MAHA’s Health “Cure” Is Just Snake Oil in a Lab Coat

The Trump administration’s leaked Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) strategy report promises a cure for the nation’s health crisis, from improving children’s well-being to addressing pesticide pollution and toxic chemical exposure. But what it actually delivers is pure snake oil.

Behind the glossy language are just empty remedies: vague calls for “innovation” that keep industry lobbyists in the driver’s seat of communities’ health, pseudoscience in place of credible research, and stall tactics demanding more studies of problems that are well understood. In turn, it leaves the real drivers of children’s chronic illness — corporate greed, industrial pollution, poverty, and systemic inequities — untouched and even emboldened.

Families deserve more than corporate-sponsored fixes, which is why Earthjustice is demystifying the snake oil this administration is trying to sell.

Snake Oil #1: Safeguards Sacrificed for “Innovation”

The report touts “innovation” through private-sector partnerships, throws vague buzzwords like “precision agriculture,” but offers no enforceable protections from toxic pesticides that are linked to children’s neurodevelopment issues. Instead, the leaked report gaslights the public into believing that pesticide laws are already “robust.” They are not, and that’s why so many parents and scientists are so worried about toxic chemicals in our fruits and vegetables.

Meanwhile, it calls for weakening chemical pollution standards for slaughterhouses and factory farms, which only means more animal waste in the water families drink and fumes in the air children breathe. The silence on antibiotic overuse in animal feed, which drives resistance that kills 35,000 Americans each year, is as telling as it is deadly.

Protecting children should mean stronger safeguards from toxic pesticides, dirty air, and polluted water, not weakening laws to allow Big Ag to put profits ahead of kids’ health. When the government dresses up a corporate-profit agenda as innovation, it is doing nothing more than exploitation in disguise.

Snake Oil #2: “Gold-Standard Science,” Hold the Science

The MAHA strategy promises “gold-standard science,” yet cites none (the lack of citations is an astonishing, but not surprising omission given the administration’s failing track record on factual credibility). Instead, it substitutes ideology for evidence, and delay tactics for longstanding, peer-reviewed science. For example, the proposed Task Force on Chronic Disease is purported to “catalyze transformative discovery science and intervention strategies” on the environmental determinants of chemical exposure, a connection that has been established for years.

The administration is even defunding the science it says it needs. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just cut nearly $500 million in vaccine research, stalling breakthroughs in cancer treatment and emergency preparedness. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin gutted the Office of Research and Development, dissolved independent scientific advisory boards, and defunded children’s health research programs. This is happening as Congress makes cuts to Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides critical food assistance for nearly 40 million people, including one in five children, while simultaneously proclaiming these programs are essential to children’s health.

Taken together, these actions aren’t just misguided; they represent a systematic dismantling of federal science, weakening protections for public health, children, and the environment. The administration is selling a plan for sick politics, not healthy children.

Snake Oil #3: Promoting Health, but Excluding Communities’ Needs

The strategy ignores the obvious: kids in neighborhoods near highways, plants, and chemical sites suffer higher asthma, cancer, lead, and PFAS poisoning. Poverty and racism make those harms systemically worse. Yet this report pretends low-income families don’t live in overburdened places while facing impossible tradeoffs between paying rent, gas, or nutritious food, leaving them highly vulnerable to environmental and health risks.

Even advisory structures are being politicized to reinforce these failures. The Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, historically an independent body providing science-based recommendations, would now be forced to “align” its guidance with MAHA’s political agenda. This change risks turning a scientific advisory body into a rubber stamp for corporate-friendly policies rather than a protector of children’s health.

Equally concerning is the exclusion of community voices. The strategy makes no attempt to incorporate insights from parents, frontline healthcare providers, teachers, or local leaders; those who experience the consequences of environmental hazards daily. Notably, the MAHA strategy even ignores lead in drinking water and PFAS in food and household products, two major toxic threats communities have long urged the government to address.

Without grounding policy in the realities of the families it purports to serve, this strategy ceases to be a health strategy at all; it becomes a blueprint for profit, not children.

The Way Forward

At Earthjustice, this report reinforces what we already know: this administration is repackaging political giveaways as health policy while sidelining science and neglecting community voices. It is why we launched the Health Equity and Environment Action League (HEAL) a coalition of environmental justice experts, health professionals, scientists and community advocates to ensure Congress exercises oversight and its policies are guided by evidence, equity, and proven safeguards, away from the harmful reach of Big Oil and Big Ag.

Children’s health isn’t a political bargaining chip. If this administration won’t stand up to corporate interests over human lives, we will. Families deserve clean air, safe water, and food free from toxic chemicals — not another bottle of snake oil.