“I think there’s a huge misconception in the Republican Party of thinking that constituents don’t really care about these issues,” Kelly Ryerson, one of the petition’s organizers, told Grist. “A key part” of the MHA agenda, Ryerson added, “is to remove corporate interests from our regulators.”
“If anything, the situation at the EPA is much worse in this administration than it was during the Biden administration,” he said. “And that’s something that really turns off a lot of voters who came away with this promise.”
However, the alliance’s anger seems to be targeted only at Zeldin (who recently teased his upcoming MAHA agenda). Ryerson has nothing but praise for the other leaders in the administration—Kennedy, Rollins, and the President himself. Last Wednesday, Kennedy and Rollins announced a pilot program that will direct $700 million to support regenerative agriculture, which Ryerson cited as an example of the administration’s commitment to cleaning up the country’s food system.
At all times, the administration’s support for industrial farms, which are major users of toxic pesticides, far exceeds its support for farms that practice more planet-friendly methods. Ryerson freely admits this; He said that factory farming “has come to dominate agriculture, and we all know that’s a really inconvenient fact, but we all know that it has destroyed our soil.” Still, he said, the problem lies with the EPA.
“The MAHA movement,” Ryerson continued, “we would love to see a complete overhaul of our ag system that is spending such ridiculously obscene amounts of money on subsidies for products that aren’t even actually food for us.”
And yet, Trump shows no signs of abandoning his billion-dollar farm bailout playbook — promoting the same pesticide-subsistence system that the MHA is rallying against.
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