Trump Invokes Wartime Law to Fulfill ‘Wish List for Oil, Gas, and Coal Industries’

“Trump is abusing emergency authorities and wasting taxpayer resources through unprecedented abuse of the Defense Production Act to promote his politically favored fossil fuel projects.”

THE THREE STOOGES

US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and President Donald Trump appear at an event in Washington, DC on March 4, 2026.
(Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Apr 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


US President Donald Trump on Monday invoked wartime authority in an effort to boost domestic fossil fuel production—with the help of taxpayer funding—as his administration faces growing political backlash over gas price spikes, driven by the illegal assault on Iran.

The five presidential memos Trump signed cite his executive powers under the Cold War-era Defense Production Act, which gives the president the ability to expand and accelerate production of key supplies. Critics accused Trump of abusing his emergency authority, once again, to give handouts to an industry profiting massively from the Iran war, which the president launched without congressional authorization.


Windfall Tax on Big Oil Demanded as Trump’s Iran War Pads Profits of Fossil Fuel Giants


‘Opportunistic’ Fossil Fuel Execs Cashed In on Trump’s Iran War With Record Stock Sales

“President Trump is abusing emergency authorities and wasting taxpayer resources through unprecedented abuse of the Defense Production Act to promote his politically favored fossil fuel projects at the expense of energy affordability and common sense,” said Tyson Slocum, energy director at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen. “Today’s unjustified suite of executive orders is a wish list for the oil, gas, and coal industries, who are already enjoying record profits under Trump’s Energy Unaffordability Agenda.”

“America is already—far and away—the world’s largest oil and gas producer, and the world’s largest petroleum and gas exporter,” Slocum added. “Promoting more fossil fuel exports at a time when Trump has failed to deliver affordable, sustainable energy for American communities is just another example of the president’s incompetent, failed energy policies.”

Trump’s memos aim to bolster petroleum, coal, and liquefied natural gas production, asserting that the nation’s “current inadequate and intermittent energy supply leaves us vulnerable to hostile foreign actors and poses an imminent and growing threat to the United States’ prosperity and national security.”

“Action to expand the domestic petroleum production, refining, and logistics capacity is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability,” the memos state.

Trump signed the directives hours after he publicly disagreed with his own energy secretary’s assessment of when Americans can expect to see relief at the gas pump, where they’re paying over $4 per gallon on average nationwide. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Americans might not see significantly lower gas prices until next year; Trump claimed that assessment was “totally wrong,” even as economists warned of lasting impacts to US and global energy markets stemming from the Iran war.

The world’s largest oil and gas giants have profited massively from war-induced price spikes, with the biggest beneficiaries—including US-based Chevron and ExxonMobil—banking over $30 million an hour in windfall gains during the first month of the conflict.

Trump’s memos came days after a group of Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced legislation aimed at shielding fossil fuel companies from legal action to hold them accountable for their central role in the climate emergency.

“Big Oil companies have raked in massive profits at the pump while lying to the American people about the catastrophic harm of their products, and now they want to deny Americans their rightful day in court and stick taxpayers with the bill for the mess they made,” Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in response to the bill. “If fossil fuel companies have done nothing wrong, why do they need immunity?”

 

Disabled parrot is undefeated alpha male of his group thanks to novel “beak jousting”

Cell Press

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Bruce on a rock checking the photographer out

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Credit: Alex Grabham

A study reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 20 shows how physical disabilities in the animal world can be overcome through behavioral innovation. The report features an endangered kea parrot in captivity at New Zealand’s Willowbank Wildlife Reserve named Bruce who is missing his entire upper beak.  While earlier reports had described his unique use of pebbles as self-care tools, the new findings show how he uses a novel beak jousting technique to turn his disability into social dominance.

“Bruce is the alpha male of his group,” says study first author Alexander Grabham of Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC) in New Zealand. “He achieved this status by himself with the aid of a completely novel fighting technique—a jousting thrust with his exposed lower beak—that beak-intact kea cannot replicate.”

Compared to other kea using their beaks during fights, the researchers found that Bruce not only used jousting more frequently but also targeted different body areas in different ways. His jousting was also more effective than when he kicked. His innovative fighting technique led him to win every single male dominance interaction that the researchers recorded.

