MAHA Strategy Report Finds the Movement at a Crossroads

There are a couple streaks of color. For instance, the bright red lettering in the warning signs, with the skull and crossbones for anybody who might not be able to read. “Keep out,” they say. “Poison.”

A figure in a white plastic hazmat suit strides onto the field to begin a two-day fumigation job. He, too, sports a little color, in the Barbie pink plastic of his respirator filters.

The job calls for K-PAM HL, an anti-weed fumigant listed by California pesticide regulators as corrosive and poisonous, prone to windborne drift.

Cars and industrial farm machinery whizz and rumble by. A quarter mile away, farmworkers labor over crops already growing in the open fields.

This is the kind of farming Joel Salatin wants to transform.

Salatin is an author and public speaker who describes himself as a “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer.” He’s widely revered by people who question industrial agriculture, with its heavy reliance on industrial fertilizer and pesticides.

He doesn’t necessarily propose to ban that kind of agriculture. The only thing he asks is a wider scope for small, entrepreneurial, regenerative farmers like him to grow and sell their crops. Salatin thinks market competition will take care of the rest.

Salatin, 68, describes Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as “a knight in shining armor” and a champion who can redeem American life by making room for chemical-free agriculture, liberating people from compulsory vaccination and converting the nation to a diet emancipated from unhealthful food.

But with a recent leak of a draft report from Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, he got a hint of just how mighty a dragon the established order is.

“So, you know, the tension comes in how fast do we think changes can come?” he says. “It is one thing to say, ‘Here’s what I believe,’ and then another thing to say, ‘Here’s what I can do.’ We’d all like to say, ‘Whatever we believe, we can do,’ But you know, Washington’s a big place and the swamp is a big place. So, it takes some doing.”

These days, rather than counting on a decisive battle, he’s getting set for a long siege.

Others—activists, critics and supporters alike of the MAHA movement’s reforms—say cleaning up the environment, reducing public health threats or transforming the food system might be a very long siege. They point to recent Trump administration policy moves, appointments to regulatory positions and now the implementation of the plans. But they’ll keep trying.

The official MAHA strategy report, released on September 9, closely resembles an earlier version in its general outline that was leaked in August to Barn Raiser and other members of the press. White House officials did not respond to Barn Raiser emails seeking to verify the leaked document.

The final version does flesh out some issues that were formerly addressed as little more than bullet points. As in earlier leaked drafts, the report emphasizes public information campaigns and asks for voluntary industry action. It expands on previous calls for more study on surges in chronic disease affecting children.

The document does call on the President’s Task Force on Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks to Children to oversee the administration’s work and “promote children’s environmental health and safety,” but it doesn’t specify how. The strategy repeats a claim in the leaked version—hotly disputed by environmentalists—that the Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide oversight is “robust.”

So far, they have mixed reactions to the written declarations.

The initial 72-page MAHA commission assessment, titled “Make Our Children Healthy Again,” released in May, dwells on factors that Kennedy has long blamed for what he calls a crisis in public health: bad nutrition and the pervasive use of toxins in the environment. The assessment emphasizes claims of health risks associated with ultraprocessed food and beverages such as packaged snacks, sodas, frozen pizzas, sweetened cereals and instant soups—all of them laden with saturated fats, salt and sugar. One study from the Journal of the American Medical Association shows such foods make up 67% of the calories consumed by children and adolescents. A HHS press release announcing the MAHA assessment in May claims a range of related health ills, including surges in obesity, allergies and pre-diabetes.

The assessment also decries increasing exposure to chemicals in water, food and air that it claims pose a particular risk to children, even before birth. Pesticides and the pesticide industry get an especially severe treatment, with accusations of “ghostwriting” ostensibly scientific studies to sway public opinion and shape policy. The report says that this strategy “mirrors tactics used by the tobacco industry to distort scientific consensus.”

After the initial assessment, some expected fundamental change. Then came revelations of false citations to nonexistent scientific studies in the report, and after that, a leak of the plans in August, which drew widespread criticism for emphasizing voluntary industry restraint over regulation.

Reading that glimpse of the MAHA commission’s thinking prompted Marion Nestle, a renowned expert on nutrition policy, to recite a series of excerpts:

“We will explore,” “We will develop,” “We will consider,” “We will investigate,” “We will look into,” that kind of thing. They’re not actually doing anything. They’re just talking about it. It’s a report about intentions. They’ve stated their intentions. But they’re not stating policy.

