MAHA: The Gap Between the Promise and the Paperwork

The Make America Healthy Again movement, also known as MAHA, accomplished something unusual in American politics. In one fell swoop, it got millions of people to care, all at once, about what is in our food, our water, and our medicine. In a nation riddled with illness and disease, the health-driven energy behind MAHA is exciting and long overdue. Who doesn’t want cleaner food, honest science, and fewer chemicals poisoning our lives on a daily basis. So, it is worth taking a closer look when the movement starts to turn on itself. This month, a MAHA mom and former campaign adviser to current HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., named Tiffany Cianci, released a scorecard grading the current administration on 42 promises it made to the MAHA movement. According to her tally, zero promises were fully kept, five were partly kept, and 37 were broken. Days later, one of Kennedy’s own top health advisers, Calley Means, walked out.

Cianci put it bluntly, remarking that Republicans did not buy MAHA voters; they rented them. Whether it’s true or not, it is a sharp line and certainly did the trick to stoke internal discord. But hold on a second. Perhaps Cianci is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. As the current falling out turns into a war—where everyone who hasn’t delivered a miracle gets branded a traitor—the quiet part needs to be said out loud. Specifically, most of what MAHA demanded was never going to happen in two years, and the reason is not that Trump or Kennedy sold out the MAHA movement. It is because of how the government is actually allowed to operate. And yet, no one is taking the proper time to explain it.

The dangerous products that MAHA wants gone, glyphosate, the mRNA COVID shots, the artificial dyes, and so on, all share one trait. At some point, the government officially approved them. And, yes, the approval of the COVID shots was downright shady. Nonetheless, once an agency has stamped a product as approved, taking that stamp back is far harder than the process to grant it in the first place. A federal agency cannot simply reverse itself and pull an approved product because the people in charge want it gone. The law was intentionally crafted to prevent that very thing. Indeed, the quick-to-approve, slow-to-reverse is its own scandal. The system waves things through and then drags its feet on reversing them, despite a path of destruction that is clearly obvious to those paying attention.

To pull an approved product off the market, a federal agency must follow a long, rigid path intentionally built by Congress to ensure that no single administration can erase a product simply because it wants to. The product up for removal must be studied, the agency must weigh the risks against the benefits, warn other agencies, publish formal notices, open the floor to public comment, hold hearings, and then write a decision solid enough to survive a lawsuit from the manufacturer (but wait, this is backwards … these steps should happen before approval of a product, not before removal of it). The likelihood of a lawsuit when attempting to remove a product is almost certain. Why? Because chemical companies, Big Pharma giants, and Big Food have massive amounts of money and immediately gear up for a legal battle. In court, judges often throw the whole thing out if the paperwork behind it isn’t airtight.

Sure, the president’s pen has real power, and President Trump has used it. Through executive order, the Trump administration took action to shrink the childhood vaccine schedule. It also removed the dangerous COVID jabs from the list of routine shots, pressured states and schools to roll back COVID shot requirements and pulled hundreds of millions of dollars out of mRNA research. For many MAHA families, those were huge wins they had waited years to see. But what happened next? A federal judge blocked the vaccine schedule changes for skipping the required process, and the old recommendations snapped right back into place while the case is appealed. Even here, with the power of the president’s pen, the slow machinery set by Congress had the last word. And the MAHA goal that will never be allowed by the president’s signature alone is the biggest one of all—erasing the approved mRNA products from the market, or sidestepping the process enforced by the courts. Importantly, this is not a failure of nerve. It is the very design.

Glyphosate, the toxic weedkiller, is the clearest example of the problem plaguing the movement. MAHA wanted glyphosate gone from the market, or darn close to it. But unfortunately, the law governing pesticides does not allow anyone, including the president, to cancel it with a signature. Instead, the EPA has to run the full review, and for a chemical used as widely as glyphosate is used, that review can take years, often many of them. The current glyphosate review, which we’ve covered closely, aims to finish in early 2027. The EPA and Kennedy’s HHS have agreed to share the scientific work on it. NO, that is not a ban on glyphosate, but it feels like real movement. A path does not exist that would lead to a ban by now. On top of that fact, and adding to the confusion, the Trump administration issued an order to protect the domestic supply of glyphosate, which many MAHA members took as a betrayal. The order did not say the chemical is safe. Instead, it acknowledged that most American farming currently depends on it, and thus, it cannot be removed overnight while the EPA studies are still underway.

Let’s pray that MAHA eventually sees a victory with glyphosate, but the COVID shots are an even taller order. In what appears to be an effort to do all it could, the Trump administration pulled the remaining emergency authorizations in August 2025 and changed the government’s recommendations. But, again, a shot that is already fully licensed cannot be unapproved even if it is believed to be unsafe, and even with reports of injury and death on the table. The law requires more than that, unfortunately. It requires hard proof, built through its long, arduous process, that is strong enough to hold up in a hearing and in court. That work has begun. In 2025, the FDA ordered Pfizer and Moderna to strengthen its label warning about myocarditis, adding new data on who is at most risk. That is a formal, defensible step built on actual evidence, which is how Congress designed the process. But to be clear, a warning label is not the same as pulling a licensed product off the market. Not by a long shot. For that to happen, it will take years of following the process, not months.

Without question, wanting the shots gone entirely in two years is understandable, but tragically, it does not align with what the law demands. Undoubtedly, a central point of frustration among countless MAHA-aligned experts and supporters, and those who have since given up on MAHA, is that they know the mRNA shots are producing turbo cancers, immune issues, and other serious effects. Yet, these devastating effects remain largely unconnected to the jabs because the systems responsible for detecting and reporting safety signals (especially during the pandemic-induced mRNA experiment) are compromised.

Which brings us to food dyes, an example of what winning slowly looks like. In April 2025, Kennedy announced a plan to remove petroleum-based dyes from our food. Red No. 3 was on its way out, and the administration pushed to speed that up. How could they speed up a dye but not the mRNA shots or glyphosate? The answer is simple: Red No. 3 is already banned, the decision has been made, and the deadline has been set, so speeding it up meant asking companies to finish early. It is easy to rush the last step of a product ban that is almost finished, but it is impossible to rush to ban a product before the process has been followed. For the six food dyes still in everything from cereal to sports drinks, the approach is voluntary. The government asked companies to quit using them by 2026 or 2027, and many of the big ones agreed. The MAHA scorecard marked this as a promise only partly kept, because a promise from a company is not the same as a law banning food dyes. That might be a fair assessment. But it is important to note that a voluntary push got results in a year. A formal, mandatory ban, with its studies, hearings, and lawsuits, could not have delivered those results in that time frame.

So, what is the honest ledger? Where the law gives the government room to move—on solid nutritional guidance, dye pledges, research priorities, and recommendations—MAHA has made real progress. Frustration exists where the law demands years of process and procedure to cancel an approved pesticide, a licensed mRNA jab, or a long-approved additive. The MAHA scorecard does not show significant progress because, quite simply, not enough time has passed. That fact is not a scandal. It is arithmetic.

It is impossible for the real MAHA win to be a stack of bans at lightning speed. For those bans to occur, we must endure the slow, grinding, frustrating, and unglamorous work of building the evidence, changing what the market offers, shifting what people demand, and rewriting the laws and liability rules that currently protect the status quo. And that work is underway. No, it doesn’t fit on a MAHA scorecard, and it doesn’t arrive by the impossible deadline that many pushed for. The sooner the MAHA movement comes back together and makes peace with that reality, the full length of it, the longer it will last. And the more it will actually be able to change before an administration with a different agenda comes in and unravels all of it.