It’s not only President Donald Trump who is celebrating a one-year anniversary today, January 20. The nascent Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement is now celebrating its first birthday as the driving force of the Health and Human Services department. This collaboration between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the president has been a significant influence on federal and state policy over the last 12 months and could prove a major player in this year’s midterm elections.
Growing Pains
Democrats and the legacy media viciously attacked Kennedy as he called out the regulatory capture of the US food and health systems by overly powerful industries. These assaults were redoubled during Kennedy’s HHS secretary confirmation proceedings, in which Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) led a failed charge to discredit RFK Jr. Even his detractors concede Kennedy is correct about chronic illness and ultra-processed foods, and MAHA continues to gain traction on these issues.
MAHA has growing pains, struggling to maintain internal solidarity and grow the movement as critics promoted in the big box media strive to shred the nascent revolution. The first MAHA Commission Report boldly questioned the presence of pesticides in food supplies, sparking a MAGA revolt led by the nation’s crop farmers. The second report backed away from critiquing this third rail of American agriculture, outraging MAHA supporters who felt betrayed.
Meanwhile, HHS Secretary Kennedy faced a similar Scylla-and-Charybdis dilemma navigating vaccine and other medical policies. He pared back vaccine recommendations for children to howls of media contempt, even though parents can still get the jabs, they are just no longer mandatory. He replaced the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices who had conflicts of interest with Big Pharma, which outraged a media machine largely funded by Big Pharma advertising.
Taking Flak While Fighting Back
In 2025, Kennedy was plagued by detractors for doing what he promised to do: eliminate industry bias, study vaccines more thoroughly, and leave important medical decisions for their children between parents and the doctor.
Yet the real MAHA action is not in the vaccine arena but the chronic disease crisis fostered by ultraprocessed foods (UPFs). While Americans remain sharply divided over vaccine safety and efficacy, they are largely united in their awareness of the ills inflicted by toxic food dyes, microplastics, endocrine disruptors, and heavy metals in children’s cereals, baby foods, and infant formula. This policy/political consensus has continued to swell as the 2026 midterms approach.
Critics scoffed when Kennedy’s HHS quickly called for the elimination of toxic dyes in US food supplies, claiming much more needed to be done (avoiding the obvious question: Why wasn’t this done decades ago?). Kennedy then pushed to eliminate sugary drinks and candy from the SNAP program. His detractors pushed back, claiming a government that pays $100 billion annually for free food should not deprive the poor of the junk diet that tastes the best but sickens them the most.
Focus on Food and Farming
Later, Kennedy reshaped the nation’s food pyramid to favor whole, healthy foods over processed options. The negative press was more muted, likely because Americans knew the old guidelines were bunk and that their children suffer from obesity and mental health problems that are compounded by toxic food additives. Of course, many in the MAHA base clamored for greater change, but most agree that progress in food quality is apparent, even though more remains to be done.