She continues:

They have said that they want healthier foods in schools. Where’s the policy? They have said that they want to reduce ultraprocessed foods. Where’s the policy? They have also said that they’re going to, you know, the business with seed oils. Ooh! They’ve pulled back on that one. They’ve pulled back on chemicals in agriculture. They’ve pulled back on a number of things. The one thing in there that I thought, “Ooh, this is possibly good!” was to do something about restricting marketing to children, but they used the word “explore” on that one. The evidence on the effects of marketing to children has been known for decades. I thought the overall message of the entire report was, “More research needed.”

Lori Ann Burd, a senior attorney and environmental health program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, sees the hand of Big Ag. She says even before the release of the initial report, there were credible rumors of how intently the industrial agriculture lobby was working to weaken its approach. Rumored proposals for striking policy change vanished in the final presentation, Burd says.

She claims industries with much to lose under MAHA-style reforms are coopting key regulatory positions, including the appointment of two former American Chemistry Council executives and a recent American Soybean Association lobbyist Kyle Kunkler, known for his advocacy of the controversial pesticide dicamba. Now he’s as the deputy assistant administrator for pesticides in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, as the agency seeks to reverse 2020 and 2024 federal court bans on the pesticide.

“After all the promises of, ‘We’re not scared of anyone,’ and ‘We’re gonna do what needs to be done,’ and ‘We’re not gonna succumb to pressure, to install the pressure into the top post in the chemical safety office, I think is a very confusing message to say the least,” Burd says. “And to see the dicamba reapproval proposal come out just a month after one of its most vocal supporters was installed in the top seat at EPA’s pesticide office is a little bit jarring.”

For her part, Nestle does see the potential for dramatic change, if not from MAHA. She’s described former Food and Drug Commissioner David Kessler’s recent call for the administration to strip legal protection from refined carbohydrates, a foundational ingredient in many ultraprocessed foods, as “absolutely brilliant.”

Who would know better than how to do this than [Kessler] would? He figured out a way to define the vast majority of ultraprocessed foods without having to do any new regulations,” Nestle says. “All the FDA would have to do would be to rule that processed refined carbohydrates were no longer ‘Generally Recognized as Safe.’ That would take care of it.

Outside of Washington, others are thinking hard about their own regulatory and legislative solutions, says Scott Faber, the Environmental Working Group’s senior vice president for governmental affairs. The EWG has an online map to track food and beverage legislation in 21 states, with 69 laws introduced as of late July. Fifty are still in play, with 17 adopted.

According to Faber:

The second Trump administration has not banned a single toxic chemical, but they have rolled back standards for salmonella and chicken products and fired food safety experts and inspectors. So, so far, the second Trump administration has made our food less safe, not more safe. That doesn’t mean the second Trump administration won’t take action, but there’s nothing in the MAHA report that suggests they’ll take action anytime soon.

In the meantime, he says, state legislators are filling the vacuum.

Donald Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, says that’s aways been the case.

“People tend often to follow issues of public health, issues of public policy in general and public health in particular, with a relatively single-minded focus on Washington. But the reality is that most public health issues play themselves out in state and local governments,” Kettl says. “They are the places where diseases pop up to begin with, where the implications are most clear, where whatever we want to do to try to make things better have to happen.”

Partisan differences, exacerbated by the culture wars and the pandemic, tend to prompt predictable legislation, he says, with Democrats advocating more regulation and its attendant bureaucracy and Republicans seeking both to loosen restrictions on business and tighten up the rules for people receiving public benefits, such as food stamps.

Deep in Los Angeles’ Topanga Canyon, far from any Washington or statehouse maneuvering, steeped in reverence for the natural world that makes up her daily life and her philosophy of health, teacher and writer Deena Metzger espouses a more global view of what it will take to assure public wellbeing.

She’s an icon in the Southern California wellness culture that’s still rooted in the shambling canyons, even if its inheritors, the hippy children now middle-aged themselves, have raised awfully chic children, bought expensive shoes and set up healing crystal shops on glitzy Melrose Avenue.

