The MAHA Strategy and Food Systems

As the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement first took shape in late 2024 and early 2025, there was a cautious curiosity and optimism expressed by some in the food systems and public health realms.  After all, some of MAHA’s prominent voices were raising concerns about some of the same issues that advocates have been working on for years, including pesticide regulations, food industry consolidation, and overuse of antibiotics in farm animals. 

While many expressed valid concerns about Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s opinions on vaccines and other topics, some held out hope that some good could come if the Trump administration was genuinely interested in tackling the underlying systems that influence chronic disease.  Many public health and food systems advocates would agree with the vision of building a world where “American farmers are put at the center of how we think about health,” as noted in the MAHA Commission’s “Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment” which was released in May 2025 (and quickly overshadowed by a debacle surrounding the report’s fake AI-generated references).  

On September 9, HHS released its much anticipated MAHA strategy report, which was expected to describe the actions and policy levers the administration will pursue to realize its vision of ending childhood chronic disease.  Many have been curious what these federal efforts would look like, in part because many of the “MAHA wins” the administration has touted to date have relied on voluntary industry commitments and state-led efforts. 

A press release from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)  (Secretary Brooke Rollins is on the MAHA Commission) hyped the 20-page strategy, calling it a “sweeping plan with more than 120 initiatives to reverse the failed policies that fueled America’s childhood chronic disease epidemic.”  

So, what is in the strategy? Ultimately, it seems likely to disappoint those interested in reforming our food systems to be healthier and more sustainable. Here are a few of my key takeaways related to the strategy’s food and agriculture-related commitments: 

• The strategy is organized around four elements: advancing research, realigning incentives, private sector collaboration, and increased public awareness. The initiatives mentioned within each of these categories are brief and details are sparse, raising a variety of questions on how they will be designed, implemented, monitored, and evaluated.   
• There is more discussion of removing regulations than developing new ones. Deregulating efforts include, but are not limited to: reforming the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) approval process to increase the “timely availability” of pesticides and herbicides, considering exclusions from water and hazardous waste permitting for low-volume meat processing operations, and ensuring “flexibility for farms to manage manure and process water without triggering industrial-grade permitting requirements.”  This is concerning, given existing agricultural exceptions to environmental regulations. 
• The strategy also notes the administration will partner with food and agricultural stakeholders to “ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in EPA’s pesticide [sic] robust review procedures and how that relates to the limiting of risk for users and the general public and informs continual improvement.”  This, along with few other mentions of pesticides in the strategy, appears to indicate the administration may be feeling political pressure on this issue.
• While consolidation of the food system was called out in the MAHA assessment report, there is no mention of food system consolidation or any efforts to address it in the strategy.
• Several commitments related to federal agencies’ implementation of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) reflect standard activities that take place every five years when a new set of guidelines is released and thus do not appear to be new initiatives. However, the new aspect that is sure to garner attention from the nutrition world is a commitment to “reforming future DGA development processes, including structure and members of the advisory committee and scientific review of future DGAs.”   
• Some of the strategy’s initiatives are laudable—such as working to better connect local food producers to schools in the farm-to-school grants program—however, impacts will surely be hamstrung by the administration’s budget cuts.  Earlier this year, USDA cut $660 million from programs funding local food in schools and childcare settings. 

Despite the fact that MAHA advocates have pointed out some real problems with our food and agriculture systems—problems that the government should very much be working to address—it seems clear that this strategy will do little to address the root causes of chronic disease.  After all, it is significantly easier to remove food dyes from ice cream than it is to truly tackle the complex web of wicked problems related to how our food is produced, what we end up eating, and how it affects our health.