Some supporters of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement have begun publicly turning against their leader, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Trump administration as a whole, demanding a tougher crackdown on food coloring and pesticides.
A dashboard released Thursday by MAHA activists, including former members of Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign, says the Trump administration has broken more than 85 percent of its promises to MAHA on food, agriculture and environmental health. The dashboard’s creators include Dave Murphy, a former fundraiser for Kennedy’s campaign, and Charles Eisenstein, Kennedy’s former chief speechwriter.
NBC News is the first to report on the dashboard, which provides a window into how MAHA views the administration and Kennedy himself, ahead of the midterm elections. He accuses the Trump administration of giving favors to the chemical industry, pointing to its decision to approve new pesticides and hire lobbyists and industry executives.
“We are calling on the Trump administration to deliver on even the most basic promises it has made to the MAHA movement, and we have seen time and time again not only a lack of interest in doing so, but a blatant slap in the face,” said Tiffany Cianci, a former Kennedy campaign adviser, MAHA advocate and author of the scorecard.
About 41 percent of adults in the United States say they support MAHA ideals, according to an April poll by KFF, a nonprofit health think tank. Most are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, according to the poll, although alignment with Kennedy or President Donald Trump is not a primary reason to support the movement.
MAHA united during Kennedy’s 2024 presidential bid, then threw its support behind Trump when Kennedy endorsed him. It brought together several social movements, including food safety, environmentalism and vaccine skepticism, under the umbrella of fighting big corporations whose products may contribute to chronic diseases.
But many of those supporters have become Kennedy’s harshest critics in recent times, saying their priorities are being ignored by the Trump administration.
Covid vaccine skeptics, like Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, have criticized Kennedy and Trump for allowing mRNA vaccines to remain on the market. Food safety advocates say Kennedy didn’t put enough pressure on companies to remove synthetic colors and other additives from their products. And advocates of reducing pesticide exposure say Trump undermined their mission by issuing an executive order to increase the supply of glyphosate, a weedkiller, in the United States.
This discontent led to infighting between Kennedy loyalists – including those appointed to key government positions – and activists loyal to their original cause.
“What started as a crack in the coalition has now widened into a gaping fissure,” said Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on nutrition and food security.
White House spokeswoman Allison Schuster said the Trump administration “has already achieved numerous victories for the MAHA program, including overhauling Americans’ dietary guidelines, removing artificial ingredients from our food supply and investing in regenerative agriculture.”
“After years away from politics, the MAHA coalition found a champion in President Trump, who has made incredible strides to make America healthy again,” Schuster said in a statement.
Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said Kennedy “remains focused on implementing lasting reforms based on science, transparency and accountability.”
“President Trump and Secretary Kennedy are delivering the fundamental change Americans voted for. In just 20 months, this administration has moved at a historic pace to advance MAHA within the federal government,” she said in a statement.
Cianci acknowledged that many of the administration’s actions regarding environmental toxins and food additives were outside Kennedy’s purview. But his time in the administration did “obvious damage” to his reputation, she said, noting that Kennedy’s career led him to sue the pharmaceutical and pesticide companies the administration currently works with.
“To see him not speak out on issues that so obviously go against everything that was promised is very difficult because I think ethically it probably goes against his own inclinations,” Cianci said.
Kelly Ryerson, a well-known MAHA advocate who goes by the nickname “Glyphosate Girl” and helped develop the dashboard, said she doesn’t blame Kennedy as much as the rest of Trump’s cabinet because she knows “where his heart is.”
“I know the magnitude of the forces in terms of corporate influence over regulators, and this is something he himself has been critical of for years,” she said. “(But) the administration’s actions have really worked against everything we hoped for and everything Trump promised.”
Pamela Herd, a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan, said the MAHA movement has always been vulnerable to conflict because it is made up of unusual partners: liberal mothers who feed their children organic products, fringe doctors who falsely claim vaccines cause autism and Trump supporters who want to remove corporate influence over the federal government.
Over time, however, MAHA’s main objectives became consolidated. A Politico poll from March suggests that removing ultra-processed foods from the American diet and limiting exposure to PFAS, microplastics and pesticides were key priorities for people who identified as part of the movement.
“What the MAHA movement has always been interested in is chemicals,” Lurie said.
Much of Cianci’s dashboard focuses on actions taken by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture — agencies that Kennedy does not oversee. For example, he views EPA’s decisions to weaken mercury emissions standards and lower drinking water limits for certain PFAS as broken promises.
Remove food coloring
Several of the promises that were “partially fulfilled,” according to the dashboard, came directly from Kennedy-led agencies like the Food and Drug Administration.
For example, the FDA asked food companies to voluntarily eliminate certain dyes and banned two others that were not widely used. It also proposes requiring food manufacturers to notify the FDA when they determine that an additive is “generally recognized as safe.” However, the rule would not remove additives already in foods or prevent manufacturers from adding more.
Lurie said Kennedy campaigned on addressing these issues, but “never considered the practicalities on the ground: What do the regulations actually look like? How much authority do these agencies actually have?”
The dashboard does not mention an action that Kennedy has often touted: his January overhaul of federal dietary guidelines, which encourages Americans to eat more protein and cut out ultra-processed foods.
Nor does it address Kennedy’s vaccination policy. Kennedy and Trump attempted to reduce the number of universally recommended childhood vaccines. And Kennedy last year fired longtime members of a federal vaccine advisory committee, replacing them with vaccine skeptics. (A federal judge temporarily blocked the change, which is still being challenged in court.)
“If you have to pick one thing that RFK was successful at, it was in the way he influenced government vaccine policy,” said Herd, the University of Michigan professor.
Kennedy reassured anti-vaccine activists last month that they had “a strong and loyal friend in the White House.”
But as tensions rise, many MAHA supporters insist the movement does not need a political affiliation. Ryerson said MAHA voters likely won’t participate in the upcoming midterm elections.
“The disappointments with Obama and Biden are similar to the disappointments with Trump,” she said. “The difference with this administration is that we’re being promised something very, very different in a very real way, so I think this burn feels particularly raw.”
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