying the provision to require a crew of at least two people wouldn’t have mattered for East Palestine as there were three people in the cab of the Norfolk Southern train that derailed there.

“What’s more, we don’t need anybody in the cab,” he said on May 21. “With today’s technology and positive train control, these trains can be run from the dispatch center. That’s a fact. We don’t need anybody else in the cab.”

While former president Joe Biden did not travel to East Palestine until a year after the derailment, Vance visited the village multiple times in the days, weeks, and months after Feb. 3, 2023.

On the two-year anniversary in February of 2025, Vice President Vance told reporters that he was hopeful that the city of East Palestine would be “more prosperous than it was before this disaster happened in the first place,” after cleanup and through the rebuilding process.

“That’s not going to happen overnight,” Vance continued. “Of course, I’m a realist about this, but I just want the people to know here that President Trump, me, and the entire administration are committed to ensuring that their government does right by them and will keep on working at it in the months and the years to come.”

Vance remains committed. In a May 19 post on X, he wrote: “President Trump is keeping his promise to the people of East Palestine. The Trump Administration will never forget you. Our message to Congress is clear: pass the Railway Safety Act.”

Ahead of last week’s vote, President Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. both urged members of the Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure to approve the proposed upgraded safety measures.

“I have long said that the horrific tragedy that beset East Palestine in 2023, along with Sleepy Joe Biden’s utterly incompetent response, must NEVER happen again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on May 19, imploring all Republicans on the committee to vote for the Nehls amendment.

Kennedy, a longtime environmental lawyer who represented multiple families who were victims of the East Palestine disaster, wrote on X: “East Palestine reminded the country that a single derailment can devastate an entire community’s health, environment, and future…I’ve spent decades fighting to protect communities from toxic chemical exposure, and the families in East Palestine deserve lasting accountability and stronger safeguards to prevent this from ever happening again.”

What happened in East Palestine?

Life abruptly changed in East Palestine, Ohio, at about 9 p.m. on Feb. 3, 2023. That’s when 38 of the 151 cars that were part of the Norfolk Southern train heading east towards the Pennsylvania border derailed, including 11 that contained flammable chemicals including vinyl chloride and butyl acylate.

Several cars caught fire and burned, sending huge clouds of black smoke into the air and releasing toxic chemicals.

Three days after the crash, a Norfolk Southern contractor detonated five of the nine cars carrying hazardous material that hadn’t derailed, sending a massive cloud of black smoke into the sky that was visible for miles and that was later likened to a mushroom cloud created by a nuclear bomb.

The dark cloud of chemical-filled smoke could be seen for miles.

In the detonation, the train cars spilled the rest of their contents into a drainage ditch connecting to Sulphur Run, a stream that flows through the heart of East Palestine.

Two years on, in 2025, East Palestine residents still complained about a toxic smell in the air, burning eyes, headaches, and rashes among other health ailments, even though federal and state agencies had repeatedly said tests showed that the air and water were safe.

Now, with the bill through the House committee, President Trump, VP Vance and HHS Secretary Kennedy hope it will pass the full House and Senate when it comes up for vote later this year.

Related reading:

On April 2, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within Health and Human Services (HHS), unveiled a $144 million program—STOMP (Systematic Targeting Of MicroPlastics)—designed to confront microplastics as an urgent environmental and human health challenge.

HHS made the historic announcement in tandem with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

With the recent release of the Plastic Detox documentary, public attention is catching up to what the science has been signaling: we are not just surrounded by plastic—it is accumulating in our bodies.

Once assumed to be inert packaging, plastics have quietly crossed a dangerous threshold: they are now understood to fragment into microscopic particles that enter the body through the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and even the clothes we wear, embedding themselves in tissues and interacting with our biology in ways we are only beginning to understand.

“Today, HHS is taking decisive action to confront microplastics as a growing threat to human health,” said Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on April 2.“Americans deserve clear answers about how microplastics in their bodies affect their health.”

In lock step with Kennedy, EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, said, “For too long, Americans have vocalized concerns about plastics and pharmaceuticals in their drinking water. That ends today.”

Zeldin continued, “By placing microplastics and pharmaceuticals on the Contaminant Candidate List for the first time ever, EPA is sending a clear message: we will follow the science, we will pursue answers, and we will hold ourselves to the highest standards to protect the health of every American family.”

Kennedy and Zeldin capture both the urgency and the unease of the moment. Microplastics are no longer a distant environmental issue; they are an immediate biological one.Particles, small enough to evade detection yet persistent enough to accumulate, have now been identified in the human brain, lungs, arterial plaques, reproductive tissues, and the placentas and breastmilk of mothers.