His winning record apparently led to other health benefits. Bruce had the lowest levels of corticosterone hormone metabolites levels, which is a sign of reduced stress compared to his peers. He enjoyed priority access to feeders and was the only male to be allopreened by other males, including beak cleaning.

Bruce had already earned some fame before, offering the first recorded case of self-care tool use in a kea. Grabham and colleagues noticed that Bruce fought other kea in a way they had never seen before. They wanted to learn more about what he was doing exactly and what it meant for his social position and the rest of his group.

Overall, the researchers have recorded 227 agonistic interactions from the Willowbank kea, including 9 males and 3 females. Out of 162 interactions between males, Bruce came out on top, winning all 36 interactions he was part of. The findings confirmed Bruce as the clear winner and dominant alpha male of the group.

The researchers describe how he uses his exposed lower beak in jousting thrusts, both at close range and from afar. Bruce uses his beak up close by extending his neck. He also would run or jump to propel his beak at opponents. They found that 73% of the time, his jousting behaviors, which other parrots don’t replicate, displaced opponents immediately. Their observations show he dominates not only in agonistic interactions but also socially during feeding and allopreening.

The findings highlight the remarkable behavioral flexibility and intelligence of endangered kea. But they also have broader implications about physical disabilities and what’s possible, according to the researchers.

“Bruce shows us that behavioral innovation can help bypass physical disability, at least in species with the cognitive flexibility to develop new solutions,” Grabham says. “Previous research has shown links between large brains, behavioral flexibility, and survival at the species level. Bruce demonstrates how those links play out in a single individual, on traits that matter day-to-day, like social dominance. Our findings also raise an important welfare question: if a disabled animal can innovate its way to success, well-intentioned interventions like prosthetics might not always improve their quality of life. Sometimes the animal can do better without help.”

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This work was supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, an ERC Consolidator Grant UNIPROB, a Robert C. Bates Postgraduate Fellowship, and a Gordon Grant Postgraduate Fellowship.

Current Biology, Grabham et al. “A disabled kea parrot is the alpha male of his circus” http://cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)00259-9

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit: http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.

 

Bruce perched in a tree on one leg preening himself

Credit

Ximena Nelson

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Journal

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2026.03.004 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

A disabled kea parrot is the alpha male of his circus

Article Publication Date

20-Apr-2026

Scientists map the blackcap bird brain, opening a new era of 3D digital atlases

Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

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Blackcap brain atlas, viewed coronally

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Credit: Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL

A migratory bird brain, the Eurasian blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), has been mapped for the first time using high-resolution light microscopy. The open-source software tools developed, and the detailed processes published, form a foundation for new brain atlases to be built for any species, providing a valuable resource for neuroscience worldwide. Created by a team from the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL and the University of Oldenburg, Germany, a paper describing the atlas has been published today (20 April 2026) in Current Biology.

Brain atlases - digital, high-resolution, 3D maps of brain structures - are transforming neuroscience. They improve the ability of researchers to interpret their own data, they enable cross-validation between and within experiments, and they foster collaboration - driving forward studies into learning, memory and cognition.

“A digital open-source brain atlas allows researchers to directly align their own experimental multimodal data to the common coordinate space of the atlas. It enables consistency, meaning researchers around the world can speak the same language when it comes to the brain. We are delighted to bring this resource to the community, and even more excited about building many more atlases for other research communities in the future,” said Dr Simon Weiler, Senior Research Fellow at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL, and lead author of the study.

The team is already working on creating a similar digital 3D brain atlas of the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), a bird used to study vocal learning.

The new Eurasian blackcap atlas is freely accessible via BrainGlobe for the neuroscience research community and will advance studies of magnetoreception, migration and navigation. The technology means that any brain sample, even historic histology samples that have been stored for years on glass slides, for example, can be mapped onto the atlas.

Birds are among nature’s foremost navigators, using the Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves and travel between breeding and wintering grounds. Many species travel thousands of miles with centimetres of precision. In the same publication, the team has revealed a previously unknown direct link between magnetosensitive areas in the brain and the decision-making centre, the nidopallium caudolaterale (equivalent to the prefrontal cortex in mammals), demonstrating how the atlas can assist in characterising novel brain pathways.

