When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was on the campaign trail last year, the conspiracy theorist delivered a promise to voters: If he joined Donald Trump’s team, he’d “ban the worst agricultural chemicals.” With this in mind, when RFK Jr. unveiled a long-awaited “Make America Healthy Again” report this week focused specifically on improving children’s health, it was widely assumed that he’d take aim at pesticides.
But that didn’t exactly happen. The report endorsed new research related to pesticides, but otherwise said very little on the subject. Tracey Woodruff, the director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, told The New York Times, “It’s almost like a slap in the face of the people from the MAHA movement who legitimately care about pesticide exposures and how that impacts their kids.”
The Times published a separate report a couple of days later, noting that while the hapless Cabinet secretary has used his powerful office to advance his anti-vaccine vision, he’s applied “a far lighter touch” to pesticides and unhealthy foods. From the article:
Far from cracking down on food and farming practices, Mr. Kennedy’s MAHA commission report on Tuesday defended existing pesticide review procedures and, in some cases, called for loosening food regulations, even as the report promised future steps to clean up what children eat. To many scientists — and some of Mr. Kennedy’s own followers — the gap between the health secretary’s use of his authority over food quality and his pummeling of vaccines has created a jarring split screen.
The MAHA “movement,” the Times added, has run “headlong into the deregulatory agenda of other segments of the Republican coalition.”
This isn’t altogether new. MSNBC’s Catherine Rampell wrote a memorable Washington Post column in June along these lines, noting that Kennedy’s MAHA agenda is rooted in part in the idea that Americans’ health would greatly improve through better nutrition and exposure to fewer environmental toxins.
RFK Jr., Rampell added, is nevertheless playing a leading role in an administration that’s “taking away nutritional assistance” and “expanding use of environmental toxins.”
The same column noted that the Trump administration “fired everyone at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tasked with fighting lead poisoning. (It has since tried to rehire them.) Officials also attempted to purge toxicology researchers from the Environmental Protection Agency. (Litigation is ongoing.) And they paused a Biden-era rule that provided safeguards to prevent accidents at chemical plants and have proposed shuttering the agency tasked with investigating chemical accidents after the fact.” Going a step further down that path, it’s worth emphasizing that Kennedy rose to public prominence decades ago by suing polluters. Now, he finds himself part of a Republican administration that’s actively opposed to efforts to reduce pollution — with nary a word from the nation’s health secretary. But months later, with the release of an underwhelming MAHA report, the fine print on Kennedy’s agenda is coming into sharper focus. Even if we were to narrow the focus to vaccines, Kennedy is obviously not making Americans healthy again. But the more we widen the aperture, the more ridiculous Kennedy’s vision appears.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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