Last week, top Trump Administration officials including Vice President JD Vance and HHS Secretary RFK, Jr. spoke at an event dubbed the “Official MAHA Summit.” Aside from a conversation between Vance and RFK, Jr., the conference was not televised and excluded press. But its available now in podcast form! As FoodFix’s Helena Bottemiller Evich remarked, the program exhibits a “stark lack of policy substance.” In that respect, the conference program follows in the footsteps of the MAHA Strategy report put out earlier this Fall, “short on specifics and weak on regulatory action.”

Still, the MAHA Summit and its organizer, MAHA Action, deserve attention. For one, the summit’s speaker roster of top officials shows the Administration’s commitment to “Make America Healthy Again,” or at least to campaigning under the MAHA banner in next year’s mid-term elections. The Summit also offers insight into MAHA’s priorities. Which of the 120 planned actions enumerated in the MAHA Strategy report, for instance, will receive emphasis?

As a recent JAMA commentary argues, the stakes are high. While the MAHA Strategy report contains some conspicuous omissions—e.g. soda taxes, agricultural subsidy reform—and its prescriptions are at odds with Administration moves like cancelling university research grants, it “has potential to catalyze a bold, multifaceted approach to address food, nutrition, and health.” In particular, “provisions on UPF, GRAS reform, marketing to children, food in health care, and nutrition education for clinicians, if implemented and sustained, would represent a turning point in US food and health policy,” according to the authors. On the other hand, the MAHA Strategy Report’s “diversions into vaccine skepticism,” and “questionable initiatives” around fluoride and causes of autism, “creates confusion, undermines public trust, and distracts from the necessary actions on diet, environment, and chronic disease.”

The MAHA Summit sheds light on which of these disparate visions may prevail in the Trump Administration. Notably, the agenda, while light on policy substance, speaks volumes about the role of private industry in MAHA. Every single panel featured one or more representatives from private companies, including Google, Walmart, and pharmaceutical companies like Regeneron, along with various start-up founders and enterprising “activists.” Indeed, every speaker listed on the agenda is either an Administration political appointee, or promoting some profit-making venture—no one representing academia, unions, state or local government, or non-profit organizations (other than MAHA Action) made it onto the agenda.

Tony Lyons opened the Summit on behalf of MAHA Action, the event’s 501(c)(4) host. Secretary Kennedy’s 28-year-old son Finn, listed as a “board member” of MAHA Holdings, followed. The relationship between MAHA Action and MAHA Holdings is unclear. Neither Kennedy nor MAHA Holdings CEO Alex Hardy, who spoke after him, explained what MAHA Holdings is, its organizational structure, ownership, revenue model, etc. MAHA Action reportedly sought donations between $250,000 and $1 million for conference sponsorships. To what extent the various speakers on the agenda paid for the opportunity to address the attendees remains unknown.

So the MAHA Summit exhibits a rather permissive attitude towards profit-seeking enterprises seeking to influence public policy. But many will nevertheless find the agenda comforting insofar as it omits any discussions of vaccines. The Summit featured an “eloquent rant” from the actor Russel Brand, who spoke earlier in the month at the annual conference of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit founded in 2018 by Secretary Kennedy. Brand made no effort to hide his vaccine skepticism, but he also disavowed any allegiance to Republicans—he submits to the “authority of Jesus Christ not any political party.” Incidentally, Brand is facing rape and sexual assault charges in the U.K., to which he has pled not guilty, but back to MAHA.

A closer look at MAHA Action gives a clearer picture of the movement’s advocacy priorities. The 501(c)(4)’s website directs users to submit letters to lawmakers on 165 different state and federal bills, on topics that it identifies as “Medical Freedom” (68 bills), Nutritional Reform (49), Agriculture (27), Environmental Toxins (26), Chronic Disease (26), Pharma Industry/Vaccines (14), and Physical Fitness (0). In fact, most of the “medical freedom” bills involve freedom from vaccine requirements (whether for school children, as conditions of employment, etc.), with a few anti-mask initiatives thrown into the mix. The first “environmental toxin” bill listed on the site is New Jersey AB25, which “mandates the identification and study of infant fatalities and near fatalities potentially linked to vaccination.” (MAHA Supports!)

Another “environmental toxin” bill is California AB144, sponsored by Assembly member Jesse Gabriel, whose AB 418 blazed the trail for other state laws banning food additives like artificial dyes. MAHA does not support Gabriel’s AB 144, however, which would shift authority for immunization recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel to the California State Department of Public Health following Kennedy’s “unprecedented step of dismissing all 17 members,” of the panel, and replacing them with folks like Vicky Pebsworth, who served on the board of an organization dedicated to warning against vaccine risks. Rather, MAHA Action provides a template for concerned Californians to write to their legislators and oppose AB 144 on the grounds that it “undermines the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at HHS . . .  risking less transparent, state-driven mandates that conflict with MAHA’s push for gold-standard science and informed choice.”

Food policy is not absent from the MAHA Action advocacy portfolio. I counted 27 state bills that banned food additives or mandated food labeling, as well as several banning junk food from the Supplemental Food Assistance Program (SNAP), restricting pesticides, promoting local agriculture, and three that ban cell-cultivated or “lab grown” meat. MAHA Action even supports a few bills that could only be characterized as “bleeding heart liberal” initiatives, like California Democrat Liz Ortega’s AB800, which would improve nutrition in the state’s prisons, or Congressional democrats’ “Closing the College Hunger Gap Act,” which would expand SNAP to low-income college students. But the MAHA Action advocacy platform mostly underscores the incoherence of a movement that purports to champion “population health” in partnership with an ideology that sees government as the problem. Does anyone expect the Trump Administration and its congressional allies to close the college hunger gap while it kicks millions off SNAP?

This matters because food lies at the heart of MAHA’s appeal. Nearly four in ten parents “identify as supporters of the MAHA movement,” according to one recent poll. The polls shows that, more than any other issue, food policy motivates this support. Other MAHA causes, like promoting vaccine “freedom” and removing fluoride from drinking water, not to mention authorizing over-the-counter sales of Ivermectin, enjoy much less support.

But while the MAHA movement has helped to elevate legitimate concerns about ultra-processed foods and food chemical safety, its activities thus far point to few solutions that would actually improve Americans’ diets. Few observers would predict that the Trump Administration will pursue the sort of robust public policies to change the food environment—e.g. investing in nutrition school meals—that nutrition and public health experts tend to endorse. By contrast, the vaccine skepticism and other fringe issues that dominate the MAHA Action website fit seamlessly with the Administration’s efforts to dismantle public health infrastructure. Only time will tell, but the path ahead for MAHA seems clear, and its not good for consumers.