Following the Money Behind the MAHA Brand

by Robyn O'Brien | May 1, 2026 | Politics, Corruption & Criminality

Image by Kagenmi, iStockphoto

Following the Money Behind the MAHA Brand

by Robyn O'Brien | May 1, 2026 | Politics, Corruption & Criminality

Image by Kagenmi, iStockphoto

PAC filings don’t lie. MAHA is a Republican election machine wearing a wellness mask as its disguise, and real food advocates deserve the truth.

Republished with permission from Robyn O’Brien

I want to tell you something I don’t say lightly, because I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to bring people together around food. I was a Wall Street food analyst before I became a mother, and when my youngest had a life-threatening allergic reaction to breakfast, I stopped seeing food as a market and started seeing it as a moral emergency. I’ve been called a whistleblower, a troublemaker, and worse. I’ve testified, written, spoken on global stages, not for a party, but for the 54 million American kids with a chronic condition and the parents who can’t figure out why.

So when someone tells me that the Make America Healthy Again movement is “nonpartisan,” I need them to sit down. Because I’ve read the filings. I’ve looked at the money. And what MAHA actually is, underneath the seed oils and the food dye messaging, is a Republican get-out-the-vote operation with a wellness Instagram filter over its face. And I will show you the money.

I’m not saying the food issues aren’t real. They are devastatingly real. I’ve been speaking about ultra-processed food, synthetic dyes, and the corruption of our food supply since 2006. But the machinery that has been built around the MAHA brand? That machinery has one purpose. And as someone who has followed the money for twenty years in this space, I will show you the receipts.

“The MAHA PAC spent zero dollars supporting Democrats. Zero. Not a penny. But nearly $2 million opposing them.”

There are at least four MAHA-branded federal political committees registered with the FEC, plus a 501(c)(4) advocacy arm. Here’s what they’ve done with their money:

Let me translate that last row for you. MAHA Action has already endorsed its first 2026 candidate , an Iowa Republican running for governor. It is backing Rep. Julia Letlow, a Republican, in a Senate primary in Louisiana against Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican who dared to question RFK Jr.’s vaccine changes. It endorsed Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky. It has endorsed Republican state legislative candidates in Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas.

Follow the Money

That’s not a movement. That’s a primary enforcement mechanism. That is one political party using the language of public health to discipline its own members and mobilize its base.

And the lying by influencers claiming otherwise are misleading.

The concerns are real. I have been fighting the exact same battles, the ultra-processed food epidemic, synthetic dyes, the stranglehold of Big Agriculture on our regulatory agencies, the chronic disease crisis in our children, for two decades. So many of us have. These are not Republican issues. They are not Democratic issues. They are American issues. The allergy epidemic does not check your voter registration. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent. Neither does the fact that our food has been systematically degraded in the name of profit.

“The MAHA PAC’s own website says its mission is to elect Republicans. Full stop. That’s not a health movement. That’s a party platform.”

I was doing this work when RFK Jr. was a Democrat and and had an AOL email address with his wife. I was doing this work when the progressive left was the only political space willing to publicly discuss food safety. I watched this issue get ignored for years by Republicans who were too cozy with Big Ag, Big Pharma, and the processed food lobby that MAHA now claims to oppose. To see those same political forces, with Bayer’s deep web of influence wrapped around them, now wrapping themselves in language that food advocates have fought for, while their PACs spend millions to elect a single party, is not a cause for celebration.

It is a cause for alarm.

The MAHA PAC’s own website says explicitly that it exists to “elect Republicans to the House and Senate in 2026.” Tony Lyons, the president of MAHA PAC, has said “the midterms are existential for the MAHA movement.” Their internal polling brags that MAHA messaging flips swing voters toward Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin. This is a partisan electoral strategy. It has a consultants’ memo behind it. It has a $100 million fundraising goal behind it.

And yet, in wellness spaces, on food activist social media, in conversations with parents who genuinely love their children and want to feed them better, I keep hearing the same refrain: MAHA is bipartisan. MAHA is just about health. MAHA is above politics. Poison isn’t partisan.

