On February 13, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14212 establishing the Make America Healthy Again Commission (MAHA), tasked with confronting what it calls the “childhood chronic disease crisis.” This month, the Commission released its Strategy Report, a sweeping plan that promises to reorient federal health policy around prevention, nutrition, environmental safety, and medical reform. At first glance, the scope is ambitious: it emphasizes dietary improvements, environmental protections, better medical transparency, and lifestyle interventions. Yet closer reading reveals a troubling mix of genuine innovation and politicized science. This is my initial interpretation of the MAHA strategy.
The Four Pillars of the Report
The report begins by identifying four drivers of chronic disease in children: poor diet, chemical exposures, inactivity and chronic stress, and what it calls “overmedicalization.” From there, it proposes a four-pillar strategy: advancing research, realigning incentives, increasing public awareness, and fostering private sector collaboration. In its research agenda, the strategy highlights nutrition science, gut microbiome studies, oral health, and “food as medicine” programs, alongside calls to track chemical exposures, study microplastics, and examine the links between screen time and mental health. Some of these are forward-looking, but others stand out as politically loaded: new vaccine injury research centers, autism “root cause” studies, and federally backed investigations into fluoride and electromagnetic radiation. These inclusions echo long-running talking points from anti-vaccine and anti-public health movements, raising questions about the scientific rigor guiding the plan.
The incentives and systems section is equally wide-ranging. It calls for reforms to food policy, from updated dietary guidelines to stricter oversight of additives, infant formula, and junk food in school and SNAP programs. It also promises new transparency rules for researcher payments and conflicts of interest, as well as changes in medical education to elevate nutrition and prevention, but mixed in are deregulatory measures, loosening environmental protections, eliminating reduced-fat requirements in school lunches, and accelerating drug and device approvals, that could roll back hard-won public health safeguards. Perhaps most strikingly, the vaccine framework emphasizes “medical freedom,” vaccine injury, and the “best” childhood schedule, framing immunization policy in a way that risks eroding public trust rather than strengthening it.
The awareness campaign section is less controversial, focusing on school-based nutrition and fitness initiatives, public campaigns about vaping, alcohol, and opioid use, and renewed attention to mental health in children. These efforts could genuinely improve health literacy and cultural attitudes toward prevention. Similarly, the private sector collaboration proposals, working with farmers on soil health, incentivizing precision agriculture, encouraging restaurants to offer healthier options for children, and even addressing infertility through education and training centers, have promise but are short on details about enforcement and accountability.
MAHA Radicalizing Medical Education
One of the most concerning aspects from the MAHA strategy is their views on medical school accreditation:
Medical School Curriculum and Accreditation: HHS and CMS will address the current monopolies that exist for the accreditors of medical education programs by using their regulatory authorities to bring in competing accreditors of medical education programs, including those with a focus on treating the root causes of chronic disease in the United States. Accreditation reform can also increase nutrition education and ensure medical school curricula better align with making America healthy again.
Right now, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) set the standards for training physicians. These organizations aren’t perfect, but they exist to make sure that every doctor, no matter where they went to school, meets a rigorous, evidence-based standard. Breaking that system apart has enormous risks.
If new accrediting agencies are allowed, some schools will naturally gravitate toward the easiest standards. That’s how accreditation works in higher education more broadly, when multiple agencies compete, the quality bar doesn’t go up, it often goes down. Medical education can’t afford that kind of dilution. Lowering the standards for training physicians isn’t a matter of academic debate; it’s a matter of patient safety.
Accreditation reform is being pitched as a way to “increase nutrition education” and focus on “root causes of chronic disease.” However, notice the framing: this isn’t about evidence-based expansion of the curriculum. It’s about reshaping medical education through political authority. If accrediting bodies are chosen because they align with certain ideologies rather than with science, then medical training risks becoming a battlefield for political agendas. Imagine a future where one accreditor emphasizes alternative medicine over pharmacology, or downplays vaccines, or sidelines the study of infectious disease. That’s not reform, that’s sabotage.
Patients trust physicians because they assume a common foundation: every doctor has been rigorously trained, tested, and vetted under the same standards. Fragment the system, and that trust erodes. If one accrediting body requires deep study of evidence-based medicine and another rubber-stamps a looser curriculum, how will the public know which doctors have the training they deserve? Once confidence is lost, it’s hard to regain.
Yes, doctors should learn more about nutrition, exercise, and prevention. However, those topics should be integrated into existing curricula, not swapped in at the expense of core medical sciences. Chronic diseases are complex, and many of the issues are beyond the control of doctors such as food insecurity and toxic environmental stressors. Treating diseases requires understanding pathophysiology, pharmacology, behavioral science, and health systems. Oversimplifying medical training into a narrow focus risks producing doctors who are underprepared for the realities of clinical care.
Bottom Line
Taken as a whole, the MAHA strategy is a paradox. On one hand, it embraces forward-thinking concepts like precision nutrition, microbiome research, and food policy reform. On the other, it embeds politicized priorities—especially around vaccines, autism, and fluoride—that threaten to undermine its credibility. By weaving together evidence-based ideas with ideological insertions, the strategy risks confusing the public and destabilizing trust in health institutions. Public health is strongest when science leads and politics follows; this document often seems to invert that relationship.
The MAHA strategy could have been a landmark roadmap for preventing chronic disease in America’s children. Instead, it arrives as a mixed bag—part visionary, part political Trojan horse. There is no doubt that improving nutrition, cutting ultra-processed foods, and funding microbiome research should be central to our national health agenda. But conflating those worthy goals with anti-vaccine frameworks, regulatory rollbacks, and fringe science sends the wrong message. Rather than making America healthy again, this plan risks making the public more confused, divided, and vulnerable.
Thank you for the rundown. This is what makes pseudoscience so dangerous; it combines real concern and science with absolute quackery, appealing to the desperate.
The rage I feel regarding their policies around "healthy food" or whatever, while doing nothing to address food deserts, while stripping SNAP, and just so many things that will make access to ANY food so much harder...