Calley Means’s departure is the last straw for some in the movement who argue that administration figures have sabotaged MAHA priorities.
Calley Means, a senior adviser to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., resigned from his White House post on Thursday, sending shock waves through the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.
Means’s departure comes as Republicans brace for a bruising midterm election cycle, the first election since Kennedy and Trump joined forces in the months leading up to the 2024 election. At the time, MAHA was cast as a force multiplier, a new coalition partner that Trump’s remade GOP could accommodate.
Two years later, some prominent MAHA figures have become disillusioned with an administration they feel has neglected their priorities and see Means’s departure as a final breaking point; others are hopeful that with new leadership, the movement can finally start to accomplish some of its priorities.
“I am impressed that he stayed committed for as long as he did,” Kelly Ryerson, a MAHA influencer who goes by the moniker “Glyphosate Girl” online, told me minutes after the Wall Street Journal reported Means’s resignation. According to Ryerson, Means’s efforts to reform the food supply and end chronic illness were “blocked by entrenched industry interests at nearly every turn.”
“If MAHA promises had been kept by the White House, we would be in the middle of a rapid overhaul of our food system. Industry and administration allies seem committed to keeping us sick,” she said.
One former administration official tells me that President Trump and Secretary Kennedy are “100 percent aligned” on MAHA issues, but the policies face delay due to the slog of bureaucracy leveraged by “Bush Republicans” who oppose major reform.
Before joining the White House, Means founded TrueMed in 2022, a health-care company that helps customers use health savings account or flexible spending account money for health products that wouldn’t automatically qualify.
Means and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, authored the 2024 book, Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, which became the “MAHA bible” as the foremost defense of charting a new path in public health, one focused on holistic medicine and preventative care.
One former Trump administration official described Means as the second most important MAHA figure, after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself.
In an X post after the Wall Street Journal reported his resignation, Means announced that his departure comes with “tremendous respect for President Trump and Bobby Kennedy.”
“They laid out a vision of [combating] the entrenched, dark forces in DC that profit from Americans getting sick,” he wrote. “More policy and cultural change has happened around these goals in the past 2 years than any time in history — and I know this movement is just getting started.”
Means’s departure from the White House comes after MAHA assembled an organizational scaffolding of various nonprofits like the MAHA Institute think tank and the MAHA PAC political action committee run by Tony Lyons, an RFK Jr. ally and book publisher.
MAHA PAC backed Representative Julia Letlow’s successful primary challenge against incumbent Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who is viewed by Means — and MAHA broadly — as an obstacle to sweeping reform.
Cassidy, the chairman of the powerful Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP) committee, was a major obstacle to getting RFK Jr. confirmed. After a lengthy delay and significant public criticism directed at the nominee’s record on vaccines, Cassidy did ultimately vote for RFK Jr.’s confirmation twice — once in committee and once in the final vote on the Senate floor. But when Cassidy said he did not have the votes in the HELP committee to push through Dr. Casey Means’s nomination as surgeon general, her brother, who previously said that Cassidy’s vote to confirm RFK Jr. would be “the best vote of his career,” called Cassidy “a mindless avatar for his donors and a blind defender of the status quo system that is profiting from American sickness.”
Senator Cassidy did not respond to a comment request regarding Means’s resignation.
The MAHA health revolution promised by RFK Jr. and turbocharged by his appointment at HHS frequently ran into the roadblock of practical politics, especially in the White House. A poll conducted by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio in December found the anti-vaccine rhetoric common in MAHA circles — and sometimes employed by the president himself — was politically unpopular among voters. That tension created strife across the administration.
“He was a bully publicly and privately, who only got his job because of his relationship to RFK,” according to a person familiar with Means’s relationship with members of Congress and across the administration. “No one, especially in Trump world, will miss him.”
Means appears to have retained support among many online influencers who command large audiences of MAGA faithful.
Alex Voetberg, another popular MAHA influencer, reacted to the resignation in a post on X lauding Means as the “Godfather of the MAHA movement” and then blaming “crony capitalism and corporate capture” for squandering “a generation opportunity to completely change the trajectory of children’s health.”
“We have very few left with integrity in the White House,” she wrote.
When I asked David Mansdoerfer, a Health and Human Services official during Trump’s first term, he directed me to a lengthy X post he had written cautioning against MAHA catastrophization: “One individual advisor, who isn’t even in a senate confirmed position, does not carry the political weight to force the White House to move.” Mansdoerfer argued that there are countless factors that might delay the implementation of MAHA policies, not all of them sinister.
Not every MAHA operative is sad to see Means go. Mary Talley Bowden, founder of American Health Freedom, a MAHA-aligned anti-vaccine group, was relieved to see Means’s resignation. “The fake face of MAHA is out,” she wrote on X.
Another MAHA operative told me Means’s resignation two weeks before the midterm elections is “a total BS move and dripping of egotism and arrogance.”
One former administration official whom I spoke with after the news of Means’s resignation broke had a different theory regarding the timing of his departure: By publicly resigning a few weeks before Election Day, the theory goes, Means might draw attention to his cause and place the spotlight on its enemies within the administration.
“I think Calley did this to save the midterms,” the former administration official said. “I think he did it in the hopes that the people who are undermining the MAHA agenda inside the administration get called out by President Trump, allowing the administration to reverse course quickly, ahead of the midterms. There’s still time.”