The White House released a strategy document on Tuesday outlining ways to address what it says are the key factors impacting children's health.
The 20-page report, composed by the White House's Make America Healthy Again Commission, covered a broad swath of factors, outlining more than 120 proposed plans for advancing research, increasing public awareness, and strengthening public-private partnerships. But many of the recommendations were vague or lacked the teeth some experts hoped to see from a document MAHA allies for months had said would dramatically transform the health of Americans.
"The report has a lot of ideas for actions that really could improve health, but is short on specifics and weak on regulatory action," Dr. Marion Nestle, an emerita professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, told ABC News in an email.
MORE: Draft of new 'MAHA' report suggests RFK Jr. won't target pesticides
"So much of this is voluntary, work with, promote, partner," she said. "Where's the policy?"
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. testifies before the Senate Finance Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, September 4, 2025 in Washington.
Mark Schiefelbein/AP
Some of the most specific policy changes, perhaps one of the most universally supported pillars of Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. MAHA agenda in office, included pledges he has made before. The report pledged to define ultraprocessed foods at the federal level for the first time, and also to regulate a process that allows food companies to evaluate the safety of their own ingredients and avoid third-party review.
Still, those moves drew praise from Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and the director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, who encouraged the administration to officially implement them.
"From a food and nutrition perspective, the report is excellent. It is comprehensive, it's specific, and if many of these actions are implemented, it could really have a high impact," Mozaffarian told ABC News.
"Where I have would have liked to see more is that there's no funding specified, so all of those good ideas will die on the vine if there's not really meaningful dollars shifted there," he added.
Kennedy, asked in a Fox News interview about criticism over the lack of specifics in the report, said he planned to accomplish many of the 128 policy recommendations before the end of this year.
"For many of them, we're already doing them," he said. "We're getting rid of [synthetic] dyes ... we're changing the GRAS loopholes so that people can't just put anything they want in our food anymore without showing that it's safe. We're changing nutrition standards in baby formula. We are requiring medical schools to do nutrition education."
Notably, the report avoided using highly critical language about some of the more controversial factors which Kennedy, who chairs the commission, has long accused of harming children's health -- including vaccines, which Kennedy has significantly targeted over the last few months as he terminated vaccine research contracts and limited qualifications for who should get the COVID vaccine.
Vaccines were mentioned briefly as part of a pledge to create a new "vaccine injury research program at the NIH Clinical Center" and to "ensur[e] scientific and medical freedom." The MAHA Commission also called for ensuring "America has the best childhood vaccine schedule," a nod to Kennedy's skepticism of many routine vaccines, but doesn't specifically call for limiting access to particular shots.
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In practice, though, Kennedy, while atop HHS, has launched a campaign against vaccines, including by firing the CDC director over her reluctance to align with parts of his vaccine agenda, and by removing all 17 members of a CDC panel that makes vaccine recommendations and replacing them with handpicked members, many of whom have expressed doubts about vaccines.
Meanwhile, pesticides, which Kennedy has accused of "poisoning" people, were treated softly after an intense lobbying campaign this summer by agriculture groups to prevent the administration from taking tough action to curtail or eliminate the chemicals. ABC News and others reported last month that a draft of the report had suggested the administration would not strongly target pesticides.
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins defended pesticides in an event with reporters Tuesday, calling the Environmental Protection Agency's review of pesticide safety "a strong process that our farmers stand by."
"A crop protection tool such as pesticides is absolutely essential for America not to compromise our food supply system at this point," she said.
The science is clear on the harmful health impacts of farmers directly spraying pesticides, but less clear when studied in low levels carried through to food, said Mozaffarian.
The commission promised research to help farmers adopt "precision agricultural techniques," a more specific way of using pesticides only on certain crops, which the report noted could reduce pesticide while also helping farmers make more money. It also said the administration would look at the "cumulative" chemical exposures that may affect children.
In response to Tuesday's report, the National Corn Growers Association said it was "encouraged' by the approach the report took toward pesticides, calling the recommendations "reasonable and science-based."
The Center for Food Safety, meanwhile, which advocates for a healthier and safer approach to agriculture, condemned the report, saying it "fails to offer any concrete regulatory steps towards achieving the Commission's stated goals."
Autism was given a brief mention in Tuesday's report, in which the commission said the administration would "study the root causes," including through an integrated dataset hosted by the National Institutes of Health that links electronic health records, wearables data and health insurance claim data.
Kennedy has pledged a more extensive report on the causes of autism later this year.
The report also announced the launch of an NIH "Initiative on Chronic Disease," which will adopt a "whole-person-health" approach to generate plans to address chronic illness in kids.
"Now for the first time, we're talking about the microbiome and food as medicine and micronutrients in soil and microplastics and all sorts of topics that we know are central to the health of kids," FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said at the Tuesday press event.
The commission said the administration would research possible connections between children's oral health and chronic disease, update nutrition requirements for infant formula, and work to increase the rate of breastfeeding among American mothers.