Your Guide To Who’s Who In The Maha Movement

Many Americans have a soft spot for the Make America Healthy Again movement — even if they can't name many of its pivotal figures.

It shocked the public health establishment when President Donald Trump named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the government’s health department and Mehmet Oz, Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary to head its most important agencies. The figures had controversial histories that included raising questions about vaccine safety, pushing unproven medical treatments and opposing pandemic-era lockdowns and school closures.

New results from The POLITICO Poll suggest that despite the controversies plaguing Kennedy and his acolytes, the public isn’t as concerned. While Kennedy’s own approval rating is low — 39 percent see him positively, while 33 percent have a negative view — respondents were more likely to approve of Kennedy and his deputies than disapprove of them.

Of course, Kennedy’s agency heads aren’t nearly as well known as he is, outside of the wellness gurus and crunchy mom-fluencers who comprise his Make America Healthy Again movement.

Learn more about who’s who atop MAHA:

Heading into the midterms, the Trump administration is trying to harness the MAHA coalition that White House aides believe helped Trump win the 2024 election.

But Kennedy is a polarizing figure. Before joining the administration, he spent years arguing — in defiance of the medical establishment — that many vaccines are unsafe, and that children should get fewer shots. Those ideas guided his moves as health secretary, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule, a decision that was subsequently halted by a federal judge.

The White House is now downplaying vaccine policy moves ahead of the midterms in favor of touting nutrition, which is considered more popular among voters.

Oz is considered one of the administration’s most effective communicators. He played a key role in selling the cuts to Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income people, that Congress passed last year and has steered clear of MAHA's more controversial priorities, like vaccines. He’s also been the face of the administration’s high-profile push to target Medicaid fraud, which has primarily focused on blue states.

While Paltrow hasn't endorsed MAHA, she told Vanity Fair last year that she's “very fascinated” by Kennedy's movement. Some critics consider Paltrow, who drinks raw cream in her coffee and sells supplements and youth-boost peptide serum on her website, a precursor to the MAHA movement.

Means isn't well known outside of the MAHA movement, with less than half of survey respondents having an opinion about him, but he served as the administration's mouthpiece after Kennedy's decision to flip the food pyramid upside down and change the dietary guidelines to recommend eating more meat. He's largely avoided talking about vaccines, focusing instead on MAHA's food agenda.

Hari's been widely criticized by scientists for spreading misinformation about common food ingredients, but also had some wins. She petitioned Kraft to remove artificial dyes from its mac and cheese, which the company later did for products marketed to children. It denied the petition was the reason. The administration has embraced Hari, inviting her to speak.

Under his leadership, the FDA, which regulates food and drug safety, has had a rocky year. It’s been marked by high-profile departures and whiplash decisions, like the agency’s refusal to review Moderna's application for a new mRNA flu vaccine, which it reversed days later.

Makary’s signature push to speed drug reviews and overhaul FDA's clinical trial standards has garnered criticism from some factions of the public health world, who worry that they will result in more lax safety oversight. He's also endured intense scrutiny from the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, including a February opinion piece that asked: "Who's in Charge at the FDA?"

But the administration has stood by him, allowing him to hold a one-year press conference to tout his accomplishments.

Means' nomination has become a litmus test for Republican senators’ appetite for Kennedy's vaccine agenda ahead of the midterm elections. After her February confirmation hearing, during which she said that vaccines “save lives” without promising to encourage people to get them, three Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, said they weren’t sure they’d vote to confirm her.

The White House recently reaffirmed its support.

The administration considers the soft-spoken professor one of its best communicators, so much so that it’s given Bhattacharya multiple agencies to run.

Bhattacharya has struck a more diplomatic tone than some of his colleagues in the administration, saying he would oppose more firings at the CDC, endorsing the measles vaccine, and promising Congress that the NIH, on which universities rely for billions in funding, would not ignore lawmakers’ directive that it spend its budget.