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Daily Caller

Trump, RFK Jr’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Pledge Signals Major Shift In GOP Priorities

Published

5 months ago

11 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

 

By Adam Pack

Former President Donald Trump and former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent vow to tackle public health issues together could signal a major shift in Republican priorities if the Trump campaign prevails on Election Day.

Trump has called for the creation of an independent commission with Kennedy’s input and pledged to address various Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) issues the former independent candidate has brought to the forefront, including improving the public’s intake of nutritious foods and addressing the rising trend of obesity in adults. These concerns, in addition to other MAHA priorities that have not historically found much support in the GOP such as calling for more stringent environmental regulations, indicate that a potential Trump administration may take a different approach on health, agricultural and environmental issues than during his first term in office.

Campaign officials, GOP lawmakers and health experts previewed a diverse set of MAHA priorities in interviews with the Daily Caller News Foundation. Tackling the rising chronic disease rate that impacts roughly 60% of American adults is a shared point of concern.

“It’s finally turning the page and saying, ‘We want a health system, not a disease system,’” Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told the DCNF. “For 50 years we built a disease system.”

“When we send President Trump back to the White House, he will work alongside passionate voices like RFK Jr. to Make America Healthy Again by providing families with safe food and ending the chronic disease epidemic plaguing our children,” Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, told the DCNF. “President Trump will also establish a special Presidential Commission of independent minds who are not bought and paid for by Big Pharma and will charge them with investigating what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic illnesses.”

Republicans and former Trump health officials are enthusiastic that marshaling the federal government in response to the country’s myriad health crises could turn the corner on an era where Americans are facing poorer health outcomes and declining life expectancy.

Redfield endorsed the idea of an independent chronic disease commission and told the DCNF that the federal government “must get more serious in preventing chronic disease” to turn the corner on an era where Americans are facing poorer health outcomes and declining life expectancy.

“It’s much more important to get real time, continuous, day-to-day monitoring of your chronic illness, not just the way the system works now where you check in every six months and someone tells you how you’re doing,” Redfield added. “No, you’ve got to check in every day.”

According to Redfield, a second Trump administration could cut the more than $4 trillion Americans  spend on healthcare every year by half if federal agencies take an “all-of-government” approach to targeting substance use disorder, obesity and ultra-processed foods in addition to improving mental health services.

“These are, in my view, low-hanging fruit,” Redfield told the DCNF. “That alone would improve the American health system substantially.”

Texas Agriculture commissioner Sid Miller, who is helping vet candidates to serve in a second Trump administration, recounted running into a swarm of British schoolchildren while on a recent trade mission to the United Kingdom as providing further confirmation that a second Trump term must take action on obesity and processed foods, in an interview with the DCNF.

“90s kids and there wasn’t one fat kid in the bunch,” Miller, who has also called for bringing back the presidential fitness test program retired by the Obama administration in 2012, told the DCNF. “That kind of inspired me and made me think we’re not doing something right.”

To improve health outcomes for the more than 40% of Americans that are obese, Miller told the DCNF that a second Trump administration should consider ending Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for processed foods.

“Why are we paying for soda drinks and cookies and junk food with SNAP benefits?” Miller told the DCNF. “That needs to stop.”

Miller also pointed to his Texas Fresh Farm program that provides fresh and local products to more than 5 million Texas school members as a program that should be implemented nationwide to improve a portion of the public’s intake of nutritious foods.

Republican lawmakers have also been supportive of a second Trump administration prioritizing nutrition as part of the MAHA agenda.

“As a physician, I can absolutely say that good nutrition leads to better patient outcomes 100 percent of the time. Healthy food is medicine and is the cure for many chronic diseases and curbing health care spending in the United States,” Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas told the DCNF in a statement. “American farmers set the gold standard for nutritious food, and the MAHA agenda will work with farmers and ranchers to continue producing the safest and most wholesome food at affordable prices for our country and the world.”

Implementing MAHA priorities will likely require the empowerment of federal government agencies whose budgets and enforcement powers Republican lawmakers could be inclined to shrink. Taking action on chronic disease and obesity will also necessitate buy-in from members of the public and lawmakers that have lost trust in institutions’ abilities to tell the truth and manage crises without infringing on a person’s individual autonomy.

