GOP frustrates MAHA allies, risking midterm support from key voting bloc

“Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) activists are growing frustrated with Republican leaders following a series of what many see as serious betrayals of the movement .

The growing divide between the two comes just ahead of the midterm elections, where the GOP is already facing headwinds.

The latest setback is the farm bill, supported by Republicans purporting to be MAHA sympathizers. Activists are pushing back on the inclusion of a provision to delay a deadline for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pesticide safety reviews. They’re also raising concerns about cuts to certain conservation programs.

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials hobnobbing with key industries and little activist presence at a recent MAHA summit are also exacerbating tensions.

Voters in this bloc are characterized by their support for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as well as distrust of vaccine mandates and chemical and agriculture corporations. Activist Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, warned that MAHA-aligned voters could sit out the midterms — meaning the potential loss of a key pocket of support for Republicans.

“Do we vote for someone who supports vaccine mandates … or do we vote for someone who is actively supporting pesticides and poison in our foods that our babies and children eat on a daily basis?” Honeycutt said. “It’s an impossible decision, and this is why many of our moms are saying they’re going to stay home, or vote independent, write somebody in.”

During last week’s summit, Kennedy and other administration officials mingled with executives from drug developers, AI companies, insurers and retailers like Walmart.

Some grassroots activists accused MAHA leaders of selling out to the corporate interests they pledged to fight.

Robert Malone, who previously was vice chair of Kennedy’s vaccine advisory committee, wrote a scathing blog titled “The Capture of MAHA.”

“The people who built this movement were promised an end to … Washington influence-peddling, not a MAHA-branded version of it,” he wrote.

In the farm bill , activists are raising particular concerns about a provision that would extend the deadline for the EPA to re-review health impacts of pesticides that are already on the market.

“Under law, you’re supposed to re-review pesticides every 15 years. That is to account for emerging science and complete what’s known as the registration review process to ensure that both people and the environment are being appropriately protected,” said J.W. Glass, senior EPA policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity.

For pesticides that were on the market prior to a 2007 update to the law, the deadline had previously been 2026. The farm bill would extend it to 2031.

Glass said that pushing the deadline back amounts to “kicking the can down the road and allowing EPA to not take a hard look at products that have been on the market now for … multi-decade intervals, and not have any sort of theoretical or legal deadline keeping them from moving forward.”

Citing that provision, activist Vani Hari called Republicans on the Senate Agriculture Committee, all of whom recently voted to advance the legislation, “MAHA Traitors” in a post on the social platform X .

Activist Kelly Ryerson said that pushing back the deadline “is just going to be even more harmful to human health” and said it could mean “another five-year break to glyphosate regulation.”

She additionally warned of cuts to certain conservation programs, raising concerns about funding for a regenerative agriculture pilot program.

According to the University of Illinois , the Senate Republican bill cuts nearly $2 billion from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program , which provides money to farmers for conservation.

Republicans defended their legislation, noting that the EPA has not been able to get all of the reviews done on time. They say their bill gives the EPA a more reasonable time to complete the process and that the extension would prevent lawsuits against the agency.

They also said there’s no overall cut to conservation programs, noting that conservation funds are instead being moved to support new Forest Conservation Easement and State Conservation Assistance programs. They also said the legislation does not forbid the regenerative agriculture program from moving forward.

A committee spokesperson said via email that the farm bill “was crafted with input from producers to deliver the programs and tools they need to meet today’s challenges and build a stronger, more resilient future for American agriculture.”

Ryerson, who goes by the moniker “Glyphosate Girl” online, directed some of her ire specifically at Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), chair of the Senate MAHA Caucus and a member of the Agriculture Committee, who is facing a surprisingly tough fight to retain his seat.

She said MAHA- and Kennedy-aligned voters “should not be supporting Marshall and I think they should vote for the Democrat.”

Long-standing disagreements not going away

The tensions come on top of long-standing disagreements between Republicans and the movement, including on issues related to pesticides and chemicals, plus fights earlier this year about other pesticide provisions in the farm bill.

In a sign of further dissatisfaction with the GOP leaders, former Kennedy campaign adviser and MAHA advocate Tiffany Cianci issued a scorecard on Thursday accusing the Trump administration of breaking 85 percent of its promises to MAHA on agriculture, environment and food safety.

The scorecard cites issues including the appointment of chemical industry personnel at the EPA, actions to support pesticide companies including backing the industry in a key Supreme Court case, rollbacks to air and water regulations, cuts to the Food and Drug Administration and healthy food programs, and tariffs and other farm policies.

Jeff Hutt, who worked on Kennedy’s presidential campaign, agreed that many of the MAHA supporters who backed Trump in 2024 specifically because of Kennedy may stay home. Republicans shouldn’t count on those votes, he said, because the party is more beholden to Trump than to the MAHA ideals.

“The Republican Party really went from being a big tent party in ‘24 to a pup tent party in ‘26. I think a lot of those voters are going to stay home,” he said.

But Hutt added that the MAHA movement was never intended to be partisan, and the alignment with Republicans has always had an expiration date.

“If you look at the movement and you look at how it’s impacted politics, I think it’s been very successful,” Hutt said. “But I think if you look at it through the lens of a caucus within the Republican Party, I don’t think that has been very successful. But I really don’t think that that was very realistic from the get-go.”