Major green groups very publicly disavowed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his 2024 presidential campaign, calling the candidate who spent four decades as an environmental attorney a “dangerous conspiracy theorist and a science denier.” Now, some of those same groups are quietly working with his “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
Many of MAHA’s biggest names held a rally last week outside the Supreme Court during oral arguments over labeling the cancer risks of a weed killer. Mainstream environmental groups were there — some took to the podium, delivering speeches denouncing the Trump administration’s decisions siding with the pesticide’s manufacturer. Others were cheering from the crowds.
Scott Faber, who leads government affairs efforts at the Environmental Working Group, was among the attendees at the rally, hugging and chatting with speakers like Kelly Ryerson, a MAHA influencer known online as “Glyphosate Girl,” but he didn’t give a speech.
“We get a lot of airtime,” Faber said.
Matthew Tejada, senior vice president for environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, wasn’t at the rally — but he’s also working on “trying to figure out kind of how to operate in this very messy MAHA space.”
“We want to figure out how to build some bridges over to parts of our society and parts of the MAHA community where there’s obvious alignment with what we’ve been doing,” he said.
That seemingly anodyne assertion is part of a 180-degree pivot for Tejada, who once called Kennedy “a one-man misinformation superspreader.” His group — where Kennedy worked for nearly three decades, beginning in the 1980s — took out full-page ads in the Sunday papers of six swing states during the 2024 presidential campaign, denouncing Kennedy for “co-opting the credibility and successes of our movement for his own personal benefit.”
As environmental groups struggle to confront an administration that has dismantled decades’ worth of work on climate and public health protections in barely a year, they see opportunities with a new coalition: vaccine skeptics, MAGA Republicans and medically dubious wellness influencers.
It’s a budding alliance that’s politically treacherous for both sides, but could make for a powerful combination. The partnership promises to bring greens’ decades of policy expertise, legal acumen and political strategy to a grassroots movement that was crucial to President Donald Trump’s 2024 election, but has struggled to notch wins on priorities like pesticides and corporate influence, where their agenda is at odds with powerful industries that are intensely entwined with Trump and his administration.
And it comes at a moment when Democrats, including Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, are urging their party to boost outreach to the maverick political movement ahead of the midterm elections.
“Getting my colleagues to understand what an important issue this is to their constituents is my eternal crusade,” Pingree said on a recent podcast of EWG, the largest national green group working on pesticides, food safety and toxic chemicals.
Rewards — and risks
EWG has been working alongside MAHA-aligned grassroots organizers, often volunteers, to convince state legislatures to regulate chemicals — and they’ve gotten some significant wins.
Over the past year, at least 40 states — ranging from Republican strongholds like Kansas to liberal bastions like California — have introduced legislation targeting food chemicals or pesticides, according to EWG’s state bill tracker, up from just three states in 2023, all of which were blue.
MAHA Action, a group politically aligned with Republicans, claims a handful of those same bills as wins for the movement, such as West Virginia’s artificial food dye ban passed last March.
Ryerson, aka “Glyphosate Girl,” is a longtime advocate on agricultural and public health issues and worked with groups like EWG before she identified herself with the MAHA movement.
“I’ve always been one. I’m independent. So I go wherever,” said Ryerson, who co-leads the nonprofit American Regeneration. “Do you realize what a game changer it is just having conservative constituents on board now?”
Environmentalists admit Kennedy’s pull has boosted their issues.
“Certainly, at the state level, we’re seeing things that we’re working on starting to materialize,” said Ken Cook, EWG’s president and co-founder. MAHA volunteers “are actively engaging on the kind of hard-edge policy issues that we haven’t seen Kennedy be able to engage in in D.C.”
Still, the nascent alliance is politically touchy.
For environmentalists who blamed Kennedy for Trump’s election, locking arms with the Republican-aligned movement risks alienating Democratic supporters and undercutting their bedrock belief in science. Greens are also intensely frustrated that they and their Democratic allies are being overshadowed by MAHA on issues that they’ve spent decades advocating on — without much visible progress.
“This is an administration of influencers, where expertise and competency and so forth are actually a disadvantage,” Cook said. “Because if you know too much, and you realize all the contradictions with what the administration is doing, you’re not going to last very long in Trump world.”
