RFK, Jr.’s MAHA report favors voluntary industry action over regulation

For the most part, the final MAHA report issued today will bring a collective sigh of relief in food industry boardrooms, since it leans heavily in the direction of government deregulation, voluntary corporate action, and research likely to be decimated under the President’s proposed budget. The report ignores the actual causes of chronic diseases and proven interventions, and the administration’s actions are otherwise making Americans hungrier, sicker, and less safe.

The report offers mostly the same hodgepodge of half-baked science and the Secretary’s pet peeves that characterized the earlier reports. It should not be taken seriously as science, but as a political document, we have not seen the last of it.

Kennedy and Trump have purged the FDA, USDA, and CDC of tens of thousands of skilled employees charged with keeping our food supply accessible, nutritious, and safe. They have indulged anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, including denying Covid vaccines to those who would benefit, and have badly bungled the response to a measles outbreak driven by the anti-vaccination policies the Secretary espouses. They have passed legislation ripping millions of people off SNAP and Medicaid, pushing both healthy food and healthcare out of reach, and they have sabotaged the nation’s pioneering biomedical research program at the National Institutes of Health.

With a track record like that, it’s hard to find much reason for optimism for this report. In the rare cases it gets right, as it does with closing the GRAS loophole, details are sparse. And even in the case of food dyes, the administration is pointedly deciding not to use its regulatory authority to spur progress.

If MAHA adherents were looking to its movement’s leaders to tackle chronic disease, they should be horrified by the administration’s actions on food assistance, healthcare, and medical research. And to the extent MAHA was expecting action on pesticides in food, Kennedy and Trump have clearly capitulated to Big Agriculture.