Calley Means, a senior adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a leading figure in the Make America Healthy Again movement, resigned Thursday.
He had reportedly grown frustrated with what he viewed as a stalled agenda and had come to believe that special interests were undermining the movement, according to Politico.
“I am resigning from the White House with tremendous respect for President Trump and Bobby Kennedy,” Means wrote on X. “They laid out a vision of combatting the entrenched, dark forces in DC that profit from Americans getting sick.”
“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,” he added.
Means, a Stanford graduate and co-founder of the wellness company Truemed, worked on Kennedy’s failed 2024 presidential campaign, before becoming a senior HHS adviser last year.
During his tenure, he helped advance several administration initiatives, including revisions to federal nutrition guidelines, efforts to phase out synthetic food dyes and expanded research into psychedelic treatments for mental illness.
His exit from the administration — less than two weeks before the midterm elections — followed growing disillusionment with what he saw as a failure to meaningfully advance MAHA priorities, Politico reported, citing two U.S. officials.
Means was scheduled to meet with White House officials and Kennedy this week to talk about policies for ultraprocessed foods — but the sit-down was pushed back.
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” one unnamed official told the outlet. “Calley’s been pushing very, very hard for this, but it’s been a very opaque process and has been just continuously stonewalled.”
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Other supporters of MAHA — a loose coalition of Kennedy allies focused on wellness and combating chronic disease — saw the president’s February executive order boosting production of glyphosate, an herbicide, as a sign the movement was losing ground.
“There are a lot of presidential promises within the MAHA movement that have been pretty blatantly subverted by special interests, and that’s completely driving his decision to step to step aside and resign,” an unnamed official said.
In May, CNN reported that Kennedy’s allies expressed concern that the secretary was being “marginalized” by the Trump administration, a claim that the White House denied.
“Making America Healthy Again has been a Day One priority for President Trump, and Secretary Kennedy continues to play a central role in the Trump administration’s whole-of-government effort to deliver on the President’s MAHA agenda,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said at the time.
A March Politico survey revealed that nearly half of MAHA voters do not think Trump has done enough to champion their causes. An April poll found that 14 percent of voters identified as being part of the MAHA movement.
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