Is Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) anti-science? The question seems straightforward enough. After all, the MAHA movement’s figurehead, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promotes debunked theories about vaccine dangers, champions raw milk despite clear evidence of its health risks, and cites retracted studies to support his positions. When Kennedy became the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in February 2025, public health experts and mainstream media outlets characterized Kennedy and MAHA as anti-science and a threat to evidence-based medicine. The narrative appears clear-cut: here is an illiberal movement rejecting scientific authority in favor of conspiracy theories and folk wisdom.
While MAHA is firmly situated within an illiberal administration—and one that has done real damage to mainstream scientific funding streams and institutions—this straightforward answer misses something crucial. MAHA does not reject science; it zealously invokes it. References to gold-standard science appear throughout official MAHA documents and speeches. Kennedy and his advisors constantly proclaim their commitment to evidence-based medicine, rigorous research, and reproducible studies. These principles are enshrined in an HHS report, authored under Kennedy’s leadership, called “Implementing Gold Standard Science.” The puzzle, then, is not whether MAHA embraces or rejects science, but rather how it deploys science as a political tool. What work does science do for MAHA?
MAHA does not reject science; it zealously invokes it…The puzzle, then, is not whether MAHA embraces or rejects science, but rather how it deploys science as a political tool.
To answer this question, and as part of a larger project trying to tease apart where MAHA fits within neoliberal and illiberal politics, I examined the discursive politics of MAHA. By discursive politics, I mean the stories these political actors tell about health threats, scientific authority, and who gets to speak on behalf of truth. I analyzed official documents and media events published in the months leading up to Trump’s election to the White House through to the end of his first year in office. I combed through transcripts from a four-hour senate roundtable, as well as HHS reports, the dietary guideline’s scientific report, as well as dozens of press conferences and promotional videos. What emerged was not simple anti-science rhetoric, but rather a sophisticated form of what I’m calling populist science—a political strategy that speaks the language of scientific rigor while fundamentally reshaping who counts as a legitimate expert and whose knowledge matters.
Three themes dominated these materials, each revealing how MAHA constructs its relationship to science and expertise. This relationship reveals an illiberal project aimed at stoking fear around the future of the nation while redefining what counts as trustworthy science and expertise.
Health Catastrophism
The first theme that emerged from my analysis is apocalyptic: chronic disease as an existential threat to the nation. The language used by policy actors is vivid, dark, and urgent. At a senate roundtable in September 2024, a defining moment that launched MAHA into the political mainstream, Kennedy declared that if a foreign nation did to America what food and chemical companies have done, we would consider it an act of war. Calley Means, a health savings account entrepreneur and Kennedy’s future policy advisor, warned that chronic disease poses a genocidal-level threat to the nation. His sister Casey, an unlicensed Stanford-educated physician and now nominee for Surgeon General, proclaimed that 90 percent of American deaths come from a “weaponized food system.” Speakers at the roundtable made several references to the United States’ poor ranking in health measures relative to peer nations.
The first theme that emerged from my analysis is apocalyptic: chronic disease as an existential threat to the nation.
The first official MAHA report, released in May 2025, declares that today’s children are the sickest generation in American history, and their deteriorating health threatens national security itself because the country’s youth are not fit for military service. When Kennedy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosted their “Pete and Bobby” fitness challenge at the Pentagon, Hegseth proclaimed: “Make America healthy again. Fit, not fat. We’re going to have a war fighting force with young men and women who are prepared to defend the nation.”
And what has caused this catastrophe? According to the first MAHA report, it is ultraprocessed foods, food additives, toxic chemicals, and vaccines. Thousands of synthetic chemicals in food, water, and air pose risks to children’s neurodevelopmental and endocrine health, the report warns. Here, MAHA references genuine peer-reviewed science: research does support connections between environmental chemicals and rising rates of certain cancers, neurodevelopmental disorders, and reproductive problems. Major professional societies representing endocrinologists and pediatricians endorse these findings. Yet, MAHA leaders’ claims that vaccines seriously endanger public health have no robust scientific evidence to support them. Evidence points to the opposite fact: vaccination programs have translated into lower overall mortality, in the United States and globally, and have contributed to dramatic reductions in childhood mortality specifically.
