RFK Team Report

The MAHA Agenda

This page describes the stated goals of the Make America Healthy Again movement and the RFK Jr. HHS team, drawn from their speeches, policies, and publications. It is their agenda in their terms — not this site's endorsement, and not medical advice.

The diagnosis

Ask anyone in this movement what’s wrong with American health and you’ll hear the same three-part diagnosis. First, a chronic-disease crisis: roughly six in ten American adults live with at least one chronic condition, and the movement’s figures argue the trend lines — obesity, diabetes, autoimmune disease, infertility — point to something environmental rather than genetic. Second, a corrupted food system: ultra-processed products, added sugars, artificial dyes, and pesticide residues dominate the American diet, and the movement blames both industry and the regulators it says industry captured. Third, captured institutions: the FDA, NIH, and CDC, in this telling, serve pharmaceutical and food conglomerates more than the public — through the GRAS loophole that lets companies self-certify additives, through nutrition guidelines shaped by industry-funded science, and through a medical culture that reaches for prescriptions before prevention.

You don’t have to agree with the diagnosis to understand the agenda. But you can’t understand the agenda without it.

The food agenda

Food is where MAHA started and where its most concrete wins sit. The 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines flipped the old pyramid — the movement calls it putting whole foods back at the base. The FDA is phasing out petroleum-based food dyes. The GRAS loophole, which let manufacturers declare additives safe without FDA review, is being closed. States are getting SNAP waivers to exclude soda and candy. School cafeterias, military mess halls, and hospitals are being pushed toward scratch cooking and real ingredients — Kennedy’s “Real Food Show” roadshow has made this the movement’s most visible campaign.

The through-line: make the default American diet consist of actual food again, and use every lever — guidelines, procurement, benefits rules, public pressure — to get there.

The medical agenda

The movement’s medical vision is “root cause” medicine: find what’s driving chronic disease and remove it before reaching for a lifetime prescription. In practice that means price transparency so patients can see costs before care, a war on what Oz calls “ghost billing” and phantom enrollees, primary-care payment reform, and support for metabolic-health approaches — continuous glucose monitors, food-as-medicine programs, exercise prescriptions. It also means reopening questions the establishment considers settled: the childhood vaccine schedule is under formal review, with the movement demanding better safety science; psychedelic medicine research is being accelerated; and figures like Bhattacharya are redirecting NIH money toward replication studies and human-based research models.

The institutional agenda

MAHA’s leaders argue you can’t fix health without fixing the agencies. The FDA is being pushed toward faster, more transparent reviews — including new pathways for ultra-rare diseases — while its food side faces the dye phaseout and GRAS closure. The NIH is getting its grant machine overhauled: replication rewarded over novelty, indirect-cost caps, and an end to what Bhattacharya calls “groupthink” funding. CMS, the government’s largest health payer, is being turned into an anti-fraud and price-transparency weapon. The common thread is distrust of concentrated expertise and a bet that sunlight — open data, open trials, open prices — disciplines institutions better than internal reform.

What it means for a family

Strip away the politics and the agenda’s promise to an ordinary household is simple: food your grandmother would recognize as food, in schools and stores; a doctor’s visit where you know the price beforehand; a medical system that asks why you’re sick before deciding which drug you’ll take forever; and agencies that publish their reasoning instead of asking for trust. Whether the movement can deliver that — and at what cost — is the open question this site chronicles week by week.

The criticisms

The agenda has serious critics, and this site covers them to the same standard. Physician groups say the vaccine-schedule overhaul risks measles and whooping-cough resurgences, pointing to 2026’s record measles year. Nutrition scientists argue “ultra-processed” is too vague a category to regulate and that the seed-oil panic outruns the evidence. Former officials warn the NIH grant overhaul could politicize science funding. Economists note the Medicaid payment deferrals punish states — and patients — before fraud is proven. Some of the movement’s own allies have broken publicly: Robert Lustig walked out of the dietary-guidelines process over Kennedy’s leadership, and grassroots MAHA figures denounced the corporate sponsors at the movement’s own summit.

An agenda this ambitious will be judged by results. That’s what the Scoreboard is for.

Where to go next