No. Stop. That is a lie, and the people telling it either know it is a lie or haven’t done the homework.

A bipartisan health movement does not register five political committees with the FEC.

A bipartisan health movement does not spend $1.96 million opposing Democratic candidates while spending zero dollars opposing Republicans.

A bipartisan health movement does not launch a $100 million super PAC to elect one party to Congress.

A bipartisan health movement does not mobilize its 501(c)(4) to punish Republican senators who question Kennedy.

The Polling They’re Not Telling You About

A KFF/Washington Post survey found that only 1 in 6 self-identified Democrats said they agreed with MAHA, while support closely correlated with Republican political affiliation. This is the demographic reality of a movement that calls itself nonpartisan.

What you are watching is a political strategy that is extraordinarily clever precisely because it uses real grievances, grievances that I share, that millions of parents share, as its Trojan horse. The concerns are real. The chronic disease epidemic is real. The corruption of our food system by corporate money is real. I’ve staked my life’s work on these truths.

But truth can be weaponized. And when you take legitimate public health concerns and attach them to a partisan electoral machine, you do two things. You make those concerns a casualty of the next election cycle, and you make it impossible for anyone who cares about food safety to work across the aisle with any credibility, which is the only way we ever actually win.

I spent years building coalitions between conservative farmers and progressive parents because the problem doesn’t respect party lines. The corruption doesn’t respect party lines. I’ve sat across from Republican members of Congress and Democratic governors and talked about the same data. That work is harder now. Every time someone treats MAHA as a nonpartisan cause, they hand political operatives exactly what they want: the ability to launder partisan spending through the credibility of the real food movement.

“You can care about what’s in your food and still refuse to be a tool of a political machine. In fact, if you actually care about food safety, you almost certainly should.”

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying the food system isn’t broken. It is. I am not saying we shouldn’t pressure our government to act on chronic disease. We absolutely should. I am not saying that people who vote Republican do not care about food safety. Of course they do. And I am not saying that every person who uses the hashtag MAHA is a bad actor. Most of them are parents who are scared for their kids and have every right to be.

What I am saying is this:

The institutional MAHA apparatus , the PACs, the super PACs, the 501(c)(4), the endorsements, the $100 million war chest , is a Republican political operation.

Its leaders say so openly. Its FEC filings prove it. And anyone telling you otherwise is either uninformed or deliberately misleading you.

The children with chronic disease deserve advocates who will fight for them in every Congress, regardless of which party is in power. They deserve a food safety movement that cannot be turned off when it becomes politically inconvenient , which is exactly what happens when you tie a public health cause to a single party’s electoral fortunes.

What happens when a movement is financially tied to the outcome of one political party? We know what happens. We’ve watched it happen before. The cause gets traded. Our families pay the price.

I’ve spent twenty years advocating for children and our families. I’m not about to stop. But I am going to keep saying it out loud, as plainly as I know how: MAHA is a partisan Republican electoral machine, and calling it anything else is a lie. The PAC filings are public record. Anyone can look.

I’m asking you to look.

Because if we actually want to fix our food system, not just win an election cycle, but genuinely, durably change what is on the shelves and our kitchen tables, we are going to need people in both parties willing to fight for it.

And we are never going to get that if we let one party claim the whole cause as a campaign strategy and also use the cause to actively campaigning against the other party.

The kids are counting on us to be smarter than that.

The kids need us to look at the receipts and be smarter than that.

Robyn O'Brien

Robyn O’Brien began her career as a financial analyst covering the food industry and later became one of the earliest voices identifying systemic risks and investment opportunities driven by shifts in consumer demand, health, and environmental pressures. She is a Fulbright fellow, adjunct professor at Rice University and the author of the award-winning book, The Unhealthy Truth, How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It, published by Random House in 2009.

She operates at the intersection of courage, innovation and what comes next.

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Following the Money Behind the MAHA Brand

Following the Money Behind the MAHA Brand

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