Republicans Just Passed A Public Health Disaster
And MAHA Helped Make it Possible
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Earlier today, Republicans in Congress passed a sweeping budget bill that includes the largest cuts to healthcare in U.S. history. These cuts are expected to cause millions of people to lose health insurance, force the closure of hundreds of hospitals and nursing homes, and result in an estimated 51,000 premature deaths each year. The bill also includes the largest reduction in food assistance on record, which will strip support from millions of families, including hundreds of thousands of children, and significantly increase food insecurity across the country.
And MAHA helped make that possible.
When I first started posting about the MAHA movement last summer, it wasn’t because I thought food dyes were great or that there were no problems with our regulatory agencies. It was because I recognized something much deeper and more dangerous unfolding. I very clearly saw a movement that used the language of health to manipulate people who were rightfully frustrated, and then pointed them toward all the wrong targets.
MAHA talked about the right problems, like the rise in chronic disease, the failures of our food system, the distrust in institutions. But they manipulated the causes and distracted from the real solutions that could actually help people. Instead of focusing on the structural drivers of poor health in America like income inequality, healthcare access, underfunded nutrition and public health programs, environmental pollution, and campaign finance laws, they weaponized wellness language to advance a political agenda.
Months before the election, Calley and Casey Means went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast and spun conspiratorial misinformation about nutrition science and public health systems. They took a grain of truth — real issues that scientists and public health experts work to address — and twisted them into a narrative designed to deepen distrust. And it was a model that worked.
I did a 10 minute response video that explained the misleading and inaccurate claims from just the first 15 minutes. But it got almost no reach.
After that interview, Calley Means, who once interned for the Heritage Foundation, met with RFK Jr. to align what would become the MAHA movement with Trump’s platform. It was a coordinated effort to fuse wellness rhetoric with the language of “corruption,” “toxins,” and “draining the swamp.” It played directly into RFK Jr.’s brand of vaccine misinformation and distrust in institutions, and it gave the Republican platform a shiny, fear-based wellness campaign to mask a deeply anti-health agenda.
Keep people focused on food dyes, so they don’t notice the plan is to cut healthcare, nutrition assistance, environmental protections, scientific research, and our public health agencies.
Last September, when MAHA went to Congress for a roundtable titled “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion,” they didn’t invite a single nutrition scientist. Instead, they platformed and legitimized wellness influencers who had built massive followings by spreading fear-based, conspiratorial content. The same kind of misinformation many of us have spent years debunking on social media. MAHA borrowed their exact playbook and gave it political power.
And what did they do with that power?
They helped Trump win. They brought him votes from people who otherwise wouldn’t have cast a ballot for him. And for Trump, that was all MAHA was ever there for.
Because within just days of Trump’s election:
— NIH research funding was frozen
— Global HIV/AIDS support was halted
— Plans to regulate PFAS in drinking water were scrapped
— A proposed ban on menthol cigarettes was reversed
— Efforts to limit access to the ACA were renewed
And as the months went on, it became even worse:
— Eliminated USDA’s local food and farm-to-food bank programs, cutting off support for fresh, local food distribution to schools and food banks during a time of rising food insecurity.
— Cut funding for the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Program, slashing hands-on nutrition education and local food sourcing in schools.
— Fired over one-third of FDA food safety scientists and inspectors, weakening oversight and delaying responses to contamination and foodborne illness.
— Suspended milk quality testing during the bird flu outbreak, undermining early detection and public trust during an emerging zoonotic threat.
— Rolled back environmental protections, increasing exposure to mercury, arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals in air, water, and soil — especially in low-income and rural communities.
— Froze $43 billion in USAID funding, halting vaccine delivery, food aid, and global health programs, estimated to have caused over 300,000 preventable deaths, including more than 200,000 children.
— Dismantled key components of the federal public health infrastructure, including the CDC’s divisions on oral health, environmental health, and chronic disease prevention, and proposed eliminating entire programs supporting maternal health, newborn screening, and occupational safety.
And as those devastating actions rolled out, MAHA said nothing. Or they celebrated state-wide fluoride removal, corporate promises to swap out food dyes in candy, or fast food restaurants using beef tallow in their french fries.
And now.
Today the Trump administration passed the largest healthcare cuts in U.S. history. And as a result, 16 million people are now projected to lose their health insurance. One in four nursing homes could close. Hundreds of rural hospitals are at risk. And public health researchers estimate these cuts could lead to 51,000 preventable deaths every year.
Millions more will lose nutrition assistance, including hundreds of thousands of children. And the regressive tax cuts that come alongside these rollbacks will overwhelmingly benefit corporations and the wealthiest Americans, while further increasing income inequality, which is one of the strongest predictors of poor health.
This bill will directly make Americans less healthy. And MAHA is silent. Because MAHA was never about health. It was a Trojan horse.
It brought the Republican Party votes they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, and gave them the public cover they needed to carry out the exact agenda outlined in Project 2025, a plan written by the Heritage Foundation, where Calley Means (the orchestrator of MAHA) once interned. It wasn’t accidental. It was a deliberate strategy to manufacture distrust and then use that distrust to dismantle the very systems designed to protect people’s health.
It’s why you won’t find many people in public health or chronic disease prevention who supported MAHA. It’s why the movement was overwhelmingly made up of middle- and upper-class white people who had the privilege of worrying about dyes in candy bars while buying expensive supplements and wellness products sold by MAHA’s loudest voices, including Calley Means, Casey Means, Vani Hari (Food Babe), Mark Hyman, and others.
They care about building their brands. About selling their solutions. About the fame and power that came with pretending to care, while the health of the country, especially the health of the people who could never afford their overpriced products in the first place, suffer.
Because what this movement enabled — the gutting of healthcare, food assistance, environmental protections, research funding, and public health infrastructure — will cause real harm. It will cost lives. It will widen health disparities. It will leave behind the very people they claimed to speak for.
That’s why they’re silent now. Because this was never a movement to make America healthy.
Don't give up please - your writing is so important and we need to keep fighting. I subscribed in support.
So perfectly and accurately stated.