Big Agriculture Dodged a Bullet with the New MAHA Strategy

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has courted controversy his whole life. Since becoming the Trump administration’s top health official, Kennedy’s outlandish claims and illogical leaps have only continued. He’s made dubious scientific claims in TikToks with Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) influencers. In a press briefing as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy shocked the agriculture industry by calling sugar “poison.” In early September, he gave one of the most combative appearances before the U.S. Senate in recent memory, arguing with both Democrats and Republicans about vaccines. And although U.S. farmers largely voted for Trump in the 2024 election, Kennedy’s inflammatory comments on seed oils, pesticides, and fertilizer villainize the farming and production practices that underpin modern U.S. agriculture.

However, despite Kennedy’s tirades against the so-called “ills” of American agricultural production, the official healthy policy agenda released by his MAHA Commission does not go very far to disrupt U.S. agriculture. Instead, the strategy resembles a predictable Republican agricultural policy document. While disappointing to the MAHA movement, it is a welcome surprise for U.S. farmers and ranchers who would have been sent reeling by policies targeting pesticide use or a proposed shift to organic production systems.

Ultimately, the Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy refrains from elevating the MAHA movement’s aggressive posture against modern agriculture. Instead of proposing a regulatory crackdown on industry, the Strategy proposes a litany of new task forces and research efforts to answer questions at the intersection of food, agriculture, and public health. Instead of delivering on MAHA’s demands to restrict pesticide use, the Strategy acknowledges the importance of pesticides for supporting crop productivity and in turn calls for increased investment in precision agriculture technology, soil health research, and conservation programs.

While the ascendant MAHA movement is fuming over the new Strategy’s lack of teeth, agricultural leaders were happy for the moderation—and with good reason. The absence of anti-scientific claims about modern agricultural inputs and practices in the Strategy means that, at worst, current production systems can be maintained. If the Strategy’s proposals for investments and research are implemented, both farmers and consumers are likely to actually benefit. In short, big agriculture just dodged a bullet.

Wins for Big Ag

The Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy contains 128 proposals to address four key “drivers” of childhood chronic disease: poor diet, chemical exposure, chronic stress and lack of physical activity, and overmedicalization.

The MAHA Commission’s initial report, released earlier this summer, questioned the safety of synthetic chemicals in the U.S. food and agriculture system and raised misguided concerns about glyphosate. Instead of heeding calls from MAHA leaders to ban pesticides, the Strategy emphasizes the importance of supporting increased crop productivity. Instead of input restrictions or mandates on production practices, the Strategy calls for more agricultural research on soil health, water quality (although the focus there is mostly on fluoride), and precision agriculture—a set of technologies that will prove crucial as producers seek to use less pesticides without sacrificing yields. Prioritizing research and farmer uptake of tools that utilize data and technology to optimize water, fertilizer, pesticide or other input use could generate dual wins: improving farmer profitability and minimizing environmental impacts of farming.

The Strategy also calls for continued investments in USDA conservation programs like EQIP and CSP, which provide a cost-share to farmers implementing conservation practices. These programs are popular among farmers and are perpetually oversubscribed. With robust future investment, these programs could be leveraged to better accelerate the voluntary adoption of cost effective precision agriculture technologies and other efficiency-enhancing practices.

These proposals, and the notable absence of unscientific rhetoric on pesticides, are not only a win for farmers and Big Ag constituencies. The Strategy also avoids the environmental disaster that would stem from MAHA’s worst ideas for the future of U.S. agriculture: namely, shifting toward organic production systems and banning pesticides like glyphosate and atrazine.

While the Strategy does contain some recommendations with potential benefits for agricultural producers, the document is incredibly vague on how its proposals will be implemented and financed. The extent to which this strategy will translate into progress on developing viable alternatives to reduce farmer’s reliance on pesticides, or a measurable rise in diet- and nutrition-related research, will be determined by implementation.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Along with its agriculture-friendly recommendations, the Strategy proposes several changes that public health experts have long advocated for—for example, more nutrition research, especially on ultra-processed foods. When one considers this Strategy in the broader political context, however, its emphasis on gold-standard science and research falls flat. Funding freezes, budget cuts, and research workforce reductions underway across federal agencies threaten to derail the research goals stated in the Strategy before they even begin. In all the ways that matter, the current Trump administration is acting exactly as one would expect from a Republican administration intent on shrinking the size of government.

Many of the USDA grant programs that could fund precision agriculture research are frozen, and staff capacity is expected to continue to shrink as USDA implements a reorganization. At NIH, a similar restructuring is underway, and the country’s leading ultra-processed foods scientist left the agency citing censorship concerns. The White House requested significant cuts to nearly all research agency budgets this year, including a 22% cut to USDA, a 56% cut to the National Science Foundation, and an $18 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health. (To note, Congress seems likely to largely reject the steepest research funding cuts later this year.) These moves raise serious questions about the administration’s ability to deliver the competitive grant funding and conduct the in-house research needed to deliver on the topics prioritized in the Strategy.

Furthermore, the “wins” that Secretary Kennedy is touting to his MAHA constituents are largely voluntary industry pledges and state-level policy changes. These “wins” are not only hard to characterize as true victories that will move the needle on public health outcomes (hello, food dyes), they also aren’t due to any durable or lasting policy changes at the federal level.

The administration is instead employing a distinctly deregulatory approach, which in some respects is poised to deliver innovations farmers need more quickly. USDA is making positive moves to speed reviews of agricultural products of biotechnology, including plants and microbes. FDA introduced a faster premarket review pathway for some gene-edited plant varieties, guidance that the Trump administration has kept in place and could build on to further streamline reviews. And, EPA is moving to speed up pesticide registration reviews.

Agency actions to shrink federal research capacity, rely on voluntary industry commitments and state-level policy changes to reshape the food landscape, and reduce regulatory red tape are a mixed bag when it comes to whether they are good for farmers, consumers, or the environment. What these agency strategies have in common is that they lie in stark contrast to Kennedy’s rhetoric on food and agriculture.

MAHA Rhetoric Isn’t Going Anywhere

The Administration’s deregulatory actions and the Strategy itself have already sparked outrage among MAHA leaders like Zen Honeycutt, who characterized the Strategy as a deep disappointment, and promised to hold Kennedy accountable. In addition to continuing to push for a regulatory crackdown on pesticide use, MAHA groups are lobbying Congress to reject legislation that would shield pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits over warning labels approved by EPA. Absent this preemption language, pesticide manufacturer Bayer has warned they might be forced to stop selling products in the U.S. that contain glyphosate . The same groups will undoubtedly rally support for U.S. Surgeon General nominee Casey Means, a vocal critic of industrial farming, pesticides, and genetically modified crops, as she awaits Senate confirmation.

The MAHA movement isn’t going anywhere. Neither are the growing tensions between MAHA and other factions of President Trump’s political base. Here lies an opportunity for both Republican and Democratic supporters of modern, technology-driven American agriculture to join forces in opposing MAHA-aligned policies that would make farming less profitable and productive. As national debates over the role of government in our food system continue, bipartisan support for sustained, robust research funding remains critical to building a food system that balances food security, production targets, climate consequences, and public health concerns.