Corruption in Science
The second major theme is that of widespread corruption of scientific bodies and government agencies by the food, agriculture, and pharmaceutical industries.
The second major theme is that of widespread corruption of scientific bodies and government agencies by the food, agriculture, and pharmaceutical industries. Over a third of MAHA materials attribute the nation’s ill health to conflicts of interest within government agencies like the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The MAHA report dedicates a section to corporate capture and the revolving door, citing billions in lobbying dollars influencing dietary guidelines and suppressing unfavorable research. Future FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, appearing at the 2024 Senate roundtable, painted a dark picture of pharmaceutical companies that will stop at nothing to profit from chronic illness, a message he continues to share in his official media appearances. Kennedy has repeatedly asserted that conflicts of interest between regulators and industry have suppressed science that would have improved public health outcomes.
This critique of corporate power contains some truth. Activists and scholars studying contemporary food systems have long documented how corporate lobbyists influence regulatory agencies and lawmaking, how industry funding shapes nutrition research, and how conflicts of interest pervade public health institutions like the FDA. Corporate power certainly does distort science. The problem is not that MAHA identifies this dynamic; it’s how it selectively applies this critique of power.
MAHA leaders have their own conflicts of interest, which are never mentioned when these leaders rail against corruption in the civil service. Several advisors and expert panel members have ties to wellness companies and health savings account firms that stand to benefit from MAHA policies. These leaders are not immune to lobbying from the very sectors they purport to challenge. For instance, the first MAHA report identified agricultural pesticides and processed foods as serious threats to children’s health, but several months later, its strategy plan recommended only small tweaks to the country’s agricultural and food policies. Outsiders saw this as evidence of industrial interests working behind closed doors to shape MAHA’s agenda. In MAHA’s framework, only some conflicts matter. Science funded by pharmaceutical companies is suspect; science that supports MAHA positions is rigorous. Experts affiliated with mainstream institutions are captured; experts aligned with MAHA are independent. The accusation of corruption, conveniently unspecified, can be deployed against any institution, study, or finding that contradicts MAHA’s agenda.
MAHA leaders have their own conflicts of interest, which are never mentioned when these leaders rail against corruption in the civil service.
MAHA leaders present themselves as “renegades” and as “juggernauts against convention” seeking truth at any cost. Kennedy makes this explicit in an interview with Fox News: “Trust the experts is not a function of science or democracy. It is a function of totalitarianism and religion.” The statement is remarkable. Kennedy, speaking as the nation’s top health official, denounces trust in experts while asking the public to trust him and his team; he appeals to democracy while consolidating control over what counts as legitimate expertise; and he champions science while rejecting the institutional structures through which scientific knowledge is produced, validated, and disseminated. At a MAHA summit in the fall of 2025, Vice President JD Vance praised Kennedy for being unafraid to think in new ways. Kennedy responded by declaring that people like him advance science because they are willing to challenge orthodoxies and advance heterodoxies.
Kennedy’s vision of science and corruption is profoundly reshaping the agencies under his control. In June 2025, citing conflicts of interest, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a critical scientific body that advises the CDC on vaccines. The fired members had few conflicts of interest, yet Kennedy chose to replace them with established vaccine skeptics. When Kennedy and MAHA leaders delegitimize core government agencies regulating medicine and food as “captured” institutions, it is a critique of regulatory failure that lays the groundwork for consolidating health authority under executive control.
Kennedy’s vision of science and corruption is profoundly reshaping the agencies under his control.
The Construction of “Gold Standard Science”
This brings us to the third and most revealing theme: MAHA’s construction of what it calls gold-standard science.
