Calley Means, who resigned last month as a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, says lobbyists for pharmaceutical, vaping and pesticide interests derailed the Make America Healthy Again agenda from inside the White House itself.
Means, founder of the health-spending company Truemed, worked on food and nutrition policy under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before stepping down in October. Speaking on Joe Rogan’s podcast, he said the obstruction didn’t come from President Trump, but from staff around him.
The policy process is broken. It has to be fixed structurally. It’s simple. But money in politics is a big deal. And the leaders of the government – not President Trump – that I’ve seen. But you know, Susie Wiles, and she’s the same as many others, left, right, use this importance of money as an excuse to basically, be antagonistic to what voters said, and you know, help gas station heroin. Help vaping. Help, you know, pharma companies. Help glyphosate. Those are, like… That’s the issues that was being pushed out from the White House. It wasn’t healthy food. At all. I had to bulldoze that stuff.
Means said he was especially frustrated that basic measures ran into resistance.
And, I’m like, if we’re going to block school lunches, and a quarter-page definition of ultra-processed food, that doesn’t even have a regulatory impact, when Bobby Kennedy is the most popular figure in America, this is the most popular part of the domestic policy, not to mention that it’s just critically important for the future of America that we continue to move the trend away from ultra-processed foods, which is literally destroying our country.
He said the experience convinced him the best path forward now is simply to speak publicly about what he saw.