"To me, this is a key tool that the migration, navigation, and magnetoreception community has been lacking for decades. It will greatly improve consistency and comparability between studies and related species and will significantly accelerate our understanding of underlying neuronal mechanisms,” said Professor Henrik Mouritsen, University of Oldenburg, an author of the study.

To create the atlas, the team at SWC used serial two-photon (STP) tomography to image eight male Eurasian blackcap brains. This advanced imaging technique results in well-aligned 2 x 2 x 5 μm voxel size images of entire brains. The individual 3D images from different brains were then iteratively aligned and averaged to create a representative brain template. Following this, experts at the University of Oldenburg manually annotated the template. This resulted in 44 segmented brain areas, including principal brain compartments, prominent anatomical subdivisions shared across all bird species, regions of the song system, and sensory regions implicated in magnetic field processing. Finally, the atlas was incorporated into the BrainGlobe ecosystem and automatic registration, cell detection and object mapping were demonstrated on experimental data.

“The core aim of BrainGlobe is to democratise computational neuroanatomy. Creating novel atlases is a step in achieving this. All parts of the pipeline are open-source, and over the coming months we will be improving it so that we, and anyone else, can rapidly create new atlases,” said Dr Adam Tyson, Head of the Neuroinformatics Unit at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL and lead of the BrainGlobe Initiative.

While the team used state-of-the-art STP tomography, other microscopies, including light-sheet images are also suitable for creating atlases. Future advances in whole-brain labelling procedures, paired with STP tomography, will further guide brain area subdivision based on region-specific identification of marker genes or proteins, and the atlas will be regularly updated to incorporate new data.

ENDS

This research was funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, Wellcome, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, the European Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Source:

Read the full paper in Current Biology: ‘An open-source three-dimensional digital brain atlas of a migratory bird, the Eurasian blackcap’

Link: http://cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)00323-4

DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.03.034

Media contact:

For more information or to speak to the researchers involved, please contact:

Alison Cranage, Research Communications and Engagement Manager, Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

E: a.cranage@ucl.ac.uk T: +44 (0) 7917 922 068.

About the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre (SWC) brings together world-leading neuroscientists to generate theories about how neural circuits in the brain give rise to the fundamental processes underpinning behaviour, including perception, memory, expectation, decisions, cognition, volition and action. Funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and Wellcome, SWC is located within UCL and is closely associated with the Faculties of Life Sciences and Brain Sciences. For further information, please visit: www.sainsburywellcome.org

About the University of Oldenburg

Carl von Ossietzky University was founded in 1973, making it one of Germany's younger universities. Its goal is to find answers to the big questions facing society in the 21st century through cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and teaching.

Researchers and administrative staff work hand in hand and across disciplines. Many are involved in research – for example, in collaborative research centers, research groups, European projects, or the three clusters of excellence NaviSense, Hearing4all.connects, and Ocean Floor.

The university works closely with more than 300 international cooperation partners and universities. It also has links with non-university institutions in research, education, culture, and business. The research location is further strengthened by the establishment of the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, Max Planck Research Groups, and Fraunhofer working groups.

The university prepares around 15,000 students for professional life. The spectrum ranges from the humanities and cultural sciences to economics, law, and social sciences to mathematics, computer science, the natural sciences, and medicine.

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Journal

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2026.03.034 

Method of Research

Imaging analysis

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

An open-source three-dimensional digital brain atlas of a migratory bird, the Eurasian blackcap

Article Publication Date

20-Apr-2026

Well-placed poplar plantations can enhance forest connectivity for birds

University of Eastern Finland

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A poplar plantation in Spain.

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Credit: Sara Pineda-Zapata.

A new study published in Landscape Ecology shows how fast-growing poplar plantations can improve functional connectivity for forest birds in fragmented agricultural landscapes, provided they are strategically located and species have moderate to high dispersal capacity. The findings suggest that managed forests may contribute not only to biomass supply, but also to biodiversity conservation in highly human-modified regions.

Using spatial connectivity models in two European river sub-catchments in Spain and France, researchers examined how existing forest patches, both within and outside Natura 2000 areas, and poplar plantations interact to support movement across the landscape for three forest bird species with contrasting dispersal abilities.

“Plantations can act as stepping stones between forest patches, although their effectiveness depended strongly on their location within the landscape,” says Sara Pineda-Zapata, a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland and the lead author of the study. “We wanted to understand whether plantations, often viewed only through the lens of wood and biomass production, could also support ecological processes in fragmented landscapes,” she continues.

