Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign to “make America healthy again” has spread from Washington to state capitols with nearly 900 measures introduced this year echoing his agenda.
Those capitols span Republican strongholds, such as Austin, Texas, and Tallahassee, Florida, as well as Democratic ones, such as Albany, New York; Boston; and Trenton, New Jersey.
A POLITICO analysis found more than 130 bills aimed at regulating ultraprocessed foods and improving nutrition, over 60 bills restricting the application of pesticides and other chemicals, and more than 130 bills expanding vaccine exemptions or prohibiting mandates this year. Lawmakers also introduced dozens of bills to promote the use of psychedelics, authorize sales of raw milk and ivermectin, and ban the fluoridation of drinking water.
The measures emerging from state legislatures, long seen as testing grounds for federal policy, show how Kennedy’s movement to combat chronic disease has struck a chord across the country — even as it conflicts with traditional Republican views about regulating industry. The number of bills on the subjects has increased at least 45 percent from the prior year and in 2023 for the four states that convene biennially. The outpouring of interest in Kennedy’s agenda also shows how he has outmaneuvered a public health establishment that has condemned aspects of his agenda, such as expanding vaccine exemptions and ending water fluoridation, as unscientific and dangerous.
“The culture has changed. ... The states, that’s where the low-hanging fruit is. We’ve got to use that cultural change to really chip away at the feds,” said Charles Frohman, a lobbyist for the National Health Federation, which supports alternative medicines without government restriction and has criticized vaccine mandates.
Kennedy has embarked on a multistate tour promoting his Make America Healthy Again agenda, traveling to states like Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee, where lawmakers have passed MAHA-aligned bills to ban food dyes from school meals and prohibit purchases of ultraprocessed foods in federal nutrition programs. In June, Texas went the furthest, becoming the first state to require warning labels on products containing certain food dyes.
But it is Democrat-led states that lead the country in bills that align with the MAHA agenda, POLITICO’s analysis found. New York and Massachusetts lead the country in bill proposals, including more than two dozen measures introduced this year to restrict access to ultraprocessed and sugary foods.
“It’s some level beyond partisanship,” said Brian Kavanagh, a New York Democrat for Wall Street and Soho in the state Senate who has sponsored over a dozen bills this legislative session to curb chemicals in food systems and the environment. “We welcome allies who want to pass legislation that is smart and is going to protect people. There’s certainly a lot more energy around Republicans now around that issue, and that’s welcome.”
The MAHA advances across state legislatures come as the White House is set to release a final MAHA report, which will include recommendations to fight chronic disease. The forthcoming report has sparked a lobbying blitz in Washington, as industries push Kennedy to scale back his proposals while MAHA supporters press him to hold the line.
The momentum in state capitols suggests that even if industry secures concessions in Washington, MAHA’s influence will be hard to contain, lobbyists told POLITICO.
“We see so much state activity. … It’s bipartisan. They’re tapping into something that most Americans know intuitively. MAHA will persist when Kennedy is gone in the future,” said Joel White, a Republican health care strategist and founder of Horizon Government Affairs, a Washington lobbying firm.
Bipartisanship on dyes, psychedelics and social media
Across the country, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have introduced dozens of bills to improve nutrition by cracking down on sugary beverages, synthetic food dyes and chemicals often found in ultraprocessed foods.
POLITICO’s analysis found that restrictions on these products are one of the biggest areas of bipartisan agreement, with almost a third of the measures introduced in state legislatures this year to restrict food additives sponsored by at least one member of both parties.
Where parties differ is in their approach. Republican lawmakers led the vast majority of bills to ban participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food to low-income people, from buying candy and soda, while Democrats were behind every state push to impose taxes on sugary beverages.
Kennedy and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary recently joined Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to mark the approval of six state waivers to ban purchases of soft drinks and candy from SNAP. About a dozen states, almost all Republican-led, now have these restrictions in place, up from zero at the start of the year.
“We can use the states as a laboratory to look at both what works and what doesn't,” said Jonathan Emord, general counsel for the Alliance for Natural Health USA, a nonprofit promoting alternative medicine that lobbied Congress earlier this year to confirm Kennedy as Health secretary.
“The reason why you see all these state activities is because of the strength of this independently growing movement in favor of cleaning up the food supply, reducing chemical additives, and pollutants that are affecting the health of people and trying to pave the way for better health care,” Emord added.
Food manufacturers oppose state-by-state regulations, warning they are impractical to follow and create confusion for consumers. “Those supply chains are fully integrated. … There are significant logistical and supply chain challenges when we start to have individual and single state mandates,” said John Hewitt, senior vice president of state affairs at the Consumer Brands Association, an industry group that counts major food and beverage companies like PepsiCo, Mondelez and Nestle as members. State legislation to restrict ingredients and access to sugary food and beverages grew nearly fivefold since last year, according to POLITICO’s analysis.
Other areas of bipartisan support include addressing the chemical contamination in the environment, exploring medicinal uses for psychedelics, and limiting children's access to social media and cell phones over mental health concerns. POLITICO tracked nearly 200 pieces of legislation related to tackling chemicals that can linger in the environment in state legislatures this year, with roughly a quarter sponsored by at least one member of each party.
