The MAHA Commission Launches
A new executive order, red flags and wet blankets
TL;DR As we watch America’s health research infrastructure be impacted by DOGE, we’ve also gotten an Executive Order detailing the administration’s aspirations for Making America Health Again and tackling chronic diseases, with a strong emphasis on kids. While fluffed with claims about being evidence-based, the order has some red flags in its language and isn’t prepared for the data drought. The administration has opted to threaten already insecure NIH funding instead of tackling some really low hanging fruit wins in prioritizing research in children - making it hard to believe they’re operating in good faith and not just planning to act on un-serious wellness tropes. I know there are serious folks within MAHA who want to do good and this post is my good faith expression of concern to them.
Trump released a new executive order today titled “Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission” - this EO begins to give us some insight into the administration’s vision for developing a commission to tackle America’s health challenges, with a strong emphasis on obesity and diabetes, as well as other conditions like autoimmunity, ADHD and autism.
I’ve seen both folks in nutrition championing this messaging as well as highly critical takes; indeed, you can view the EO through different lenses. There’s a high-level, good faith (IMO naive) reading of the EO - it rightly emphasizes the need to focus on nutrition and environmental exposures, especially for kids, in order to alleviate the massive health and economic burden we face from chronic diseases in this country. There’s also a more ‘reading in between the lines’ take (without much need for squinting) - the EO continues past MAHA language focusing on vague “chemicals” and food ‘ingredients’ that don’t resemble any serious thinking about tackling the state of our food environment, dogwhistles to anti-vaccine sentiments (it highlights autism diagnosis incidences now vs in 1980 with no other added context), and builds a false dichotomy between medical treatment and healthy lifestyles.
The EO advises a number of ‘policies’ - improved data transparency, minimization of conflicts of interest, using gold-standard evidence, working with farmers to grow healthy food, and health insurance coverage for efficacious treatments, including those that support lifestyle changes. It’s not really clear how these things will happen but as aspirations, they all sound great. There’s zero doubt this country has completely flopped on nutrition and disease prevention and I’d love to believe this is serious, but I have serious doubts when the messaging is coming from vaccine “skeptic” who’s major foci in nutrition has been to hyperbolize the health effects of food dyes, with little interrogation of the agriculture, policy, and consumer economy issues that have synergized to create our modern, globalized food system and how we’re going to break that wheel.
A few of the red flags that specifically popped out to me, from a more nutrition PoV: