Political analysts will continue trying to read the tea leaves behind Donald Trump’s resounding victory at the polls for months to come. Trump’s embrace relatively late in the campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement clearly played second fiddle to issues like inflation and immigration for most Trump voters. Nevertheless, with an epidemic of diet-related disease raging, and popular cultural figures like Joe Rogan endorsing Trump as a change agent on food policy, MAHA had obvious appeal. The question now is to what extent the second Trump Administration will take action on indignities like the chemical additive discrepancy between American and Canadian Froot Loops—which RFK, Jr. recently spotlighted—along with a host of other food policies in need of reform that consumer advocates have sought to address for years.

As critics like Sen. Cory Booker pointed out in the run-up to the election, many of the policies undertaken during the first Trump Administration, such as allowing the use of controversial pesticides and weakening school lunch standards, are directly at odds with the MAHA agenda, which Booker derided as “Donald Trump’s latest con.” Critics like Booker point out that the MAHA agenda conflicts with the Heritage Foundation “Project 2025” document, over half of whose authors and contributors served in the previous Trump Administration. But Trump vocally opposed Project 2025, and a more recent document—associated with the America First Policy Institute, which some speculate is now providing Trump with policy suggestions—says little about food and ag policy, although it exhibits a similar ethos as Project 2025 regarding government regulation generally, more on that later.

For now, progress in the next Administration on the MAHA agenda seems possible, if not very probable. And while the details are thin, what’s articulated on the MAHA website sounds like a consumer, public health, and environmental advocacy groups’ wish- list: formulating “a comprehensive national strategy to combat the chronic disease epidemic,” supporting “regenerative agriculture,” preserving natural habitats threatened by “industrial and agricultural expansion,” “combatting corporate corruption,” and “removing toxins from the environment.”

Few observers would associate these goals with recent Republican platforms, much less Trump’s first Administration, but the MAHA agenda does not obviously conflict with the Republican Party’s 2024 platform. That document largely skips over food and agricultural policy. It pledges to “protect American workers and farmers from unfair trade,” and to “defeat inflation,” which presumably includes food inflation. But the platform says nothing about agricultural subsidies, federal food assistance programs, dietary guidelines, food safety inspection, food additive regulation, or any other hot button food policy issues. Nor does the America First Policy Institute’s agenda.

Which brings us back to Project 2025. Project 2025 skips over a lot of food policies too, but where it does offer details, the conflicts with MAHA come into focus. For example, Project 2025 emphasizes the importance of “food productivity and affordability.” It urges the Administration to “clarify the critical importance of efficiency to food affordability,” and to “announce its principles through an executive order,” instructing USDA to “remove all references to transforming the food system on its web site.” By contrast, MAHA recommends “supporting policies that incentivize sustainable farming practices, improve soil health, reduce chemical usage, and increase biodiversity.” Likewise, Project 2025 recommends repealing the federal GMO labeling law, while MAHA endorses “policies that increase transparency.”

The MAHA agenda includes support for policies that “increase access to nutritious food” but Project 2025 advocates shrinking federal food assistance, and in particular, cutting back on school meal spending. Project 2025 recommends the new Administration “return to the original purpose of school meals,” i.e. feeding just the kids from “low-income families.” More specifically, it recommends that the Administration narrow its interpretation of which schools qualify for universal free school meal funding under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), and “work with lawmakers to eliminate CEP,” while rejecting any proposals to bring back pandemic era universal free school meal policies.

Again, Donald Trump has not endorsed Project 2025. He even wrote that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” But for those who want to keep the Administration accountable for enacting the MAHA agenda, these conflicting views may be telling as the new administration begins to take shape.

Of course, the greatest headwinds to the MAHA agenda relate to public policy more generally.  Consider those Froot Loops. Gov. Gavin Newsome recently signed into law a bill that will ban color additives like the ones in U.S. Froot Loops from foods served in California schools. This is a popular policy, and I would argue, one that is well supported by the science. But it involves more rules, carried out by more powerful regulators.

If we are concerned about chemicals in food, or food safety in general, more regulation is a feature, not a bug. And more regulation is antithetical to policies like the “two for one” Trump Executive Order that required agencies to take two deregulatory actions for each regulatory action—a policy that the America First Agenda endorses in its proposal to “cut red tape.” MAHA does not say anything about “red tape,” but RFK, Jr.’s recent statement that “there are entire departments . . . at the FDA … that have to go,” suggests a view that the problem lies with too much government oversight, not its absence.

But FDA did not put the sketchy chemical additives in Froot Loops. Kelloggs did. And tearing down FDA will do nothing to improve our kids’ breakfast cereal. That’s because the problems in our food system ultimately originate in market forces run amok. Decimating the nation’s food regulatory infrastructure will not only allow those problems to fester, it risks opening up a Pandora’s box of other challenges, like foodborne illnesses caused by microbiological pathogens. When consumers are afraid to eat fresh foods like romaine lettuce, they tend to eat more “safe” (in the short-term) ultra-processed foods. That’s why recommendations like dismantling the “unnecessary regulatory barrier” of federal meat inspection are doubly concerning.

The American people have good reason to distrust the food system given the epidemic of diet-related disease that is devastating the country and shortening American lifespans for the first time in generations. Bold public policies to improve American diets are long overdue, and the cause for reform is attracting bipartisan support. But effective reforms will have to leverage FDA and other food regulators’ expertise to set the ground rules for a food system that operates to the benefit of consumers, rather than industrial food interests. They will require congressional support both to authorize and fund federal food regulators in protecting the public from unsafe and unexamined food chemicals, addictive ultra-processed foods, junk food marketing to kids, toxic food environments, and other drivers of disease. This is an agenda that the food industry will vigorously oppose. But it is an agenda with overwhelming popular support, as the MAHA campaign’s success has shown.