This brings us to the third and most revealing theme: MAHA’s construction of what it calls gold-standard science. The phrase gold-standard science appears throughout official materials, press conferences, and interviews with MAHA officials. What exactly is gold-standard science? An HHS document, responding to an Executive Order released several months earlier, lays out nine tenets, all reasonable enough, at first glance. For instance, research must provide falsifiable hypotheses, be reproducible, make data available to others, and clearly communicate uncertainty. But HHS requires that gold standard science meet all nine tenets, making for an impossibly rigid framework that will disqualify a large swath of public health research from consideration in public policymaking.
MAHA’s silences matter as much as its discourse on what science is and is not. These silences offer a clue into how its version of populist science fits into a larger illiberal administration. While lamenting America’s chronic health crisis and poor life expectancy relative to peer nations, MAHA leaders systematically ignore decades of epidemiological research (the kind of peer-reviewed science they claim to champion) showing that the underlying causes of these problems include income inequality, inadequate social safety nets, poverty, racial segregation, lack of affordable housing, and privatized health care. The nation’s declining fertility rate—a key MAHA concern—cannot be understood without examining racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality and restrictions in access to reproductive health care. Yet MAHA materials never mention these factors.
These omissions are striking and undoubtedly ideological. MAHA’s silence on the underlying causes of maternal mortality aligns with the administration’s objective to limit access to abortion and contraception. The lack of any attention to structural causes of chronic disease seems to me to relate to the administration’s hostility to language about diversity, equity, inclusion, and social inequalities.
Politics Over Science
Under MAHA, public health is subsumed under and placed in the service of partisan, illiberal politics. Health becomes a matter of military readiness and replacing a corrupt (liberal) establishment with new institutions that reject the language of racial and social equity, in favor of one that celebrates a rigid new orthodoxy of so-called “gold standard science.”
Under MAHA, public health is subsumed under and placed in the service of partisan, illiberal politics.
MAHA, like the administration it is situated in, loves simple dichotomies and embraces contradictions: good science versus bad science, independent researchers versus captured ones, truth-seekers versus profit-motivated liars. It positions its political leaders as uniquely able to discern truth from propaganda, uncontaminated by the conflicts that pervade mainstream institutions. It demands evidence while dismissing vast bodies of research. It invokes peer review while dismissing scientific consensus built on rigorous peer review.
Returning to our original question: Is MAHA anti-science? The answer is both no and yes. No, because it accepts basic scientific methods, empirical inquiry, and evidence-based reasoning. Yes, because it rejects the existing institutional arrangements through which scientific knowledge is produced, validated, and translated into policy. In short, MAHA embraces science while also fundamentally restructuring scientific authority. Rejecting commonly accepted —if flawed—scientific traditions, MAHA decides, unilaterally, whose knowledge counts, which institutions are legitimate, what questions can be asked, and which conflicts of interest matter.
And so, MAHA pretends that its new version of science is and will be immune from the problems that have long dogged mainstream science, without (so far as I have seen), offering good reasons or evidence that it will be. The record so far tells a much more mundane story of power-seeking and intellectual narrowness.
MAHA claims to liberate truth from corrupt institutions, but instead establishes controversial new orthodoxies from on high. It promises to serve the people, but at the same time advances specific political and economic interests. Understanding MAHA requires recognizing that its relationship to science is not one of simple acceptance or rejection. Rather, it is perhaps above all else a political project that involves reconstituting expertise itself by determining who gets to speak with authority about health, risk, and the future of the nation. One of MAHA’s central claims is that mainstream scientific institutions are fundamentally political—and there is, of course, some truth to that. But the same is true of MAHA science, and arguably to a much greater degree, given how it elides traditional mechanisms of transparency and review.
It is too early to predict the scientific landscape of the future, but MAHA and MAHA science can’t be ignored. They will need to be challenged and negotiated with by mainstream scientists and scientific institutions—and the politicians who care about their work.
Norah MacKendrick is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. She is the author of Better Safe than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press).
