Calley Means, a top adviser to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and proponent of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, said Monday that flaws in a recent MAHA report were a “disservice” to the Trump administration.
Despite the issues, including false citations, Means defended the documents findings.
“Just to be super direct on the report, it was a great disservice to President Trump and Bobby Kennedy that that report had some errors in its citations,” Means told NewsNation’s “On Balance” host Leland Vittert. “I think the reason it’s primetime is because of the content of the report.”
“There was not one word of the MAHA report that was factually corrected — a couple footnote errors,” he added.
The HHS report, focused primarily on digging into the root causes of chronic diseases in children, was heralded as a “milestone” for Kennedy and the Trump administration’s health care endeavors when it was released May 22. It cited hundreds of studies to highlighted four main factors as contributors to poor health: ultraprocessed foods, environmental chemicals, digital behavior and “overmedicalization.”
But the administration’s celebration of its release quickly unraveled after the news outlet NOTUS found some of the studies cited did not exist or did not back up the report’s conclusions.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed the citation problems last week and reaffirmed the administration’s “complete confidence” in Kennedy.
“I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed, and the report will be updated,” Leavitt told reporters Thursday. “But it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government.”
Means similarly sought to highlight the report’s findings despite the multitude of errors that it cited to reach its conclusions.
“The content of the report really explained that every major government piece of public health advice over the past 30 years has been fake in a real substantial way,” said Means, the brother of Trump’s surgeon general nominee Casey Means.
The health adviser, hired as a special employee to HHS earlier this year, told Vittert that he’s currently working on a “budgetary analysis” for the White House.
“We right now have double the rates of obesity and diabetes as Europe,” he said. “If you take the rates of obesity and diabetes in the United States to European levels, we save trillions in cost.”
A major focus will be on stopping the government from “subsidizing” ultraprocessed foods, including through changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly referred to as food stamps.
“We have a fundamental, unmistakable, blaring problem with ultraprocessed food consumption,” Means said. “And that’s not because of personal choice, it’s not because of free will, it’s not the free market; we subsidize ultraprocessed food with free lunch subsidies, with agriculture subsidies, with our SNAP.”
“We are not only recommending ultra processed food with the dietary guidelines — which we’re going to fix them, they still do — but subsidizing,” he said.
The Means siblings have been prominent figures in the MAHA effort with both being quickly tapped for roles in Kennedy’s HHS — but they have also drawn rebuke from the health chief’s former vice presidential running mate Nicole Shanahan and others. Shanahan wrote in a post on social platform X last month that she was “promised” neither would be appointed to federal posts if she supported Kennedy’s confirmation.
