After Calley Means Quit, Who Is Actually Left to Run MAHA’s Health Agenda
The man who brokered the Trump-Kennedy alliance walked out blaming a "corrupt DC bureaucracy." A look at the personnel record shows a movement that built a brand but never a bench.
“I don’t know him very well.” That was Donald Trump’s answer in a gaggle with reporters on Thursday when asked about Calley Means, the senior health adviser resigning from his administration that morning. The president offered a coda for the cameras: “MAHA is great.”
Twelve days before the midterms, the broker of the Trump-Kennedy alliance walked out.
Means is the operative widely credited with introducing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Trump. Alongside the late Charlie Kirk, he arranged the July 2024 phone call that put Kennedy’s endorsement in Trump’s pocket, and eventually put Kennedy himself in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. Means then spent two years inside the building: first as a special government employee in the White House, then, from last November, as Kennedy’s permanent senior adviser on food and nutrition policy.
“More policy and cultural change has happened around these goals in the past 2 years than any time in history,” Means wrote on X on Thursday. Then he listed the receipts: dietary guidelines reform, removing soda from SNAP, food dyes, GRAS reform, psychedelic reform, an overhaul of government food procurement. In the same statement he said he was leaving two “historic figures” who are “committed confronting a corrupt DC bureaucracy that is doing everything possible to protect the status quo.”
He got wins he can name. He’s walking out anyway, telling the public the machine beat him while declining to explain himself to the Wall Street Journal. People familiar with his thinking told the Journal he was “disillusioned,” frustrated by White House delays on Kennedy’s most popular food ideas and convinced that food companies and special interests had too much sway inside the administration. Others in the building, the Journal reported, found him difficult to work with and unwilling to make the practical concessions that get policies through.
The departures started before him. Susan Monarez, the CDC director Kennedy chose, was fired about a month after her confirmation last summer, and four senior CDC officials resigned in the fallout. Jim O’Neill, Kennedy’s deputy and briefly the acting CDC director, was dismissed in February and nominated to lead the National Science Foundation. The CDC’s principal deputy, Ralph Abraham, resigned the same month. And Trump’s nomination of Means’s own sister, Casey, for surgeon general was withdrawn. Means’s exit is the latest mark in that record, not the first.
That leaves Kennedy atop a department where the deputy secretary’s chair is held by a nominee, Chris Klomp, and the CDC by nobody permanent. The FDA is Marty Makary’s. The CDC has been without a confirmed director since Monarez, and the 210-day legal limit for acting replacements ran out on March 25, with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya performing the delegable duties.
The brand, outside the building, is doing better than the bench. Last month’s MAHA summit sold corporate sponsorship packages of up to $300,000, with speaking slots and a private dinner with Kennedy and Medicare chief Mehmet Oz included, and took money from Walmart, UnitedHealth, Anthropic and OpenAI. Walmart is, as Politico noted, America’s biggest retailer and a leading purveyor of the ultraprocessed foods MAHA decries.
Robert Malone noticed. The MAHA figure Kennedy put on the CDC’s vaccine safety panel called the sponsorship lineup “sickening” on X, writing that “MAHA-gov and MAHA-inc have completely divorced themselves from the health freedom movement.” The physician Mary Talley Bowden wrote that “grassroots MAHA has devolved into a cesspool of corporate interests.” Alex Hardy, the CEO of MAHA Holdings, offered the other side of the same coin: the summit, he said, unites everyone “from the grassroots to the boardroom.”
Means’s farewell blames “dark forces in DC that profit from Americans getting sick.” The summit’s sponsor list puts some of those forces at the dinner table. A movement that can sell $300,000 access packages to the industries it was founded to fight has built something real. It hasn’t built the thing that would have kept its chief operator in the building.
The two policies Means cared about most never made it out. The White House deferred both a legal definition of ultraprocessed foods and a school-meals rule with less sugar and more protein, the Journal reported. A white paper defining ultraprocessed foods has been sitting at the White House for months.