In Spain, plantations generated connectivity gains that were greater than their area would suggest, with some patches playing an important role in maintaining ecological connectivity for forest networks, including Natura 2000 areas. In France, plantation patches were more isolated and contributed less effectively. The strongest benefits were observed for species capable of moving over longer distances; for short-distance dispersers like the common chaffinch, plantations had a more limited effect unless they were located very close to an existing forest habitat, suggesting that even narrow gaps can remain major barriers for less mobile species.

“Plantations are often assessed only in terms of production, but when strategically located, they can provide much more than wood. They can contribute to landscape structure, help maintain ecological flows and complement conservation efforts in intensively used agricultural regions. The key message is that location matters, and that planning matters,” says Professor Blas Mola at the University of Eastern Finland.

Professor Alejandra Morán of the University of Basel in Switzerland highlighted that the results are relevant beyond bird movement: “Connectivity influences how species move, persist and respond to environmental change. When we think about ecosystem services, we should consider not only what land use produces in one place, but how it shapes ecological processes across the wider landscape.”

Rémi Duflot, from the University of Jyväskylä, emphasised the broader implications: "Birds are particularly informative because they respond quickly to landscape fragmentation. However, we caution that plantations cannot replace natural forests in ecological quality, and that increasing tree cover may reduce habitat for open-habitat species, while forest specialists often require more complex structures than plantations provide.”

“What our results show is that in fragmented landscapes, well-placed plantations can become part of the solution, opening up interesting possibilities for designing productive landscapes that are also more supportive of biodiversity,” concludes Pineda-Zapata.

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Journal

Landscape Ecology

DOI

10.1007/s10980-026-02316-z 

Article Title

Strategic placement of plantations enhances forest connectivity for birds in agricultural landscapes.

Disabled Organizers Are Facing Down Trump’s Immigration Crackdown


Disability justice organizers are turning to immigrant rights groups to guide their interventions and support work.

By Marianne Dhenin , 

Truthout

March 25, 2026

A demonstrator holds a sign that says “Abolish ICE” during a protest in Houston, Texas, on January 10, 2026.Mark Felix / AFP via Getty Images

Since Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office last year, the number of people in immigration detention has almost doubled from 40,000 to about 75,000. Disabled people face an increased threat of violence and detention from law enforcement, including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents who have been deployed to terrorize communities and detain neighbors in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and elsewhere as part of Trump’s crackdown over the last year.

As the Trump administration’s assault on migrant communities escalates, members of the disability community are showing up for their neighbors on all fronts — in Congress and the courts, at protests, and as nodes in mutual aid and ICE watch networks. Disabled organizers who spoke to Truthout said the attacks feel all too familiar, and it’s a fight they cannot imagine sitting out.

“Fascism is not new to this group, the idea of being disposable, not being of value to this capitalist society, aggressive institutionalization, state-sanctioned violence, lack of resources — we have been screaming from our lungs that there was something severely wrong,” Ramiro Alvarez, communications director at Detroit Disability Power (DDP), told Truthout. “It’s not a ‘We told you so’ moment. It’s a ‘We are glad more people are waking up and there are more in this fight’ moment.”

Research has repeatedly shown that disabled people are overrepresented at every stage of the criminal legal system. They account for upwards of two-thirds of the U.S. prisoner population. However, no similar demographic data exists for the population in immigration jails.

Members of the disability community are showing up for their neighbors on all fronts — in Congress and the courts, at protests, and as nodes in mutual aid and ICE watch networks.

The risks are even greater for disabled people of color, who are likewise overrepresented in the criminal legal system. Of those incarcerated in the U.S., 1 in 3 are Black men, and 1 in 6 are Latino men, compared to only 1 in 17 white men. People of color are also more likely to be disabled and less likely to have access to needed health care.

“Anybody who’s not white and is disabled is at such a huge risk of being profiled by ICE and CBP,” CT Tyson, government affairs liaison at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), told Truthout.

