MAHA: Is It a Movement or a Market?

by | Aug 19, 2026 | Opinions & Commentary

MAHA: Is It a Movement or a Market?

by | Aug 19, 2026 | Opinions & Commentary

A pesticide liability shield was stripped out in April, and MAHA claimed the win. In August, the Senate voted along party lines to put it back, and MAHA went quiet.

Republished with permission from Robyn O’Brien

I have spent two decades asking a simple question: why is it so hard, in this country, to find out what’s actually in our food and what it’s doing to our health? Every time I think we’ve made progress, I get a reminder that the fight was never really about information. It’s about power. It’s about who holds the power to decide what we’re allowed to know. Last week, in the Senate Agriculture Committee, that power closed ranks again.

Senator Cory Booker brought forward a modest amendment to the farm bill. It didn’t ban a single pesticide. It didn’t regulate a single chemical company out of business. It simply said that when a pesticide company fails to warn people about the health risks of its products, that company should not be shielded from being sued for it. It would have let manufacturers add cancer warnings to their own labels if they chose to. It was, in Booker’s words, about restoring “the fundamental right of cancer victims to have their day in court.”

Every Democrat on the committee voted for it. Every Republican voted against it. It failed on a straight party-line vote.

I want to sit with that for a second, because I think a lot of people in the Make America Healthy Again movement are going to want to look away from it, and we can’t afford to.

This amendment existed because the Supreme Court handed pesticide manufacturers a gift this year, ruling that federal labeling law pre-empts the kind of failure-to-warn lawsuits that families have used for years to hold companies like Monsanto accountable for glyphosate exposure. That ruling didn’t come out of nowhere. It came after years of quiet, patient work by chemical industry lobbyists to build exactly this kind of liability shield, brick by brick, bill by bill. Farm bills. Appropriations riders. State legislatures. It’s the same playbook every time: bury the language, funnel industry insiders into an administration, call it “regulatory certainty,” and count on nobody outside the industry reading page 400 of a 900-page bill.

The MAHA coalition, to its credit, did address this playbook before. Back in the spring, GOP members of the House joined Democrats to strip nearly identical liability-shield language out of their version of the farm bill, in a 280-142 vote that even surprised some of the people who organized it.

When RFK Jr. joined with Republicans, he promised his followers that they would no longer be reflexively loyal to Big Ag and Big Chemical the way they’ve been loyal to Big Pharma’s critics. That was the deal. That was the pitch. Farmers, mothers, MAHA activists rallying outside the Supreme Court, all told they finally had a seat at the table.

So where was that coalition last week, when the fight moved to the Senate?

Not one Republican vote. Not one. And Kennedy?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man who built his entire political identity on beating Monsanto in a courtroom, who once stood in front of a jury and argued that glyphosate gave his client cancer, who is now the sitting Secretary of Health and Human Services, said nothing. Not a statement. Not a post. Nothing.

This is the same man who, back in February, broke with his own movement to defend Trump’s executive order boosting glyphosate production, telling farmers and skeptical Republican senators not to worry, that nothing in his own MAHA report would threaten their business model.

So maybe his silence on Booker’s amendment shouldn’t surprise anyone. But it should make people angry.

You do not get to build a movement on the backs of cancer patients and then go quiet the moment your own party votes to keep those patients out of a courtroom.

I don’t say this to score partisan points, because this was never supposed to be a partisan issue. Cancer doesn’t check a party registration before it shows up in a farmworker’s bloodwork or a five-year-old’s leukemia diagnosis. The parents I’ve spent my career talking to, the ones digging through ingredient labels at ten o’clock at night trying to figure out why their kid’s allergies won’t quit, are Republicans and Democrats and everything in between. That’s exactly why MAHA had real potential: it wasn’t supposed to be red or blue, it was supposed to be about whose side you’re actually on when a chemical company and a cancer patient show up in the same courtroom.

But MAHA made this partisan itself. MAHA PAC doesn’t hide it, its own website says it exists “for one reason: to elect Republicans.” Not a healthier food system. Not accountability for chemical companies. Republicans.

At least four MAHA-branded political committees are registered with the FEC, and together they’ve spent nearly $2 million opposing Democrats and zero dollars opposing a single Republican.

That’s not a health movement. That’s a party operation wearing a wellness label.

So here is the test. Not the press conferences. Not the executive orders on ultra-processed food dyes that photograph well and cost the industry almost nothing. This. Whether the people who marched under the MAHA banner are willing to spend real political capital on the boring, unglamorous, absolutely essential work of protecting a family’s right to sue when a company hides what its product does to them.

And if they are willing to get behind the party and the Democrats consistently voting to protect cancer patients during the midterm elections.

If MAHA wants to be taken seriously as something other than a branding exercise, its leaders in Congress, and the officials at HHS and EPA who claim to share its values, need to say plainly that this vote was a betrayal of the movement’s own founding promise, and they need to say it to the Republican colleagues who cast it, not just to a sympathetic press. Silence here isn’t neutrality. It’s a choice, and it’s the same choice the chemical industry has been counting on from both parties for thirty years.

Senator Booker says he’ll bring this amendment back when the farm bill returns in September. That’s the moment that matters, not the outrage cycle this week, but who actually shows up and votes when a cancer patient’s day in court is on the line again.

And maybe that’s the real answer to why MAHA went quiet.

It’s easier to sell a supplement or a protein powder than to fight a pesticide company. Easier to build a wellness brand off of distrust of “Big Pharma” than to spend real political capital going after Big Ag’s actual lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

A lot of the loudest voices in this movement have their own products to sell, their own sponsorships to protect, their own seats at the table to keep. Their focus on expanding what health savings accounts can buy fattens their revenue lines.

Suing a pesticide company doesn’t.

Fighting for a family’s right to sue Monsanto has no up-sell. No revenue line. No sponsorship. No product roll out. It simply protects people, and this month, once again, that turned out to be something MAHA’s allies in Washington aren’t willing to fight for.

Booker says the amendment is coming back. So does the question:

Is MAHA a movement, or is it a market?

 

Robyn O'Brien

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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