POLITICO analyzed thousands of measures introduced in the past two legislative sessions across all 50 states, covering issues from nutrition and chemicals to vaccine mandates and corporate influence. While some ideas, such as regulating chemicals and banning microplastics, were gaining momentum before Kennedy became Health secretary, they drew broader political backing after Kennedy’s confirmation and appeared in a May MAHA report assessing risks to children’s health.
Partisan division: vaccines, chemtrails, and pesticides
Vaccines remain a sharp dividing line between the parties. Nearly all of the 160 measures tracked by POLITICO related to vaccines were sponsored solely by Republicans, with Texas and West Virginia leading the country in the number of bills.
Almost 15 percent of these bills restrict the use of messenger RNA, the technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines, while bills to allow for greater vaccine exemptions on religious or personal grounds were introduced in at least a dozen states, including Connecticut, Mississippi, Montana, New York and West Virginia.
Other bills, more on the fringe of the MAHA movement, were also predominantly sponsored by Republicans. All but two bills related to allowing for over-the-counter purchases of ivermectin were sponsored by only Republican lawmakers. During the pandemic, some doctors prescribed the drug, which the FDA has approved to treat parasitic infections, for Covid. The FDA has warned that it has no evidence the drug works against the virus.
Republicans were also solely behind 80 percent of the bills this year to restrict geoengineering, a conspiracy theory that the U.S. government is controlling the weather by spraying chemicals into the sky. Legislation introduced related to ivermectin has grown fivefold since last year, while bills prohibiting geoengineering have more than doubled.
Democrats, meanwhile, were behind the vast majority of bills to curb plastics and pesticide use. Roughly 70 percent of the measures to phase out pesticides this year like glyphosate, the principal ingredient in the world’s most popular weedkiller, Roundup, were sponsored solely or mostly by Democrats, according to POLITICO’s analysis. Regulators say the product is no danger if used as directed, but juries have awarded billions to people claiming it caused their cancer.
The states-based effort to restrict pesticides offers MAHA supporters a chance to secure policy wins outside a White House navigating competing interests. Following intense pressure from agricultural lobbyists, the Trump administration assured farm groups earlier this summer that the final MAHA report would include no new policy around pesticide use. MAHA supporters have urged the administration to hold firm, with Moms Across America, a MAHA-aligned group, co-signing a letter last week pushing for a moratorium on glyphosate.
Supporters of the moratorium fear lobbyists for Bayer, Roundup’s maker, are going to get their way.
“There was more of an expectation that [the White House] would be able to operate on their agenda in a vacuum and there would be less interference,” said Liam Sacino, a public health advocate at the Public Interest Research Group, an environmental group that organized the letter. “Now that they are the bureaucrats, they see what the political limitations of that are.”
Blue states lead the charge
Blue states accounted for more than half of MAHA-aligned legislation identified by POLITICO, with six of the top 10 states having Democrat-led legislatures in the most recent session.
“With the blue states, it's been a race, like ‘We're going to out-MAHA Kennedy,’” said Daniel Fabricant, CEO of the Natural Products Association, a trade group for the supplements industry, and former director of the FDA’s division of dietary supplement programs.
The Democratic effort is emblematic of a broader historical pattern. Democrats have long supported using regulation of ultraprocessed food and pesticides to improve public health. Kennedy, a scion of perhaps the country’s most famous Democratic family, was a party member until he launched his own independent bid for the presidency last year and then joined Trump’s team.
Since, Kennedy’s agenda has gained fresh momentum as Republicans adopt and rebrand ideas once considered progressive as their own.
“We've been doing this work before anybody had ever heard of MAHA,” said Jesse Gabriel, a Democratic California assemblymember behind a bill that would phase out ultraprocessed foods from school meals. If successful, the bill would mark the third law in California in recent years to remove certain chemicals from food products.
Similarly in Hawaii, the first in the country to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos back in 2019, lawmakers have introduced more than 30 bills this session to crack down on pesticides, tackle chemical contamination, encourage U.N.-backed recommendations on plastic waste and improve nutrition — all issues Kennedy has supported.
Derek Turbin, chair of Hawaii’s Democratic Party, however, downplayed Kennedy’s influence. “We seized the moment early on,” he said.
Democratic lawmakers told POLITICO that while they see a new opening for bipartisan action on these issues, they remain opposed to many of the administration’s policies on health care and cuts to federal spending on Medicaid, the state-federal insurance program for low-income people, and nutrition programs in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the law Trump signed July 4 to enact his agenda.
“There is an opportunity for bipartisan agreement on tackling some of these issues,” said Jason Lewis, a Democratic Massachusetts state senator behind a slew of bills to impose limits on ultraprocessed food, tax sugary drinks and ban glyphosate.
“At the same time … I do not at all agree with some of the policies coming out of the federal government. What they’ve just done with [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act] is actually going to move us backwards in terms of improving public health and improving Americans’ diet.”
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