The Trump administration on Tuesday presented a “Make America Healthy Again” plan to tackle rising chronic disease, a paramount issue for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., issuing what it termed a strategy report that’s largely aspirational in nature and in places lacks details or citations for its claims.
The 20-page document, titled “Make our Children Healthy Again,” outlines an approach to remedy childhood illness by improving diet and adding physical activity while reducing “overmedicalization” and chemical exposure. It calls for increasing research, while also hitting Kennedy’s cornerstone demands for a new vaccine framework and cracking down on conflicts of interest.
Kennedy, though, is already facing a major challenge: Congress is divided on whether to support his efforts, partly due to controversial decisions to reduce vaccine availability. Senate appropriators, for example, provided no dedicated funding for the Administration for a Healthy America in their fiscal 2026 Labor-HHS-Education spending bill. The newly created division under HHS would coordinate the initiatives laid out in the report. It would consolidate some functions of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and several other agencies.
House appropriators have proposed $100 million for the Administration for a Healthy America, and the committee report for their Labor-HHS-Education bill seeks to incorporate the Health Resources and Services Administration into that new agency.
The strategy report sidesteps some political realities, such as the administration’s efforts to strip funding from health agencies rather than bolster them. It calls on the NIH to research several different health issues, while the administration had proposed cutting the agency’s funding by 40 percent.
The administration’s report largely focuses on three areas: research, changing incentives and increasing public awareness.
Besides at NIH, it seeks research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the EPA, Veterans Affairs and other agencies. Topics to be studied include chronic disease, environmental exposures, autism, vaccines, air quality, microplastics, prescription drug prescribing, nutrition, oral health and more.
NIH and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should work together to research the root cause of autism, the report says.
The report also puts forth a broad and somewhat vague framework for vaccines, stating that the United States should have “the best” childhood vaccine schedule and that it will modernize vaccines with “transparent, gold standard science.”
It states that HHS will work with the NIH to improve vaccine injury data collection and analysis, including a new research program at the agency’s Clinical Center that could expand to other centers throughout the country.
Notably, the report did not contain any citations. An earlier Make American Healthy Again report, published in May, was corrected after reporters at NOTUS found that it cited several papers that did not exist.
The report also calls for policy changes at the agencies including action on food dyes, “ultra-processed foods,” nutrition labeling, food allergies, infant formula, drug advertising and more. That includes action the Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday afternoon to go after companies it says mislead people in pharmaceutical ads.
The report was issued just as a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs subcommittee held a hearing Tuesday featuring Kennedy adviser Aaron Siri, who had petitioned the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine.
Many of the proposals in the report are sparse on details and in some cases include efforts that are already in the works.
For example, the report states that the FDA will promote innovation in sunscreen, which has fallen behind other countries because of how the agency regulates it. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee earlier this summer advanced a bill that incorporated legislation that seeks to change the FDA’s framework for clearing new sunscreen ingredients to market.
The report said that HHS and USDA should update the Dietary Guidelines for Americans for 2025 to 2030, while seeking to overhaul the process, including the structure and advisory committee that informs the guidelines.
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