Editor’s note: This is an early preview of an article set to appear in the May/June 2025 issue of the Western Grower & Shipper.
Has a new presidential administration ever moved so quickly and boldly across so many policy areas? Historians will assess that. For now, let’s try to map out one of the key pillars of the Trump agenda – the Make America Healthy Again movement, or “MAHA” – with one caveat: What follows could be obsolete before this magazine is published, things being the way they are in Trump’s second term.
Trump’s selection of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services was an eye-popping move, even for Trump. In tapping Kennedy, Trump – an unabashed McDonald’s aficionado who seems to hydrate almost entirely on Diet Coke – opened the White House doors to a forceful band of advocates dominated by Big Food and pharmaceutical industry critics, who through effective social media and podcasting made their movement relevant and forceful even before it became known as MAHA.
As Secretary of HHS, Kennedy has oversight of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other agencies that touch food and nutrition policy in several ways, especially food safety. (More on that another time.) But where he intends to impact food and nutrition, Kennedy needs cooperation from his cabinet counterparts.
What do RFK, Jr. and MAHA mean for agriculture policy, and especially for the specialty crop (i.e., fresh produce) sector?
Let’s start with one of the central drivers of the MAHA movement, food and nutrition policy.
Kennedy has forcefully argued to flip federal nutrition standards and guidance (think of the outdated food pyramid) to prioritize meats, poultry, seafood, dairy, fruits, vegetables and tree nuts.
He has also placed a bullseye on so-called ultra-processed foods that are typically associated with corn, soy products, other grains and often manufactured with ingredients reminiscent of college chemistry textbooks. Prioritizing fresh foods in federal purchasing programs, increasing specialty crop support in the pending Farm Bill, and elevating national consciousness around this agenda would undoubtedly create a long-awaited jump in demand for our healthy foods and a stronger federal commitment to the sustainability of the specialty crop industry.
But almost all these policy areas fall within the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture, not HHS, which is why Kennedy has been so quick to seek out Secretary Brooke Rollins as his partner. Some early signs of success are apparent; the two cabinet officers have appeared together, with Rollins increasingly expressing her support for much of MAHA agenda vis-à-vis food and nutrition.
Things could get trickier when it comes to agriculture policy. Kennedy seems to have prevailed on Trump to buy into his broad, longstanding indictment of pesticides used in agriculture. This ignores the success of our incredibly rigorous science- and risk-based federal regulatory regime governing crop protection tools – the registration and approval process, label and use restrictions and ongoing monitoring for human and environmental health effects. As part of his drive to sideline synthetic pesticides and herbicides, Kennedy is also pressing for widespread adoption – perhaps by government mandate – of a regenerative agriculture regime that would entice activist groups to graft their agendas onto an as-yet cloudy definition of regenerative agriculture. This is concerning, to put it mildly. A possible silver lining: Kennedy could become a forceful advocate for game-changing federal investments in biological controls for specialty crops, a major priority for Western Growers.
Where Kennedy must turn to Agriculture Secretary Rollins on nutrition policy, here he will need another cabinet officer: Lee Zeldin, tapped to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which has primary regulatory authority over pesticides. Zeldin is a former member of Congress from Long Island and was the Republican candidate for Governor of New York in 2022. As a suburban New Yorker, Zeldin, just like Kennedy, will need Rollins and her team for guidance on crop protection policies and impacts on farm production.
Shortly after he was nominated, I was fortunate to speak with Kennedy by phone, and though the main purpose for my call was to ask that he support a friend of WG who was seeking a high-level position, I took the opportunity to talk about all of this with him and came away mostly encouraged. But it struck me then, as it does now, that while Kennedy’s determination to affect policy in nutrition and agriculture is fierce, in this – as in so many aspects of this presidential administration – Trump himself will be the ultimate arbiter on major policy decisions, as is his prerogative. As a previous occupant of the Oval Office put it: “I’m the Decider.”