Metzger stayed in Topanga, atop a hilltop up an old asphalt road, with her grove of orange trees. She is matter-of-fact about the rattlers, mountain lions, and coyotes that share the land. Talking about the pollution encroaching on her world, she speaks yearningly, as one might of an ailing grandparent. “The planet needs to breathe,” she says. “This pollution might kill it.”

Metzger despises Trump’s immigration raids, his firings, his tirades. She questions whether MAHA is even real. She does have trust in her good friend Casey Means, who has described her as a “one of my spiritual guides.”

Means, a Standford-trained physician and bestselling author, has become something of a wellness celebrity who has aligned herself with the MAHA movement. On January 30, she posted on X, “Moms (and families) will not stand anymore for a country that profits massively off kids getting chronically sick.” In May, she became Trump’s pick for U.S. Surgeon General.

Metzger says she hopes to speak with Means about her baby, due this fall, but they won’t talk politics.

“What I would say about Casey from when I did talk with her is that she had a lot of hope, because she is passionate about ending pollution and ending plastics. And I think she thought that Kennedy would be able to do that,” she says.

“And I think it’s a bottom line for her, to be able to do that. So if she’s given a ‘No,’ I don’t know how she’ll respond. But I know that that’s what she will try to create: healthy food, end pollution, end plastics, and live in a terror-free world.”

Means did not respond to requests for an interview, and a Health and Human Services scheduler later wrote in an email that she won’t be available until after she’s confirmed as surgeon general.

On her sheep farm across the continent in Ohio, Angela Huffman, co-founder and president of Farm Action, sticks to specific governmental policy.

In January, her organization endorsed Kennedy’s nomination for Health and Human Services secretary, arguing that from his position as secretary he’d have decisive control over national food policy, to the benefit of both consumers and farmers. Farm Action argued that he would not only help to shape public discussion of pesticide use, but share in oversight, especially enforcement of pesticide limits for food. The group also said that Kennedy would support Farm Action’s emphasis on regenerative farming, which eschews the heavy use of industrial fertilizer and pesticides in favor of composting, permaculture and other practices aimed at sustainability.

Interviewed before the release of the official strategy document, Huffman noted that the suggestions she found most encouraging are just bullet points of a few lines each.

“The devil’s in the details,” she says.

“So, you know, it’s hard. I don’t want to read between the lines, but I guess I would just highlight the good there.”

Among the good, she says, is the mention—finalized in today’s released report—of improving the farm-to-school grants application process to promote farmers selling to nearby schools, easing the regulatory certification process for would-be organic farmers and a proposal to expand the federal Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which provides financial assistance and technical support for farmers and ranchers to establish conservation practices or protect natural resources. It can help pay for such things as brush clearance or setting up rotational grazing for cattle.

Burd, the Center for Center for Biological Diversity advocate, says the release of the report and the planning follow-up leave things in flux. She says her organization has been fighting to fix “broken” environmental policy for decades, and now she’s getting back to work on another round in the dicamba battle, submitting arguments as the EPA prepares to reintroduce the pesticide yet again.

She’s struck by how many Trump supporters, despite such steps by the administration, expect the transformation MAHA has promised.

“I think this is a real moment of truth: Will this growing movement of Americans who are recognizing there’s a real significant problem with how chemicals are being regulated in this country, are they going to be welcomed in as promised, as Trump promised?” she asks. “Will we be taking action on pesticides?”

“Will this movement that helped bring in this new administration—I guess not so new anymore, but this administration—will their concerns be taken seriously, or will Big Ag continue to steamroll those concerns?”

Today, Huffman’s organization issued a press release that says the final strategy “sidesteps” antitrust reform and “leans on ‘precision application’ technologies and Environmental Protection Agency reviews rather than confronting pesticide overuse head-on.”

“This strategy report shows what happens when corporate interests, including checkoff-funded front groups, steer the process: incremental steps are overshadowed by a refusal to confront the root causes of America’s health crisis,” the release concludes.

“Farmers and families deserve more than half-measures—they deserve bold reforms that put public health ahead of industry profits.”

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Chris Richard is a Los Angeles-based journalist. In more than 30 years of reporting for local, state, national and international print and radio media, he has covered a range of news from city council meetings and crime to broader issues, from local and state incarceration policy to the on-going effects of a partial nuclear meltdown near Los Angeles. His current focus is on environmental and environmental justice issues.