Calley Means, one of the Make America Healthy Again movement’s loudest champions inside the Trump administration, has quit his post as a senior adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reports Liz Essley Whyte for The Wall Street Journal. According to sources, Means left frustrated that the MAHA agenda had stalled inside the White House.
The timing is awkward. The exit lands less than two weeks before the midterms, as some MAHA supporters grow disillusioned with a White House whose MAHA wins have been overshadowed by its support for the pesticide industry and unfulfilled food-policy promises.
Means, co-founder of the health-spending startup Truemed, joined HHS permanently in November 2025 as a senior adviser on food and nutrition policy. He built his MAHA brand as a reformed insider, citing past consulting work for the food and pharmaceutical industries. Not everyone buys it. “Calley Means is not a whistleblower. He is an opportunist, peddling junk science to make millions,” his former mentor, political strategist Steve Schmidt, told Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban in 2025.
Inside the administration, he quickly became a lightning rod. In September, the Journal reported that he had confronted White House officials at a July meeting over a federal definition of “ultraprocessed food,” insisting the matter “wasn’t open for further debate.” Officials feared the definition would sweep in most grocery products and fuel lawsuits against food companies. That effort, along with a school-meal overhaul, has since stalled.
His fortunes were also tied to his sister, Casey Means, his co-author on the 2024 book Good Energy. Her surgeon general nomination collapsed in April amid Senate concerns over her vaccine views, prompting her brother to post on X: “At every step, Casey’s message of hope and empowerment was thwarted by Bill Cassidy.”
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Pesticides were another sore spot. After Trump’s February executive order boosting glyphosate production, Means told a MAHA rally in Austin: “I’m not going to gaslight or sugarcoat it. This glyphosate thing was extremely disappointing.”