Disability Justice Organizers Are Creating the Liberatory Future We All Deserve
Organizers share where they find hope in the struggle for disability justice as we go into the second year of Trump 2.0. By Marianne Dhenin , Truthout January 6, 2026

Laura Murchie, a staff attorney focused on immigration law at Disability Law United, told Truthout that even if a person is not disabled when agents arrest them, many will develop illnesses or disabilities as they are moved through the immigration detention system. The scale and speed of Trump’s crackdown make matters worse.

“The harm is disproportionate to folks who are disabled,” Murchie told Truthout. “This has always been true, but I think because of the extra violence with which the administration is quote-unquote ‘executing the laws,’ it is a disabling event, as well.”

Several high-profile cases of federal agents harming disabled people have already made headlines. Last August, agents handcuffed a 15-year old disabled teen outside a Los Angeles high school. In January, agents dragged Aliya Rahman, a disabled woman with autism and a traumatic brain injury, from her car in Minneapolis, detained her, and denied her emergency medical care. Last month, agents abandoned Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a low-vision Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, alone and in freezing weather outside a closed shop near Buffalo, New York. He was later found dead.


“Anybody who’s not white and is disabled is at such a huge risk of being profiled by ICE and CBP.”

Abuse of sick and disabled people and medical neglect within ICE detention are well-documented issues that predate Trump 2.0, and advocates fear conditions could worsen further under the current administration. One U.S. Senate report released last October uncovered more than 80 instances of medical neglect in immigration jails nationwide. The following month, seven people sued the Trump administration over inhumane conditions at a California ICE jail. The plaintiffs report being denied treatment for a likely case of prostate cancer, having insulin and heart medications withheld, and being denied proper access to hygiene facilities.

Murchie told Truthout that many of her deaf clients are not being provided interpreters. Other clients who communicate using sign language are also having their hands shackled.

But the involvement of disability rights and justice advocates in the fight against Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown runs deeper than concerns for the disabled people swept up in it. “We are upset and concerned and panicked about what this means for our entire community,” Tyson told Truthout. “You don’t have to be disabled for us to care; we’re speaking up for everybody.”

Speaking up looks a little different for each organization, as organizers turn to immigrant rights groups to guide their interventions and respond to the needs of their local communities. DREDF is collaborating with human rights, emergency management, and other organizations to demand that Congress adopt meaningful measures to stop the violence. The organization also spearheaded a March 1 letter urging lawmakers to return funds taken from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to arm the Department of Homeland Security. DREDF has also compiled a suite of resources on how immigrant rights and disability rights are intertwined, in the hopes of helping disabled immigrants, their community members, and the organizations that serve them navigate Trump’s crackdown.

“We have heard from some of the immigrant rights groups we follow how important it is for there to be allied organizations that Congress doesn’t expect to hear from,” Tyson told Truthout. “We are going to use whatever platform we have to call this out [and] demand the funding and the prioritization of care and not violence.”

Access Living, a Chicago-based disability services and support organization, is among the 70 groups that signed DREDF’s March 1 letter. The organization has also been hard at work coordinating “know your rights” trainings in several languages, as well as other educational events and resources focused on protecting disabled migrants. That work helped the city overcome ICE’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” an onslaught launched in September.

“We have been highlighting the fear that our immigrants with disabilities have [when they] go into hospitals and get treatments that they need,” Michelle Garcia, manager of organizing and community development at Access Living, told Truthout. “They fear ICE going into the clinics and taking them away, or not getting the proper care because if they say they’re not documented, that means they won’t receive care because they don’t have insurance.”

Garcia told Truthout that many immigrants with disabilities are also scared of being removed: “If they go back to their countries of origin, they’re more likely to end up in a worse condition than they are now here without any supports.”

To help community members navigate these concerns and organize to protect one another, Access Living has also expanded its Cambiando Vidas (Changing Lives) group. Cambiando Vidas functions as a support group and lobbies for legislative changes to support immigrants in Illinois. It was launched to serve Latinx people with disabilities and now welcomes disabled immigrants from other communities.

Meanwhile, Alvarez told Truthout his organization understands its role as one of building bridges between “all these badass disabled Detroiters” who want to get involved in fighting Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda and local grassroots campaigns that might not have the resources or the know-how to make their efforts more inclusive.

Among its interventions, DDP has advised on making outreach and recruitment materials more accessible, recommended adding questions about access needs to sign-up forms, trained organizations to use plain language, and encouraged masking and other access considerations at events. These efforts have helped a growing number of disabled people get involved in neighborhood ICE watch and other efforts, such as grocery delivery and student pick-up and drop-offs, to support families forced to reduce outings or shelter in place.

