WASHINGTON — As activists and groups aligned with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. celebrated a victory in a battle against pesticides this month, they had perhaps an unlikely person to thank: a Democrat from Maine.
“Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, has become largely synonymous with the Trump administration. It was coined by Kennedy as a result of his political alliance with President Trump and his tenure as health secretary has put its goals prominently at the center of the Republican administration’s health policy.
But it was Democratic Representative Chellie Pingree who emerged as its most consequential champion in Congress, leading the effort to remove a provision from a government funding bill that could have given pesticides protection from new scrutiny by regulators and courts. Last week, the House passed the funding bill without the language MAHA had been opposing for months. The Senate is set to do the same this week and send the law to Trump’s desk.
Pingree fought the provision independently of MAHA. Still, she embraced and courted them as allies, making the fight a rare instance of a Democrat tapping the power of this coalition. The issue highlighted the political schisms within MAHA that activists say leave their alliance open for either party.
Pingree, a longtime organic farmer from North Haven who has worked on agriculture and environmental issues for decades, credits MAHA with heightening attention on topics that have in the past been seen as niche, and said it was natural to want to work together.
“If there is a moment in time where there is an interest in say, for instance, changing the rules around [the pesticide] glyphosate or ultraprocessed food, we should look for those opportunities to gain wins,” Pingree said. “That’s very different from a wholesale embrace of everything this administration does.”
Pingree is not the only Democrat to have areas of agreement with MAHA. The coalition’s causes includes a number of pro-environmental and anti-chemical views that historically have been championed by the left. But few Democrats have been willing to be publicly associated with the movement as it has also buoyed Kennedy’s controversial and unpopular overhaul of the vaccine schedule and Trump more broadly.
In this case, Pingree worked alongside MAHA to block a provision tucked into the House version of a bill that funds agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency. In sweeping terms, it could have prevented states, localities, and even federal regulators from taking any action against approved pesticides, including glyphosate, the main ingredient in the widely used weed-killer Roundup. That in turn would have given the manufacturers a way to avoid many lawsuits over potential dangers of their products.
Roundup manufacturer Bayer has paid billions to settle thousands of such claims that its product causes cancer.
The company maintains Roundup is safe and has been backed by numerous studies. That is also the official position of the EPA, even after one oft-cited study declaring it safe was retracted because it had undisclosed ties to Roundup’s maker.
As the top Democrat on the committee that oversees the relevant bill, Pingree demanded in final negotiations over government funding that the provision be removed, and she had the backing of Democratic senators. As she fought behind closed doors, she also back-channeled to MAHA activists to encourage them to keep the pressure on members of Congress over it.
The Republican chair of the relevant appropriations subcommittee, Idaho Representative Mike Simpson, argued that activists had misconstrued the language and that it was only about consistent labeling. A similar argument was laid out by an industry group backed by Bayer. Simpson said he had heard from scores of “MAHA moms” and while he agrees with them on many things, he believes they were misinformed on this one.
“All we’re trying to do is say, ‘Wait a minute, the EPA makes a decision on this. That’s the label you put on,’ ” Simpson said. “I don’t know why that’s so hard to understand, but some people think we were trying to let Bayer off the hook with the lawsuits that they’re under and stuff. That wasn’t it at all.”
Simpson said Democrats put up a tough fight against the language and in the end, it wasn’t worth holding up the entire appropriations bill over.
“What they need to do is, the company — or the people that were proposing this stuff — they need to do a better job of explaining to the MAHA moms and to the Democrats what they’re trying to do,” he said.
The episode highlighted one of the biggest schisms between the MAHA grass-roots base and Republicans, one that activists say is an opportunity for any politician who wants to work with them. The impacts of pesticides have been a concern of many activists for years and was long a top issue for Kennedy, who was a lawyer on the first major lawsuit decided against Roundup.
But the administration has largely supported pesticide manufacturers, to the dismay of the MAHA base. A major White House MAHA policy road map backed EPA’s approval of the products, and Trump’s EPA has approved new pesticides containing forever chemicals, outraging activists.
They also expressed a sense of betrayal when the Trump administration encouraged the Supreme Court to take up a case that could neuter lawsuits over Roundup. If the court does accept the request, advocates largely expect the justices to side with Bayer. On Friday, the court weighed whether to take up the case in a closed-door meeting but has not yet made a decision.
And Trump’s Republican allies in Congress were largely behind the pesticide protections in the funding bill. Representatives Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Thomas Massie of Kentucky, two House Republicans known to defy their party, spoke out against it last week, though the language had already been dropped at that point. (Incidentally, MAHA Action, an outside advocacy group that heavily backs Kennedy, featured Luna, not Pingree, in a grass-roots call celebrating the win.)
One vocal anti-pesticide MAHA activist had a blunt response for Simpson’s and Republicans’ defense of the funding language.
“What does he think, we’re idiots?” said Kelly Ryerson, an advocate against pesticides who goes by “Glyphosate Girl” on social media. “I am so pleased that the provision was left out of the bill. . . . Americans of all political beliefs simply do not want to be poisoned by pesticides, so it’s an exciting time.”
Ryerson and other MAHA activists praised Pingree’s work on the issue. They said it speaks to the way the movement defies typical party lines. While they support much of what Kennedy has done in office, including on vaccines, they say the grass roots of the MAHA movement does not belong to the Trump administration and remains up for courting by politicians who share their goals.
“If this administration thinks that ‘making America healthy again’ only means vaccine improvements, that’s incorrect,” said Zen Honeycutt, the executive director of Moms Across America, who said she looked forward to working with Pingree on more related issues. “We do support Secretary Kennedy, but there are many more things to be done, and we will speak up. . . . Moms and women will not be silenced.”
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