“I think there was a misconception in the Republican Party that voters didn’t really care about these issues,” Kelly Ryerson, one of the petition organizers, told Grist. “A key part” of the MAHA program, Ryerson continued, “is removing corporate interests from our regulatory bodies.”
“In any case, the EPA in this administration is in a much worse situation than under the Biden administration,” she added. “And that’s something that really frustrates a lot of voters who signed on to that promise.”
However, it seems that the coalition’s anger is directed solely at Zeldin (who recently he teased his own upcoming show MAHA). Ryerson has nothing but praise for the administration’s other leaders – Kennedy, Rollins and the president himself. Last Wednesday, Kennedy and Rollins announced a pilot program thus, $700 million will be allocated to support regenerative agriculture, which Ryerson cited as one example of the administration’s commitment to cleaning up the national food system.
Throughout this time, the administration’s support for factory farms, which are major users of toxic pesticides, has far outpaced support for farms using more planet-friendly methods. Ryerson openly admits this; she said factory farming “has dominated agriculture and we all know that’s a really inconvenient fact, but we all know it’s killed our soil.” Still, she said, the problem lies with the EPA.
“The MAHA movement,” Ryerson continued, “we would like to see a complete overhaul of our agricultural system, which simply spends this ridiculously obscene amount of money on subsidies for products that are not actually food for us at all.”
And yet Trump shows no sign of abandoning his billion-dollar farm rescue plan – supporting the very pesticide-maintaining system that MAHA is uniting against.