“What spurred this whole idea is this desire that we see in our community of a bunch of disabled people ready to plug in, and then this movement that’s not ready to have them plug in because there are so many access barriers,” Alvarez told Truthout. “We’re trying to create something that meets both of those needs.”

Wherever disability rights and justice organizers contribute, they bring a unique perspective to those organizing spaces. Alvarez told Truthout that this includes helping organizers understand how improving access and thinking about disability justice benefits everyone, not only disabled people.

“A lot of the organizers are realizing they’re experiencing an access need at their own job, that they are near burnout, that they’re experiencing fatigue, that they’re having pain flare-ups, that they’re getting sick more often,” Alvarez told Truthout. “Part of our disability wisdom is reminding movements that being unhealthy, tired, and burnt out is exactly where they want us, and our movements only succeed if we treat this as a marathon relay and not a single-man sprint.”

Looking forward, Alvarez said he hopes the movement will continue to learn from and lean on its disabled organizers and their ideas for building a more just and caring future. “At the end of this — because there will be an end to this, and we will win — there’s going to need to be a grand effort of care,” he told Truthout. “Disabled people are saying, ‘This time we’re going to center the most vulnerable instead of centering an individual … we’re going to center a community,’ and that community being our children, our elderly, and our disabled — those that need us the most.”

The MAHA Deception: What RFK Jr., Trump, and Company Are Really Doing to Our Food

People’s understandable distrust and discontent are being manipulated in service of a villainous power grab by some of the very same players that MAHA performs opposition to.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eats a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone during a press conference on the steps of the United States Department of Agriculture on July 14, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Andrea Brower
Mar 23, 2026

Common Dreams

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kid Rock, and Mike Tyson are on the stage of American slopaganda telling us that “for the first time in our nation’s history, the federal government put REAL FOOD at the center of the American diet.” “Something” is finally being done about ultra-processed foods, harmful additives, environmental toxins, and corporate capture of the regulatory system to “Make America Healthy Again.”

I’ve spent much of my life in food justice movements that are fighting to address these very same problems. I’ve taught and written about the toxicity and corporate control of the food system (and was actually featured in a documentary alongside RFK Jr., who strangely had no connection with the grassroots Hawai’i movement that the film was about). Of all the vile corporations and politicians I’ve studied and gone head-to-head with, the forces congealing at the top of MAHA are far and away the most spectacular threat I’ve ever seen to a healthier food system (and just about everything else).


‘One Year of Failure’: The Lancet Warns RFK Jr.’s Assault on Science May ‘Take Generations to Repair’



Alongside shirtless RFK workouts, the MAHA performance opened with purported “wins” around synthetic dyes and whole foods. In reality, RFK did not ban artificial food dyes, but asked large companies to “voluntarily phase them out” (food companies have a long history of doing absolutely nothing “voluntarily”). And in reality, though whole foods are emphasized in new dietary guidelines, federal programs like school meals are having their budgets for whole foods sliced out.

Far more significantly, these exaggerated, largely symbolic gestures are masking a whole slew of far-reaching poisonous actions that are of grave danger to our health, and radically bolster the power of Big Ag, Big Chem, and all Big Capitalists (yes, including Big Pharma). It’s not just that rhetoric and actions don’t match. It’s that people’s understandable distrust and discontent are being manipulated in service of a villainous power grab by some of the very same players that MAHA performs opposition to.

The evil genius of MAHA elites has been the appropriation of elements of progressive movements that have struggled for decades to illuminate corporate control of the food system and forge a healthier and fairer food system for all. We cannot give our wicked Doppelgänger this win.

Part of the MAHA song and dance is to hyper-emphasize individual choice and responsibility for health, often in intensely patronizing, shaming, and classist ways. Telling people they can avoid chemicals and disease all via individual choices has provided a profitable opportunity for MAHA influencers to peddle their products.

But it’s a cruel illusion that consumers can avoid toxins they don’t even know are in their food (much less invisible in the wider environment), eat food that isn’t available, spend dollars they don’t have, and avoid corporate monopolies that are entirely ubiquitous in the food system. Of course individuals have some amount of agency, but the rules of the system are stacked. And it’s the very people that the rules are stacked in favor of who are working hardest to distract us from seeing those rules.

