Leaked MAHA report’s recommendations undermined by administration’s actions

It’s quite rich for an administration that is plunging the country into a nutrition security and food safety nightmare to now promise to make America healthy “again.”  

The administration’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill is pushing healthy food out of reach for millions of Americans and is ripping health care coverage from millions more. The administration, with the help of DOGE, has totally upended biomedical research in America, delaying progress on fighting cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases.

It is striking that the leaked Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Strategy Report, like its AI-assisted predecessor, embodies much of the idiosyncratic beliefs about food and drugs of one person: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He might be right about food dyes, but the report’s recommendations to alter our vaccine framework, restructure government agencies, and promote meat and whole milk are going to promote disease, not health.  

Already, the Secretary’s actions are threatening Americans’ access to vaccines and risking the return of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases.

The report is also largely focused on voluntary action and education instead of regulation, urging industry to voluntarily reduce food additives, sodium, and added sugar in foods. The report seems to twist itself into knots to make it clear that it will not be infringing upon food companies, such as its assertion that HHS and FTC “will explore development of potential industry guidelines to limit the direct marketing of certain unhealthy foods to children” (emphasis added). Bizarrely, the report’s only suggestion to address alcohol, vaping, and opioid use is through education — despite many opportunities for regulations that we know would help — and it doesn’t even mention tobacco. Personal responsibility doesn’t work in a broken system. The fix is government action, not industry self-regulation.  

Talk is cheap. We need to hold the administration accountable for living up to its promise to improve health. But we also need to judge the administration by what it does, not what it says. And the administration's attacks on SNAP, Medicaid, the health insurance exchanges, and the FDA and USDA workforces are poised to make America sicker, hungrier, and more at risk from unsafe food.