MAHA Moms Are ‘Absolutely Furious’ Trump Protected This Forever Chemical

WASHINGTON — Make America Healthy Again advocates are up in arms over President Donald Trump’s decision to protect domestic production of herbicides, saying the president is prioritizing the agriculture industry over Americans’ health.

The president on Thursday signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to protect domestic production of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides. The move is intended to bolster national security by preserving critical supply chains, describing phosphorus and glyphosate as “critical materials” and warning that interruption of supply of either of these items could leave the American industrial base and food supply vulnerable to hostile foreign actors.

White House spokesman Kush Desai told The Daily Wire on Thursday afternoon that the order is “not an endorsement of any product or practice” but “strengthens our national security and ends America’s decades-long reliance on foreign imports and supply chains.” He also emphasized that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture are currently researching sustainable practices on this front.

Desai described the move as “America First in action,” cautioning that “building modern weapons systems or growing enough food is impossible without elemental phosphorus.”

But some MAHA advocates, like Culture Apothecary host Alex Clark, say the move is in direct contradiction to Trump’s campaign promises to “Make America Healthy Again.” Clark, who hosts one of the top health and wellness podcasts in the world with over 40 million downloads, argued that Trump campaigned on “looking into what’s in our water, what’s in our air, what’s in our soil, acknowledging that pesticide usage was making Americans sick.”

“It was a key campaign promise,” said Clark, whose show is part of the Turning Point USA network. “This new executive order ramping up pesticide use as a form of national defense is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.”

MAHA advocates who spoke with The Daily Wire argue that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the MAHA movement at large have spent years arguing against toxic chemicals contaminating food supplies — specifically glyphosate. A recently released White House-commissioned Make America Healthy Again report states that the chemical contains “a range of possible health effects, ranging from reproductive and developmental disorders as well as cancers, liver inflammation and metabolic disturbances.”

However, in a statement on Thursday, Kennedy argued that the order “puts America first where it matters most — our defense readiness and our food supply,” saying: “We must safeguard America’s national security first, because all of our priorities depend on it. When hostile actors control critical inputs, they weaken our security. By expanding domestic production, we close that gap and protect American families.”

Michaela Bardossas, a nutritionist and member of the Moms Across America team, told The Daily Wire that calling glyphosate “critical to U.S. national security” is “a stunning slap in the face to the Make America Healthy Again movement and to families who are rightfully, deeply concerned about chronic disease, cancer, and infertility.”

“If we’re talking about national security, we should be talking about the reproductive crisis,” she argues. “Roughly 1 in 6 couples now struggle to conceive. Sperm counts in the U.S. have declined by about 50% over the past 50 years, continuing to drop by roughly 1% per year. This is a public-health emergency.”

Glyphosate has become so pervasive, she said, that Moms Across America has detected levels “far above levels known to cause harm to our health in a wide range of products including vaccines.”

“For thousands of years, we farmed without glyphosate. Framing dependence on a relatively new herbicide as essential to national defense, while fertility rates fall below replacement, cancer rates soar, and families struggle to conceive, raises serious questions about what we truly consider a security priority.”

President Donald Trump during a MAHA Commission event (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

“We are talking about a chemical that is contributing to our skyrocketing rates of infertility, that is creating genital malformations in little boys in the womb, that is crossing the blood-brain barrier and causing neurological issues. How is that going to strengthen our national defense?”

Clark has been aggressively pushing back against the executive order on X, highlighting Kennedy’s former social media post on glyphosate in which Kennedy called the chemical “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic.”

The herbicide Glyphosate is one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic. Much more widely used here than in Europe. Shockingly, much of our exposure comes from its use as a desiccant on wheat, not as an herbicide. From there it goes straight into our bodies.…

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 14, 2024

Clark shared Thursday that the MAHA moms that she knows are “absolutely furious, disheartened, and are unsure if they’re going to vote at all now in the midterms.” And she believes that this kind of policy spells doom for Republicans in the midterms.

“This group of women was crucial to 2024 and they will be crucial to winning 2026,” Clark emphasized. “Not only are we wanting to court these women to keep voting for the GOP for 2026 but we want these women to vote for us in 2028. We need these women to vote for Vance. We need the MAHA movement to keep winning. And we just backstabbed them. For the life of me, I don’t understand the long-term play of this.”

Where do AG lobbyists fit into the gold standard of science?

— Alex Clark (@yoalexrapz) February 19, 2026

Zen Honeycutt, also of Moms Across America, has serious concerns that promoting glyphosate in this manner will only worsen autism rates.

“The autism epidemic will only get worse with glyphosate in our food and vaccines,” she said.

“What is tragic about Trump’s EO to secure glyphosate as a national security concern is that he promised his friends to find the reason for the autism epidemic, and we know it’s important to him to keep his word,” Honeycutt said. “He just made one of the major contributing factors of autism, glyphosate, which has been found in childhood vaccines in two batches of tests by separate labs, a government-supported asset.”

“America has just one domestic producer of phosphorus, and President Trump’s executive order safeguards our national security and food supply by addressing our precarious foreign reliance for this key input,” Desai, the White House spokesman, said. “At the same time, HHS and USDA are pursuing more research into sustainable agricultural practices, including new crop protection tools. President Trump pledged to protect our country and Make America Healthy Again, and this Administration will never compromise on either priority.”

Maija Hahn, the vice president of REACTforHope.org, an organization that supports families affected by autism and other neurodevelopment disorders, is incredibly grateful to Trump for his “willingness to confront the chronic disease crisis” and for working with RFK Jr. to address health challenges.

That’s why, she says, this decision “feels so concerning and confusing to many families like mine.”

“It appears to move in the opposite direction of the goal to reduce harmful exposures and improve the health trajectory of the next generation,” she told The Daily Wire. “We hope this executive action can include safeguards, transparency, and clear goals to ultimately end glyphosate dependency while protecting our food supply.”

Families with autistic members are already sensitive to policies that could increase widespread environmental exposures, Hahn says, particularly because parents are “already exhausted and financially overwhelmed trying to minimize cumulative toxic burdens affecting their child’s health.”

“When industry stability becomes the priority during periods of legal pressure and public concern, history shows that exposure often expands and chronic health conditions skyrocket,” she said.

Hahn would far rather see the government working alongside American farmers to transition to healthier soil, diversified weed management, and safer food production that reduces reliance on controversial chemicals, rather than reinforcing dependency on these chemicals.

“Protecting public health and supporting agricultural resilience do not have to be competing goals,” she said.

Like Clark, Hahn fears that these types of actions could affect how Americans vote in the midterm elections.

“MAHA voters supported a vision of restoring health in America,” she says. “If policies are perceived as repeating past patterns where industry concerns outweigh health concerns, there is a real risk of losing trust among the very communities that supported reform. As a nation, we should come together to reduce dependency on glyphosate, support farmers through transition, and prioritize the long-term health of our children.”

A White House official pushed back on the notion that the Trump administration was betraying the president’s campaign promise, pointing out that the White House has taken many steps to improve food safety and expand research into sustainable agriculture practices. That includes launching a “Regenerative Agriculture Pilot Program” to lower farmer production costs, the EPA’s “Path Forward on Chemical Reviews Under TSCA” to improve chemical reviews and protect against chemical exposures, as well as the EPA’s proposed revised processes for conducting chemical risk evaluations.

“The reality is,” the White House official told The Daily Wire, “this is not a binary choice between having glyphosate or not at this juncture of time.”