“Our failed response to the pandemic opened the eyes of millions to the capture and corruption of federal agencies by the corporate interests who are supposed to be regulated by them,” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told the DCNF. “As a result, the public’s interest is not being well-served or properly protected.”

“Getting public health officials in the next administration that really spend a lot of energy on trying to reestablish public trust is going to be fundamental to the success of the efforts of Making America Healthy Again,” Redfield told the DCNF. “The vaccine mandates were a big mistake. Closing down our economy—a big mistake. Shutting down our schools—a big mistake. So, there was a huge loss of credibility and trust that has to be rebuilt.”

Redfield is still a strong believer in vaccines, dubbing them as “the most important gift to modern medicine,” but said that vaccine mandates are a self-defeating approach and that debate about a vaccine’s safety and efficacy should be encouraged not denounced.

“I’ve always said that Bobby Kennedy is not anti-vax. Bobby Kennedy just wanted honest transparency and debate about vaccines,” Redfield told the DCNF. “We should foster discussion and debate, and if someone has a question about looking at data to determine a vaccine’s safety that shouldn’t be listed as anti-vax. That should be listed as wanting an honest, open discussion about what is the data?”

“As we secure our borders and rebuild our economy, we are also going to Make America Healthy Again,” Trump said at a campaign event with Kennedy in Duluth, Georgia, on Wednesday. “We have more chronic health problems than any nation, more childhood diseases than we did just a generation ago. Millions of Americans are realizing that something is wrong. By getting this fixed not only will we have healthier families, we will save trillions and trillions of dollars and bring down the cost of healthcare.”

“We have a thousand chemicals in our food that are illegal in Europe, but the problem is not from those chemicals. The big problem is corruption in our federal agencies. These agencies are now owned by big Pharma by ‘Big Food’ and Big Agriculture,” Kennedy told the crowd at the same event. “Don’t you want a president that’s going to get the chemicals out of our food? And don’t you want a president that’s going to get the corruption out of Washington, D.C.? And don’t we deserve a president of the United States that’s going to Make America Healthy Again?”

Redfield also told the DCNF that he’s willing to serve in a second Trump administration.

“I’m in the final turn,” Redfield told the DCNF. “I’d obviously work in any way I can to help the President and Bobby Kennedy and our nation move toward health.”

Kennedy did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

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Daily Caller

Biden Administration Was Secretly More Involved In Ukraine Than It Let On, Investigation Reveals

Published on March 31, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Wallace White

The U.S was far more directly involved in aiding Ukrainian forces against Russia than previously understood, a New York Times investigation revealed Monday.

American backing of Ukraine was an instrumental piece in forces of the eastern European nation wounding or killing more than 700,000 Russian soldiers during the course of the war, according to the NYT. Methods the U.S. used to aid Ukraine included giving target information while officially obfuscating their nature, dispatching American advisers close to the frontlines and sweeping oversight over its use of missile systems granted by officials.

One European intelligence official was taken aback as to how deep U.S. involvement was, telling the NYT that American officials had become “part of the kill chain.”

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Ukrainian officials met in Wiesbaden in Spring 2022, the headquarters of the U.S. European Command, to discuss strategy with U.S. forces and the extent to which the U.S. would aid the Ukrainians.

During the meeting, U.S. European Command settled with Ukrainian officials that they would reportedly dispense target locations as “points of interest” to the Ukrainians, not officially calling them “targets” as they believed the language would be too “provocative.”

“If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not,’” a U.S. official told the NYT. Most artillery strikes were carried out with the M777 Howitzer system, in part provided by the U.S.

Due to diplomatic risks, the Biden administration wanted to share intel in the most plausibly deniable way possible, with a total restriction on sharing the whereabouts of Russian military figures and targets on Russian soil, one senior U.S. official told the NYT. The information shared would have to adhere to NATO guidelines of intel sharing to not provoke the Russian’s ire against other nations in the alliance.

“Imagine how that would be for us if we knew that the Russians helped some other country assassinate our chairman,” the official told the NYT. “Like, we’d go to war.”

European Command also had sweeping oversight of the Ukrainian use of the HIMARS missile system, the Americans retaining the ability to shut off the activation key cards required to fire the missiles, according to the NYT. HIMARS strikes regularly resulted in hundreds of Russian deaths weekly.

