The Make America Healthy Again Commission (MAHA) draft report, released on May 22, 2025, was a spectacular mix of damning claims and interesting “facts.” They all relate to the horrific state of the American diet, manipulation by vested interests controlling Congress, co-opted food safety and drug approval regulatory agencies, with a literally sick population of children addicted to ultra-processed food, electronic screens, and drugs pushed by the medical establishment. The root cause of these maladies, the Commission claims, is pathologies of corporate America and the dominance of large companies controlling food production, agricultural practices, and drug development and marketing — Big Food, Big Ag, Big Pharma — and the acquiescence of a duped public.
To “balance” out these detailed claims, interest groups that were attacked received an occasional mention in a counterpoint to this list of grievances. This harsh critique of food safety and the modern American lifestyle is not made up of new criticisms; these criticisms have been raised by many groups for years, including Moms Across America, an influential group focused on, among other targets, the pesticide industry.
The mention of pesticides at stops during the campaign of President Trump echoed the criticisms of Moms Across America and energized expectations about the MAHA work. The May draft report described lax food safety regulation (see our June 2, 2025, blog item on the MAHA report), claiming that children (and the rest of us) are exposed to a soup of untested and lightly regulated chemicals and pesticides relying on biased science and regulations that do not adequately protect kids’ diet, where pesticide companies encourage Big Ag production methods, manipulating farmers who unknowingly degrade our environment and diets (clearly manipulated, since farmers are hard-working, patriotic citizens).
Fears about how critical the MAHA Commission report might be was reflected in a statement made by a group of major U.S. farm interests released on May 20, 2025:
American agriculture’s strong relationship with President Trump is based on his longstanding commitment to farmers, growers and ranchers. That is why farmers represented by the American Soybean Association, National Corn Growers Association, National Association of Wheat Growers, and International Fresh Produce Association are imploring the administration to carefully consider the content and consequences of the forthcoming Make America Healthy Again Commission report before it is finalized.
Despite the effort of many of our organizations to work with the MAHA Commission to provide factual information about American food production, we have heard disturbing accounts that the commission report may suggest U.S. farmers are harming Americans through their production practices and ‘creating foods that is [sic] destroying our microbiome and bodies — leading directly to our chronic disease crisis.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. Nutrition matters, health matters, and the confidence of consumers in the food supply matters tremendously. Such a conclusion would run counter to the scientific evidence and decades of findings from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Should the MAHA Commission report baselessly attack and, worse yet, make claims that are simply untrue against the hardworking men and women who feed our nation, it will make further cooperation on this initiative very difficult and potentially put American food production at risk. We urge President Trump to ensure that the MAHA Commission report is based on sound science and evidence-based claims rather than opinions and preferences of social influencers and single-issue activists with little to no experience in actual farming or food production.
The draft report was critical of many current food production practices. Eventually concerns of the farm groups and others were apparently heard by Administration officials. More recently, the New York Times’ August 14, 2025, article, “Draft of White House Report Suggests Kennedy Won’t Push Strict Pesticide Regulations: The report is not final, but indicates good news for the food and agriculture industries,” provides details about the lobbying efforts of pesticide and farm groups, among others, to explain the robust regulatory controls pesticides go through to meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) strict approval standards.
The draft report says that environmental regulators will work with “food and agricultural stakeholders” to ensure that the public is aware of and confident in existing pesticide review procedures. It described those procedures as “robust” and did not propose new restrictions.
It also says the Trump administration will back research on technologies to try to help farmers reduce pesticide use and on the health effects of Americans’ cumulative exposure to chemicals.
Politico reported on August 15, 2025, that the revised report apparently no longer mentions any specific pesticides by name, as did the earlier draft.
The leaked report, described as a “win” for food and agriculture groups, is expected to be released in September. Meantime, groups such as Moms Across America posted a response to reports about the leaked draft. Its critique on August 16, 2025, focuses especially on pesticides, describing “Eleven Ways The EPA Fails to Regulate Pesticides.”
The “Eleven Ways” article describes a range of critical views about pesticide regulation, with emphasis on concerns about glyphosate and claims that are at least dubious. For example, Moms Across America claims that registration requires no long-term animal studies, that there are no multigenerational animal test requirements, and that “100% of the new pesticides approved by this administration contain PFAS [per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances].” The point here is not to assess the legitimacy of any of the 11 claims, but rather to note that the response to the leaked “almost final” report focuses on glyphosate and that these “MAHA Moms” will apparently not be satisfied with any final report recommendations.
Like the reference to relentless pursuit in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — the MAHA Moms movement may continue to haunt many pillars of the food and food safety establishment and lead some to ask — “Who are those guys?”
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