Progressives Blast MAHA Report That 'Echoes the Pesticide Industry's Talking Points'

Health and environmental advocates are hammering a new report issued Tuesday by the Trump administration's Make America Health Again Commission for papering over dangers posed by pesticides and replicating the positions of powerful corporate interests.

According to StatNews, the MAHA report takes a "cautious line" on pesticides, and even includes a section recommending that the Environmental Protection Agency work "with food and agricultural stakeholders... to ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in [the Environmental Protection Agency's] pesticide robust review procedures."

As StatNews noted, this section in particular drew the ire of organic food advocate Elizabeth Kucinich—the spouse of Dennis Kucinich, who served as presidential campaign manager for Trump Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who said that it "reads like it was written by Bayer and Monsanto."

Zen Honeycutt, founder of the pro-MAHA group Moms Across America, similarly told StatNews that "we are deeply disappointed that the committee allowed the chemical companies to influence the report," even as she praised other parts of it.

Public interest advocacy groups, meanwhile, slammed the MAHA report, which they called wholly deferential to major industries.

"The MAHA Commission report is a gift to Big Ag," said Food & Water Watch senior policy analyst Rebecca Wolf. "Its deregulatory proposals read like an industry wish list. The truth is, industrial agriculture is making us sick. Making America healthy again will require confronting Big Ag corporations head on—instead, the Trump administration has capitulated."

Wolf added that the MAHA report lacks "any real action on toxic pesticides linked to rising cancer rates nationwide" and called it "shameful but not surprising" that the report barely mentioned so-called "forever chemicals" contaminating drinking water "while disregarding how elsewhere in the administration common-sense water safety rules are being weakened and canceled."

Sarah Starman, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, was even more scathing in her assessment of the report, which she called "a slap in the face to the millions of Americans, from health-conscious moms to environmental advocates to farmers, who have been calling for meaningful action on pesticides."

Like other critics, Starman heaped particular scorn upon the report's section on pesticides.

"Laughably, the report calls the EPA's lax, flawed, and notoriously industry-friendly pesticide regulation process 'robust,'" she said. "This, in spite of the fact that EPA currently allows more than 1 billion pounds of pesticide use on US crops each year, including the use of 85 pesticides that are banned in other countries because of the serious risks they pose to human health and the environment."

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) said that the MAHA report offered "a few crumbs" to health advocates, but was mostly filled with "hollow rhetoric."

George Kimbrell, legal director and co-executive director of CFS, also called out the report's claims about the EPA having a "robust" procedure for approving pesticides.

"There is nothing 'robust' about EPA's regulation of pesticides," he said. "In reality it is the antithesis of robust: it is an oversight system filled with data holes and regulation loopholes, lacking in public transparency, which has instead required decades of dogged public interest litigation to get EPA to do its most basic duties."

Environmental Working Group co-founder and president Ken Cook said that the report made a mockery of Kennedy's past promises to use his power to take on powerful industries.

"It looks like pesticide industry lobbyists steamrolled the MAHA Commission's agenda," he commented. "Secretary Kennedy and President Trump cynically convinced millions they'd protect children from harmful farm chemicals—promises now exposed as hollow."

Cook also took aim at the leaders of the MAHA movement, whom he described as "grifters exploiting the hopes and fears of health-conscious Americans in their quest for power jobs in Washington."