Here are just some of the food system “rules” that the Trump-MAHA-RFK regime is solidifying as they smoke and mirror us with illusions of “choice”:

One of the primary, open goals of this regime is to destroy regulation. 

Extreme deregulation of the past decades is the reason we have massive corporate consolidation in the food system; the reason over half of American farmland is blanketed in ecologically destructive herbicide-GMO monocrops; the reason overproduction of these crops forms the basis of our highly-processed food system; the reason children are being manipulated via advertising to get hooked early on foods that sentence them to a life of chronic disease; the reason food is packed full of unpronounceable toxic additives; the reason a concentrated grocery sector has left sweeping food deserts across the country; the reason hunger rates are so high in spite of there being an abundance of food; and the reason workers all along the food chain are living on poverty wages while they labor in horrifically dangerous conditions. 

The MAHA-Trump-RFK regime is bringing us to a new apex in a deregulated food system. The regime has already reduced oversight of factory farms, increased factory farm slaughter speeds (175 chickens per minute), demolished food safety regulations, removed pesticide use reporting, gutted the agencies and workforce tasked with regulating Big Ag, and all while slanting an already monopolized market further toward Big Ag via subsidies (and forms of government intervention that big business does like).

Farm bill policy and subsidies largely dictate what gets grown in the United States and what ends up on our plates. MAHA rhetoric pushes individual responsibility for “healthy,” “wholesome,” and “fresh” eating, while the Trump-MAHA regime is making those very choices impossible for people by systematically deepening an ultra-processed food system. One of President Donald Trump’s first actions in 2025 was to terminate $1 billion in funding for programs that helped schools and food banks buy fresh, local food from farmers, while increasing subsidies by many billions to the largest 5% of mega corn and soy monocrops. It’s not about the farmers getting rich—these subsidies directly bolster the profits of corporate agribusiness, such as food manufacturers who buy commodity crops far below production cost to make the ultra-processed foods we are instructed not to eat in the new Dietary Guidelines.

These subsidies also go straight to the pockets of factory farms in the form of extraordinarily underpriced herbicide-resistant (GMO) corn and soy animal feed. MAHA influencers champion grass-fed, pasture-raised beef and dairy, but the Trump/MAHA regime has eliminated billions in funding for programs that supported regenerative grazing and fired more than a thousand Natural Resources Conservation Service staff that helped farmers transition to regenerative agriculture. An estimated 99% of animals used for food in the United States are raised on factory farms that are driving antibiotic-resistant infections, zoonotic diseases, foodborne illness, and massive water and air pollution (which together kill hundreds of thousands of people annually).

As the Trump-MAHA regime pours lavish sums of public money into the bloated coffers of private agribusiness, it has made the biggest cuts in history to food assistance for poor people. Already, 20% of children in the United States were experiencing food insecurity amid skyrocketing food prices. Over the next decade 22.3 million families will loose support they rely upon to eat, credit of the Make American Healthy Again regime.
MAHA’s rhetoric around dismantling the corporate stranglehold on government likely carries its greatest mass appeal; it is also the most significant inversion to reality. The regime has radically increased the power of big money over politics, and corporations are spending at historic, record-breaking levels to grab all that they can. Today’s most influential and highest-earning lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, transferred directly from the Trump campaign and is now representing the American Chemistry Council, Bayer-Monsanto, and multiple Big Ag (and Big Pharma) companies.

The policy-change prizes being handed out to the highest corporate bidders in the food system are even more extreme than classic deregulation and corporate welfare subsidies. The draft new Farm Bill would actually shield pesticide companies Monsanto-Bayer, DuPont-Dow, Syngenta, and BASF from liability for deadly health impacts of their products that they have knowingly covered up for decades.

Trump is also gifting special legal impunity to Bayer-Monsanto, makers of glyphosate (Roundup), as it faces over 177,000 lawsuits alleging that glyphosate causes cancer. Under the RFK-endorsed Trump+Monsanto executive order, domestic production of glyphosate will also ramp up, meaning more glyphosate in our food, water, soil, air, and bodies, especially those of farmworkers.