But a November petition drafted by high-profile MAHA activists calling for Trump to fire EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin over industry influence at the agency — and Zeldin’s swift moves to attempt to woo the activists — punctuated for green groups how much influence the movement could wield.
On pesticides issues, the Trump administration is caught between powerful constituencies, with agricultural interests and the chemicals industry pushing against MAHA’s demands.
Activists were enraged when Trump signed a February executive order extending national security protections to glyphosate, the main ingredient in the popular weed killer Roundup. The MAHA movement has targeted glyphosate and manufacturer Bayer over the herbicide’s contested cancer risks and widespread contamination rates.
The Trump administration also sided with Bayer during last week’s Supreme Court oral arguments over whether the company must include a cancer label on its pesticides.
But MAHA activists claimed a major win last week when 73 Republicans joined all but six Democrats in voting to strip protections for pesticide manufacturers from the farm bill. Activists argued that the provisions would protect pesticide-makers that have faced hundreds of thousands of lawsuits from plaintiffs alleging they weren’t informed about health risks associated with the products.
Tony Lyons, the chief political operative running MAHA Action and its political action committee, MAHA PAC, endorsed the amendment the day before the vote, a shift from his usual messaging focused on keeping the coalition together as a united front that seldom criticizes the administration.
“This is not a Democrat or Republican issue,” Lyons said on a MAHA Action webinar last Wednesday. “We have to find some common ground. We have to get some good things done, because people will literally die if we don’t.”
Calley Means, senior White House adviser credited as a key MAHA architect, defended the movement’s backing Republicans; “Democrats have not lifted a single finger on these issues,” he said at a POLITICO Health Care summit last month.
“I give this movement a lot of credit for raising the profile of these issues, and they did that through their own blood, sweat and tears,” said Lori Ann Burd, the Center for Biological Diversity’s environmental health director. “We are happy to work with anyone who wants to take on pesticide issues, who needs information. We’re the wonks. We’re in the courtroom. We’re the ones writing the detailed legal and scientific comments.
“I have never believed I have to agree with 100 percent of anyone’s agenda to work with them,” she continued.
‘Preserving the coalition’
For MAHA activists, too close of an association with liberal green groups could raise questions about who is driving their message and dilute their influence with the Trump administration. It also threatens to drive a wedge between the prominent activists who have been focused on environmental health risks for years and the movement’s chief political operators, who are working to elect Republicans and keep a united front behind Trump.
“They’re in an awkward position,” said Ayodele Okeowo, managing director at political consulting firm Tusk Strategies and former Biden administration official. Okeowo has been working with nonprofits and companies engaged in MAHA initiatives, including building out capacity on pesticide initiatives.
“I think a lot of MAHA leaders right now are focused on preserving the coalition,” he continued. “But if they continue to sideline pesticide reform efforts and some of the other efforts that they find inconvenient, that really threatens the coalition that they’ve built.”
It’s been a sticking point with the MAHA moms, a collection of U.S. mothers concerned about toxic exposures. Zen Honeycutt, the executive director and founder of Moms Across America, and her coalition of more than 3,000 volunteer activists have embraced the MAHA title. She, like Ryerson, also has experience sitting in the middle of multiple tense political divisions.
The group’s partners and collaborators include Children’s Health Defense, the vaccine-focused group Kennedy founded; the Heritage Foundation, a Trump-aligned think tank; MAHA Action; Beyond Pesticides; EWG; and CBD, among others.
“Our children are being hurt, and they’re dying because of these poisons and lies,” Honeycutt said at the Supreme Court rally. “We are here today to say enough is enough. I feel deeply betrayed, and I am mad.”
Progress at the federal level has been slower, but Trump and other senior White House officials last month met with Ryerson and other pesticides-focused MAHA influencers, an effort to mend wounds.
Vani Hari, a blogger under the pseudonym “Food Babe” and Kennedy ally, said bipartisanship is “the spirit of what he [Kennedy] wanted to create.”
“He wanted Democrats and Republicans coming to the table to solve these issues instead of being delegated by special interests and their constituencies,” Hari said last Wednesday on a MAHA Action webinar.
Rylan DiGiacomo-Rapp contributed to this report.
Reach reporter Ellie Borst on encrypted messaging app Signal at eborst.64.
