On Make America Healthy Again, what Project 2025 actually says about food, and who this was really for.
Make America Healthy Again sounds like something nobody could argue with. Who's against healthy kids? Who's against cleaner food? Who doesn't want to talk about why chronic disease rates in this country have been climbing for decades? On the surface, it sounds like they finally noticed. Like someone in power finally decided to care about the people eating dollar menu dinners because that's what the budget allows.
But the plan was already written down before any of these faces showed up on television to sell it.
Project 2025, the 920-page governing blueprint produced by the Heritage Foundation that two-thirds of Trump's day-one executive orders were drawn from, explicitly calls for restructuring SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, through tighter eligibility requirements, new work mandates, and moving oversight in ways that make the program easier to cut. It calls for reducing federal involvement in nutrition standards and shifting control to states, which in practice means the protections vary wildly depending on where you were born. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and academic researchers have consistently documented that these proposed changes would push millions of people out of food assistance, with the sharpest impact falling on children, rural communities, and communities of color.
That is the document. That is the plan that was already in place.
Here is what happened after MAHA became the talking point.
The administration signed off on the biggest cut to SNAP in the program's history as part of HR 1, stripping billions from food assistance while simultaneously running a public campaign about the importance of nutrition. The Center for Science in the Public Interest and George Washington University's Global Food Institute published a white paper concluding it is "impossible to reconcile the administration's MAHA rhetoric on reducing chronic disease in childhood with the cruel cutbacks to SNAP." Their exact words: whatever MAHA initiatives they might have otherwise supported are "completely subsumed by the biggest cut to SNAP in the program's history."
Then the administration eliminated SNAP-Ed. SNAP-Ed was the federally funded nutrition education program that for decades ran cooking classes in low-income communities, supported farmers markets in food deserts, brought nutrition lessons into schools, and reached 1.8 million Americans annually in direct programming and 10.6 million more through policy and systems changes. A 2023 Illinois impact study estimated the program prevented more than 5,000 cases of obesity and 570 cases of food insecurity in a single state in a single year, returning as much as $9.50 for every dollar spent by reducing future healthcare costs. Cornell University nutritional sciences professor Tashara Leak told NPR: "It doesn't make sense when we have an administration focused on decreasing consumption of ultra-processed foods and wanting to encourage people to eat more fruits and vegetables, to then get rid of the largest federally funded nutrition education program that helps to achieve those goals."
The White House did not explain to NPR how eliminating the program aligned with the goals of Make America Healthy Again.
Meanwhile, six states were approved for SNAP waivers restricting what foods recipients can purchase, a policy framed as protecting families from unhealthy choices, announced at a press conference featuring RFK Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz. The administration is restricting what poor people can eat while cutting the programs that help poor people eat better and eliminating the education funding that taught them how. Cutting access, cutting the education, and then calling what's left Make America Healthy Again.
The people expressing the most visible public concern about what Americans put in their bodies are the same people who just made it harder for the poorest Americans to feed their children. That is not a contradiction. That is their intention. A healthy population that understands what it's eating and has access to real food is not the goal here. A population that believes someone powerful finally cares about them, right up until the programs that actually help them disappear, is.
Go read the document. Not the press releases. The document. Then decide for yourself who this was really for.