While glyphosate has received the most surprise from MAHA moms, it is far from the only dangerous pesticide being shoved down the public’s wary throats. The regime has green-lit new PFAS pesticides, “forever chemicals” that never break down in the environment and are linked to thyroid tumors, liver damage, and reproductive harm. They have also gone around the courts and reapproved the twice-banned pesticide dicamba, linked to pancreatic and colon cancers. Dicamba (also made primarily by Bayer-Monsanto) can vaporize and move through the air for several days after application and is causing unprecedented damage to small farms and communities surrounding genetically engineered dicamba-resistant soy and cotton monocultures.

Meanwhile, the new Farm Bill is attempting to eradicate state and local laws that currently protect people from pesticides, and preempt new ones from being passed. In sum, the Trump-MAHA regime is approving new forever pesticides, increasing pesticide production, wiping away laws that protect people from pesticides, and then blocking people’s ability to sue over the harms. It’s hard to see this as anything but rule by and for Monsanto-Bayer and friends.

Poisons will also increase at other levels of the food chain. The MAHA regime is rolling back the Toxic Substances Control Act, shifting toward “chemical industry science,” reduced transparency, and severely weakened risk evaluations. They are going to court to defend the continued use of phthalates, extremely toxic “everywhere chemicals” added to things like food packaging that have been found in nearly all tested food and are known to cause reproductive issues, genital abnormalities, neurodevelopmental disorders, respiratory issues, diabetes, and heart disease. Across the board, the regime is gutting the already insufficient laws we had for regulating poisons.

In order to push forward with this poisons-everywhere agenda, the Trump-MAHA regime is disassembling the science that has been revealing the links between chemicals and human health, slashing research funding, and sabotaging knowledge production (and thus the regulation that follows scientific discovery) on everything from microplastics to PFAS to the synergistic effects of pesticides. Federal workers who investigated toxic substances and pollutants have also been fired en masse. Toxic corporate totalitarianism relies on the destruction of truth (including the manipulation and weaponization of science, with haunting parallels to other authoritarian regimes).

One type of “regulation” that a fascist-aspiring oligarchical regime actually relies upon is the type that distracts from the criminals at the top by demonizing and policing the people at the bottom. The people growing our food, who already faced intense exploitation and marginalization, are being especially scapegoated—abducted, detained, deported, separated from their families, “hunted like animals.”

The list could go on. And the full picture on the MAHA regime and health is even more sickening—unprecedented cuts to healthcare; massive increases in air, water, mercury, and PFAS pollution; dismantled gun violence prevention laws (guns are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the US); billions in handouts to big pharma; destroyed public health institutions; hastened apocalyptic climate breakdown… The aims and repercussions of the MAHA deception extend far beyond any particular policy or issue—it is a project that ultimately serves authoritarian oligarchical rule.

There’s a tendency among some progressives and leftists to simply dismiss anything that touches the MAHA matrix as innately conspiratorial, unscientific, and reactionary—at times even inadvertently positioning themselves on the side of Big Ag so as to seem in opposition to MAHA and Trump (an all around win-win for Big Ag). While the power at the top of MAHA is deeply reactionary and using conspiracy to pull ordinary people further right, the evil genius of MAHA elites has been the appropriation of elements of progressive movements that have struggled for decades to illuminate corporate control of the food system and forge a healthier and fairer food system for all. We cannot give our wicked Doppelgänger this win. Instead of abandoning everything RFK Jr. touches, we need to spin it back at them with the missing elements of truth and justice.

Truth: We have a food system designed around maximization of profit at every level, intensified by decades of bipartisan policy that has unleashed corporate power to the severe detriment of health, safety, workers, local economies, the Earth, the 99.9%. The biggest conspiracy is plain before our eyes: a system doing exactly what it is supposed to do, capitalism (which yes, the overlords of do all sorts of perverse things to preserve and extend). Justice demands getting to the roots of that system and challenging the 0.1% who are benefiting from it—many of whom happen to be puppet-mastering MAHA.


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Andrea Brower
Andrea Brower is an activist and scholar from Kaua‘i. She is an assistant professor in the Solidarity & Social Justice Program with Gonzaga University's Department of Sociology. Her research, writing, and teaching on capitalism, colonialism, the environment, food, and agriculture is embedded in social movements for justice, equality, liberation, and ecological regeneration.
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