Why MAHA and Trump have ignored alcohol’s health risks

The Make America Healthy Again movement wants for no enemies.

For the past two years, seed oils, sugary drinks, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and childhood vaccines — and the industries behind them — have been subjected to unprecedented scrutiny. Yet MAHA’s quest to vanquish the root causes of chronic disease has omitted an obvious foe: alcohol. 

Though drinking causes more deaths in the U.S. each year than infectious diseases and opioids combined, the movement and its leader, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have largely sidestepped alcohol. 

STAT’s investigation finds that the Trump administration has downplayed alcohol’s risks and actively derailed efforts to understand and prevent drinking-related harms, all while doing favors for the expansive alcohol industry. 

Even Kennedy, who has professed a deep interest in fixing the nation’s patchy addiction-treatment infrastructure, has offered no plan for dealing specifically with the country’s favorite drug. Most of his investments so far focus on opioids or specifically on homeless Americans, and pay little attention to excessive alcohol use in the broader population.

To date, the administration’s most noteworthy actions on alcohol have consisted of burying a report that concluded light drinking poses risks; eliminating over half the staff at a federal agency focused on substance use; closing the alcohol program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and altering dietary guidelines to eliminate suggested drinking limits. That erasure is rippling through government: The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism removed information about the health risks of moderate drinking from its website in January, according to archived versions of the page.

“If you’re truly committed to improving all of these different ills in society, and you’re going to stay blind to alcohol, you’re not really that committed to it,” said Mike Marshall, CEO of the U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance, a key nonpartisan nonprofit working on the issue.