Published March 4, 2025
There is something laudable, if not especially new, in some of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda. Decades after hippies on the left sang the praises of living in harmony with the earth—years still after Rod Dreher first noticed the rise of the “Crunchy Cons”—an important strain in the MAHA coalition might be boiled down to the simple insight that “you are what you eat.” Out with the Oreos, red dye, and Coke—in with regenerative agriculture and a holistic approach to health.
Of course, some within MAHA, including its leading voice, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have been associated with some efforts that verge on quackery. Debunking those arguments would fill another piece entirely. But as a movement, MAHA’s interest in exploring holistic health care, as opposed to pinpointing and prescribing some new intervention for each discrete disease, could point policymaking in an interesting direction. Unfortunately, the White House’s move on IVF suggests it hasn’t heard what the movement’s backers are telling them.
MAHA may mean many things. But it has the most potential if it is understood as a truly radical movement, in the sense of returning to the root of our woes. Rather than opting for quick-fix band-aids or treating different parts of the body in isolation, an integrated, ground-up approach to well-being could be a welcome trend. It won’t be the solution for everyone, but addressing our obesity and chronic disease epidemics starts with better diets and more exercise.
This has led some in the MAHA crowd to push to reorient the nation’s food supply to focus more on soil health, nutrient-rich vegetables, and bolstering the supply of organic produce. On its own, this approach isn’t dissimilar from the healthy foods push championed by First Lady Michelle Obama. The Biden administration, too, held a national summit on hunger, nutrition, and health with ideas from all over the map, from universal school lunches to allowing physicians to prescribe fruits and vegetables to their patients.
But many of those efforts came across as left-coded. You don’t reach a conservative audience by including sentences like “disparities in food insecurity and diet-related diseases exist in part because of persistent structural inequities” in your White House report. MAHA may be a way of translating the goal of a healthier America into red state-ese.
How much of it translates into policy—particularly with red state senators and newly-confirmed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins leery of any meaningful reform to the food supply—remains to be seen. Yet even if it just starts as messaging, a renewed focus on holistic approaches is long overdue. The days of Sarah Palin brandishing a Big Gulp against big government nanny state-ism seem behind us.
This focus on root causes makes one of the first big health care moves out of the gate from the Trump administration a disappointment. In an executive order signed February 18, the President called for a plan to “ensure reliable access to IVF treatment, including by easing unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens to make IVF treatment drastically more affordable.”
America’s IVF industry already faces some of the lightest-touch regulation in the world, making it an odd patient to be prescribed a diagnosis of further deregulation. But beyond that, the IVF executive order is a rather striking betrayal of what we might call the principles of MAHA.
After all, IVF doesn’t treat the root causes of infertility. It tries to circumvent whatever problems may be leading to male or female reproductive problems by creating babies ex utero and then implanting them after the fact. There are doctors and lines of medicine that devote themselves to restoring healthy function of the ovaries, or boosting male sperm count, or other ways of addressing underlying health problems preventing conception. IVF doesn’t solve the problem of infertility; it sidesteps it.
In doing so, it opens the door to seeing babies turned into products selected, rather than gifts accepted. The U.S. is already one of the few nations that allows sex-selective embryo implantation. We aren’t that far from technology allowing parents to select their offspring based on a genetic score, ensuring that the children of tomorrow have the highest IQ, the bluest eyes, the most athletic builds.
If the President and his team were interested in applying the underlying principles of the MAHA movement to concrete policy proposals, they’d be directing federal research dollars towards the study and treatment of endometriosis or recurrent miscarriage. They’d champion the idea of restorative reproductive health, which would help redress infertility without turning embryos into consumer products, by endorsing Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith’s Reproductive Empowerment and Support through Optimal Restoration (RESTORE) Act. They’d hold the fertility industry—which has far from a sterling record—to the same standard as the organs of public health, instead of abetting misinformation about IVF’s track record of success (or lack thereof) as women get into their mid-to-late 30s. They’d get rid of marriage penalties and focus on helping young adults get married earlier in life, when chances at conceiving a child are higher. All of these would be root causes to be tackled, key steps towards making America—and her fertility rates—healthier.
The MAHA movement has the potential to get mainstream Republicans excited about holistic health care. It also runs the risk of becoming a political fig leaf, used to advance politically connected industries, or a punch line, if its more heterodox understandings of disease theory end up guide policymaking. Its adherents, particularly the young moms who have been excited to see their issue come to national prominence, deserve for the goal of a healthy America, from the ground up, to be taken seriously—not betrayed within the first month.
Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where his work with the Life and Family Initiative focuses on developing a robust pro-family economic agenda and supporting families as the cornerstone of a healthy and flourishing society.
