RFK Jr. Shows Why America Needs the MAHA Agenda | The American Spectator

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before a House subcommittee about the HHS’s proposed 2026 budget on Tuesday, making the case that the department needs to “recalibrate its trajectory so that it transforms our health care system from a sick care system into a health care system.” Kennedy outlined the HHS’s revamped priorities to create wide-reaching reforms to the nation’s food and healthcare system as he characterized the country’s current system as unsustainable.

MAHA’s primary target, according to Kennedy, is “a special focus on the chronic disease epidemic.” He said that the HHS must tackle the problems of debilitating disease, contaminated food, toxic environments, addiction, and mental health. In addition, the HHS aims to maintain “responsible and effective service to the 100 million Americans” on government health programs while cutting costs to the American taxpayer. “We intend to do a lot more with less,” Kennedy promised.

The HHS is a massive sprawling bureaucracy with a $130.7 billion budget for fiscal year 2025 (which doesn’t even include $1.7 trillion in mandatory spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs). The proposed 2026 fiscal budget cuts 25 percent of discretionary spending to a new total of $94.7 billion.

The largest cuts come from the National Institutes for Health, an agency that had a $47 billion budget. The new budget cuts the agency by almost 40 percent, retaining $27 billion for NIH research. In the new proposed budget, the White House argued that the “NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.” The administration criticized the NIH for engaging in gain-of-function research and “promot[ing] radical gender ideology to the detriment of America’s youth.”

One of the White House’s cuts to NIH spending eliminated half a billion dollars from the National Institute on Minority and Health Disparities. On Tuesday, Kennedy said that the NIH was conducting “thousands of studies that were doing nothing to improve American health.” He gave several examples too. One $2.2 million study researched “the effects of exogenous testosterone therapy on communication in gender diverse speakers,” and another “$3 million study at the University of Pennsylvania that studied anti-vaping social media campaigns targeted towards sexual gender minorities teens.” Based on these findings, HHS spending was ripe for budget curtailments.

Budget Cuts Are a Drop in the Bucket Compared to Health Problems

Much of the discourse surrounding HHS’s plans has focused on the department’s proposed cuts. While liberals are indignant about the cuts, DOGE has touted a major win. Currently, the HHS is No. 1 on DOGE’s agency efficiency leaderboard as the department where the most savings were found.

However, as significant as the proposed budget cuts are, they are simply a drop in the bucket compared to the monumental amount that Americans spend on healthcare every year, largely due to chronic diseases. If the Trump administration is to improve America’s financial and health landscape in a significant way, the MAHA movement must successfully begin an overhaul of the country’s entire approach to health.

The U.S. spends nearly one-third of the federal budget and $4.5 trillion as a nation on healthcare, yet we remain the sickest of developed nations. According to the CDC, 90 percent of the nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual health care expenditures are for people with chronic and mental health conditions. 

Over 70 percent of American adults and a third of children are overweight or obese, and an estimated 38 million Americans have diabetes. The amount that our country spends on healthcare is unsustainable and continues to grow at an astonishing rate. As Kennedy argued in a post on X, “We’ve thrown trillions of dollars at our health agencies — and the American people have only gotten sicker.”

Kennedy said during his opening statement on Tuesday that healthcare costs “are steadily growing at a rate 2 percent greater than the economy.” These healthcare costs have a staggering effect on America’s spiraling national debt and citizens’ medical debts. For example, Americans as a whole owe at least $220 billion in medical debts, and an estimated 12 percent of U.S. adults borrowed an estimated total of $74 billion just in the past 12 months. “If we don’t staunch this hemorrhage we will ransom our children to bankruptcy, servitude, and disastrous health consequences,” Kennedy said.

MAHA’s Fundamental Healthcare Realignment

Kennedy’s HHS is working to cut wasteful government spending, but MAHA is attempting a more radical realignment that addresses the widespread problems that have plagued the American food and health system for generations. In other words, the decisive question is not whether the HHS spends money or even how much money the HHS spends, but what the HSS spends money on.

In fact, the new proposed HHS budget hasn’t simply made cuts. The budget also provides $500 million in new spending for the MAHA initiative, which would “allow the Secretary to tackle nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance on medication and treatments, the effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety across HHS.”

Kennedy stated in the Senate’s hearing last month that a priority of his is to conduct research that has been neglected for 20 years: namely, to tackle the epidemic of chronic disease that has caused us “to go from 3 percent of American children having chronic disease … to 60 percent today. I would want to look at the over 10,000 chemicals that are now in our food, most of them have never been tested. I’d want to look at what’s causing the infertility crisis. Why are girls in this country reaching puberty 6 years … earlier than historically. Why do [teenagers] in this country have half the testosterone of a 60-year-old man.”

Kennedy has undertaken a paradigm shift in the way that the government thinks about health. For decades, America’s healthcare has focused on treating the symptoms of problems without addressing the real cause. For example, Kennedy has argued that the NIH has done well to help make cancer more survivable, but questions why the NIH hasn’t asked why cancer has become so prevalent. Addressing colorectal cancer in particular, Kennedy said that “this is something that’s new to humanity. It was never known before and now it’s an epidemic in our children.”

Citing numerous DEI studies, Kennedy said that much of NIH’s research funding was cut back because “very few of the studies that were being done by NIH were being done on chronic disease.” Instead, “NIH should be telling us: what are seed oils doing to our children? What is corn syrup doing to our children? What are food dyes doing to our children? What is the packaging and microplastics doing to our children? What are pesticides doing to our children?”

All of these questions have significant bearing on the lives and vitality of American citizens. And Americans will continue to spend exorbitantly on medical expenses until these underlying issues are addressed.

As the MAHA initiative brings new priorities to the table that could provide real results, one would rightly question why those in power hadn’t addressed these priorities before.

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