RFK Jr. Is Noticeably Quiet About a MAHA Obsession

The MAHA diet is full of fussy advice: swap the seed oils for beef tallow, cut out the ultra-processed snacks and synthetic food dyes, slap on a continuous glucose monitor to track how your blood sugar fluctuates with each bite. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his “Make America healthy again” followers have such strong feelings about food because bad eating habits are making people sick. Many MAHA acolytes are equally particular about the need for a good night’s sleep.

In their best-selling book, Good Energy, Casey and Calley Means, siblings who are both close Kennedy confidants, warn that even the best eating habits cannot make up for bad sleep: “You could eat a perfect ‘Good Energy’ diet, but if you don’t sleep, your cells will spew out excess free radicals.” (Casey is Donald Trump’s surgeon-general nominee, and Calley is a special White House adviser.) Should the family dog be a nuisance at night, it may necessitate “intensive pet training or finding a new home,” they say. Other MAHA figures have similarly suggested making hard choices in the name of prioritizing sleep; Gary Brecka, a self-described biohacker who recently hosted Kennedy on his podcast, Ultimate Human, has recommended a $3,000 smart mattress cover. In typical MAHA fashion, some tips veer into the unscientific and even absurd. Mark Hyman, a longtime friend of Kennedy’s who runs a wellness empire, has outlined a “simple sleep routine” that includes throwing away plug-in air fresheners, staying away from plastic food containers, and even building a Faraday cage over your bed to keep away electromagnetic waves.

Americans have been told over and over again to sleep more, with limited success. Nearly 40 percent of adults aren’t getting enough rest, according to the CDC. The MAHA movement has good reasons to keep hounding the message. Poor sleep exacerbates many of the chronic conditions that the movement is focused on remedying. People who don’t get enough shut-eye are at higher risk of heart disease and obesity. Even a week of sleep troubles can lead to glucose-processing issues similar to those experienced by people with type 2 diabetes. In May, the Trump administration’s MAHA Commission published a long-awaited report on the causes of chronic disease among children; sleep is mentioned more than 20 times. (Calley Means apparently spearheaded the report.)

[Read: Why can’t Americans sleep?]

When it comes to actual interventions and policies, however, sleep has been notably absent from the administration’s planning. As health secretary, Kennedy has had some success cracking down on food dyes and enacting anti-vaccine policies, but he hasn’t laid out anything close to a plan for addressing the country’s sleep problem. The same can be said of state legislators who have been eager to implement MAHA policies. As a cause, sleep is a great illustration of MAHA’s challenges: It’s easy to make the point that Americans are unhealthy. It’s much harder to actually fix it.

Kennedy seems less focused on sleep than other MAHA leaders are—something that goes back to before he was health secretary. He hasn’t mentioned sleep in any speeches since being confirmed for his job. When asked about Kennedy’s views on sleep, a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson told me that “Secretary Kennedy supports a science-driven approach to health promotion, with an emphasis on raising awareness of lifestyle factors that contribute to long-term wellness.” There is good reason to think that RFK Jr. believes that sleep is an important part of improving America’s health: He has suffered health scares in the past, partially due to sleep deprivation, and in response has prioritized getting more sleep, The New York Times reported last year.

His silence on sleep might have to do with the fact that a good night’s rest is especially difficult to legislate. Sure, the government cannot take a cheeseburger out of someone’s mouth, but it can do a lot to change food habits: tweaking what items can be purchased with food stamps, rewriting the rules for what is served in schools, putting warning labels on unhealthy foods, even banning certain ingredients. There isn’t a similar playbook for sleep.

That’s not to say there are no policies that could help. Take teens: Three-fourths of high schoolers do not get the recommended eight hours of sleep per night, according to the CDC. One of the key reasons is that their routine doesn’t match with their biology. During puberty, adolescents naturally fall asleep and wake up later. This phenomenon, known as sleep-phase delay, is why first period is so tortuous for many high schoolers. Several sleep experts I spoke with suggested that school shouldn’t start so early, which the Means siblings also endorse in their book. When Seattle’s school district pushed its start time back by roughly an hour, students reported about 30 extra minutes of sleep per night. But Kennedy has little power to influence the education system. And even if he were to convince the Department of Education to endorse such a policy, states and localities would likely be the ones to implement such a change.

Coming up with policies to address sleep is all the more challenging because different groups are falling short on rest for different reasons. Some people are deprived of sleep because they live in loud or dangerous areas. Many people are staying up working—or late-night scrolling.  (We know of one president doing so, at least.)

The policy challenges might not stop RFK Jr. from lamenting America’s sleep woes. After all, no health problem is straightforward, and Kennedy has advocated for several food changes that he doesn’t have the power to implement as the head of HHS. Like Hyman, perhaps he could give a speech outlining his own sleep hacks. Maybe he could go the way of Brecka and promote gadgets that promise to improve sleep. (Last week, Kennedy declared that “wearables are a key to the MAHA agenda” and that he envisions every American wearing one within four years.) Or perhaps he, like the Means siblings, will just give Americans some hard truths about the importance of rest. The HHS secretary has shown himself to be an expert at riling crowds by channeling nostalgia for a bygone era, and America’s sleep habits have gotten worse over the years. In 1942, 84 percent of adults were getting at least seven hours of sleep each night, according to a Gallup poll. By 2023, that number had dropped to 52 percent.

But sleep doesn’t lend itself to a rallying cry in the way that other aspects of the MAHA agenda do. The movement’s critiques of our poor diets have been so galvanizing because there is a clear enemy to organize around: the food industry. The same can be said of RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine activism: Pharmaceutical companies make for an easy scapegoat, even though they aren’t making products that cause autism. This process of determining the source of a problem and assigning blame is an essential part of any social movement, sociologists have suggested, and it is often what motivates action. If everyone was spending their nights tossing and turning on barbed-coil springs, perhaps a campaign could be waged against Big Mattress. But sleep is such a multifaceted problem that it’s difficult to generate a single, unifying enemy.

That doesn’t mean sleep is a losing issue for the MAHA universe. The fact that there’s a market for $3,000 mattress pads demonstrates just how desperate people are for a solution to their sleep woes. But without articulating a clear theory for why Americans’ sleep has suffered, anything Kennedy says about sleep will make him look less like a reformer and more like a self-help guru eager to sell another cure.