Against this backdrop, Thursday afternoon’s announcement feels less like a research initiative and more like a necessary turning point designed to confront microplastics at their root.

The Phases of STOMP

STOMP is structured as a coordinated, multi-phase effort to build the scientific and technical foundation that the field currently lacks. The program will begin by developing standardized, highly sensitive methods to detect and quantify microplastics and nanoplastics in human tissues and fluids, a task previously hampered by inconsistent measurement techniques across laboratories.

From there, researchers will map how different types of plastics enter the body, where they accumulate, and how they interact with biological systems. This includes understanding how plastic particles cross cellular barriers, distribute across organ systems, and potentially disrupt key physiological pathways. A central component of this work is the creation of a risk stratification framework—ranking microplastics by their relative biological harm and, for the first time, giving scientists, clinicians, and policymakers a shared answer to which exposures matter most.

Only after that foundation is established does the program move into its most ambitious phase: removal. Drawing on pharmaceutical biology and bioremediation science, STOMP aims to design targeted strategies to reduce microplastic burden in the body. These new approaches can eventually allow clinicians not just to detect exposure, but to intervene in ways that are precise, safe, and scalable.

In that sense, STOMP is more than a research initiative. It represents a shift from passive awareness to active response, an acknowledgment that what was once invisible must now become measurable, and that what is measurable can be addressed.

STOMP also reflects a broader focus within HHS toward confronting root causes rather than managing consequences. By prioritizing measurement, transparency, and targeted intervention, the agency makes clear that environmental exposures can no longer remain peripheral to our health.

The Microplastics Daily Routine

Often, microplastics feel abstract, but in reality, exposure is built into some of the most routine parts of daily life, especially how we prepare food and beverages. Heat, friction, and repeated contact with plastic materials create the perfect conditions for these particles to shed directly into what we consume.

One of the clearest examples comes from something widely perceived as a health-conscious habit: tea. A widely cited study found that a single nylon or PET plastic teabag, when brewed in hot water, can release approximately 11.6 billion microplastic particles and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles into a cup of tea. These are not trace contaminants; they are orders of magnitude higher than most other known exposure sources in a single serving – often repeated daily for weeks, months, and potentially years.

Coffee presents a similar, though more variable, pathway. Studies of plastic-based drip coffee bags have shown they can release over 10,000 microplastic particles per cup when exposed to hot water. With single-serve systems such as the Keurig K-Cup, the data is not yet available, but the mechanism is clear: hot water is forced through plastic capsules, filters, and internal components, creating multiple opportunities for particle shedding and chemical leaching. Research has confirmed the presence of plastic-associated compounds, including endocrine-disrupting chemicals, in beverages prepared this way, even if precise particle counts per cup are not yet known.

These simple daily routines highlight a critical reality: microplastic exposure does not occur “out there” in the environment. It is happening in your home. Everyday.

Microplastic Soup

What makes microplastics particularly concerning is not just their presence, but how they behave once inside the body.

Unlike a single, well-defined toxin, microplastics are highly variable because they consist of different plastic polymers and can carry or release chemicals such as phthalates, bisphenols, heavy metals, and other environmental contaminants, each with distinct biological effects. Some particles may become trapped in tissues and contribute to local inflammation or oxidative stress. Emerging research has detected microplastics in arterial plaque, where their presence has been associated with higher cardiovascular risk, including stroke.

There is also early evidence that smaller particles, particularly nanoplastics, can cross the blood-brain barrier and also the placenta barrier. This raises important questions about impacts not only on individual health, but on fetal development and potential long-term effects that are still largely unknown.

For the first time, the central question is no longer how much plastic is in our environment; it is how much is in us, and what that means for our health, our fertility, and future generations.

A Public Health Inflection Point

What distinguishes the STOMP program is that it is an upstream investment in understanding and ultimately mitigating a foundational exposure shaping human health.

If microplastics are accumulating in critical tissues, and early evidence suggests they are, the stakes may extend across generations, particularly given growing concern about potential impacts on reproductive health. While the full effects are not yet established in humans, the question is no longer whether microplastics matter. It is how long we can afford to wait before we fully understand and can address their impact.

STOMP offers a structured path forward, beginning by measuring, prioritizing, and ultimately intervening in an exposure that has, until now, remained largely invisible.

“Microplastics are in every organ we look at—in ourselves and in our children. But we don’t know which ones are harmful or how to remove them,” said Alicia Jackson, Ph.D., ARPA-H Director, per Thursday’s HHS press release. “Nobody wants unknown particles accumulating in their body. The field is working in the dark. STOMP is turning on the lights.”