Advisers regularly made visits to the frontlines of the war, referred to as “subject matter experts” in their official capacity, according to the NYT. Their official names only changed back to “advisers” once Ukrainian leadership changed, which was also followed by a threefold increase in advisers.

Despite the deep cooperation, there was often tension between the U.S. and Ukraine, with Kiev often accusing the Americans of being overbearing, while the Americans questioned why sometimes Ukrainians did not heed their advice, according to the NYT.

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Business

Biden’s Greenhouse Gas ‘Greendoggle’ Slush Fund Is Unraveling

Published on March 31, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Michael Chamberlain

We warned you: this gas didn’t smell right from the beginning.

The Greendoggle has made the big time! Not every shady government giveaway to special interests gets its own Wall Street Journal editorial.

But how often does the new EPA administrator announce that his staff has discovered that $20 billion that had been appropriated for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF or “Greendoggle”) had been “parked” in a bank by the Biden EPA until it could be ladled out as grants to climate industry cronies? That’s what Administrator Lee Zeldin announced back in February, referencing a Biden appointee who was infamously caught on tape explaining that the agency was “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” – trying to get the unspent money out of the reach of the Trump administration. Zeldin’s “clawing back” that money, and the lawsuit by “public-private investment fund” Climate United to get the $7 billion it was awarded, has got the media paying attention. Finally.

Administrator Zeldin’s announcement that EPA is taking back the $2 billion awarded to an organization tied to prominent political figures marks another auspicious turn in the GGRF saga, which Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) has followed and warned about since the beginning. Passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (Mr. Orwell, please call your office …), the GGRF was a massive spending program that would provide funds to environmentalist groups to finance green technology projects. The sheer amount of money Congress shoveled at the EPA was unprecedented. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with commensurate oversight resources – Mr. Zeldin says this was by design. The result was the Greendoggle, an environmentalist slush fund administered by insiders for insiders.

According to emails PPT obtained via FOIA request, the EPA invited a group of green activist organizations and thinktanks to a highly irregular November 2022 meeting to “provide early feedback on the RFI and ask clarifying questions.” And, as PPT foresaw, several groups with ties to EPA officials are on the invitation list. EPA’s “revolving door” with radical environmental groups spun fast in the Biden years.

PPT dug in and researched the green banks, finding multiple insider connections to the Biden administration. “With $27 billion dollars sloshing around, the American public should be on high alert for waste, fraud and abuse,” we warned in October 2023.

The next month, when the “short list” of coalitions vying to become GGRF distributors was announced, the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Nick Pope, whose reporting on the GGRF since early on has been essential in exposing the Greendoggle, revealed it featured “several organizations with considerable connections to the Biden administration, as well as the Democratic Party and its allies.” To put it mildly.

As the Greendoggle came together, the legacy media remained incurious, but for anyone paying attention, it smelled bad. There seemed to be no accountability, and given the Biden EPA’s ethical track record, that was concerning, to say the least.

One of the eight entities eventually chosen was the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), a green bank whose mission is to “accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology throughout the US while maintaining a targeted focus on underserved markets.” CGC board member David Hayes left the organization for nearly two years to join the Biden White House Climate Policy Office as a special assistant to the president. He then went back to the CGC board. As PPT put it in a complaint it filed in June 2024 with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the EPA’s inspector general (and which the Zeldin EPA cited in its legal defense of the clawback), while at the White House Hayes “presumably worked at the highest level on the very GGRF program from which CGC sought funding upon his return. This timing is suspect considering CGC itself publicly announced his return to its board as part of its effort to obtain GGRF funding.” Not very subtle, but it worked. CGC got a $5 billion windfall out of the Greendoggle.

It just so happened that, while Mr. Hayes was in the administration, so was another CGC veteran, Jahi Wise. Like Hayes, Wise was a special climate assistant to the president, until he joined the EPA in December 2022 as … founding director of GGRF. Subtlety doesn’t seem to be among the skill sets CGC looks for in its people. Wise at least didn’t return to CGC after that. He joined a George Soros foundation.

The GGRF should become a metaphor for congressional shortsightedness, bureaucratic arrogance and the venality of special interests at the government trough. The “green” industry is an industry like any other, green special interests are special interests and the color of a taxpayer dollar doesn’t change because it’s being wasted in a nominally noble cause.

The Greendoggle stank, gas and all.

Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.

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