The women who built MAHA are getting sidelined

MAHA was built by women — the moms and influencers who evangelized for whole foods on Instagram, pushed Trump to install Kennedy at HHS, and organized against glyphosate and food additives. A year in, power inside the administration has consolidated almost entirely among men: RFK Jr., Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya hold top health posts, and four of the first five “MAHA goal” agency leaders HHS announced were men.

From a Super Bowl ad featuring Mike Tyson tearing into a carrot to a video of Kennedy and Kid Rock exercising shirtless and pounding milk in a hot tub, MAHA’s public face has shifted toward protein and testosterone culture. Kennedy’s “masculine” diet of nothing but meat and fermented foods has reportedly been embraced by MAGA men Vice President JD Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

As Fordham political science professor Monika McDermott put it, the shift “fits with the MAGA movement’s vision of the role that men play and the roles that women play. And so, yeah, women are figureheads and can do things about the family, but the experts are still the masculine figures.”

New HHS guidance for Title X — the federal family planning program that funds contraception access for low-income women — emphasizes “chronic disease” and “optimal health” while sidelining the contraceptive services that have defined the program for 50 years.

Kennedy’s weird obsession with “sperm count” has become a running joke and HHS has simultaneously made testosterone and erectile dysfunction a priority, abruptly canceling 16 Office of Minority Health grants for infant mortality and postpartum care in favor of research into “root causes” of infertility like low sperm count and ED.

The Wall Street Journal reports that HHS has now pulled $12 million from the Office of Minority Health to fund Kennedy’s security costs.