David Mansdoerfer

This HHS interim policy on six peptides is a meaningful step for patients. It gives people a path through licensed pharmacies and physicians — with proper sourcing, testing, prescriptions, and adverse-event reporting — instead of forcing demand into the unregulated gray market while formal rulemaking / regulatory action continues. Government always lags innovations when it comes to regulatory action. This allows for the science to move ahead - and patients to get the benefits - while the government catches up. Big MAHA win.

Brilliant. Should be a fun event.

I think this is way overblown. I'm deeply involved in MAHA policy spheres and I was a Trump 45 appointee at HHS which dealt with many of the policies at question. So, let's look at this logically. 1. MAHA, in Trump 47, has been a generational force inside this Administration - with major policy wins ranging from dietary guidelines to the childhood vaccine schedule to the pro-life issue. 2. Yes, there are significant policy differences between the traditional GOP health platform and MAHA - and some of those haven't come to a conclusion. But, without MAHA and @SecKennedy at the helm at HHS, many of them wouldn't have been put at the top of the agenda to even discuss - let alone act on. 3. Policy making takes time - especially when you have different competing factions that have entrenched for decades. People forget, there are only a couple hundred political appointees at an agency of 70,000+ - there just isn't the manpower to do everything at the same time. 4. We all know that healthcare, health insurance, public health and the health economics of the United States is broken. There are decades of culture and perverse incentives that are driving this. But, @POTUS and @SecKennedy have taken on some of the toughest and most complex topics are been extremely successful! Drug pricing / MFN, Fraud, Dietary Guidelines, Price Transparency, and I can go on and on. Can anyone name a single public health or healthcare issue from the Biden Administration that made an impact - other than talking points about abortion or guns? The only thing I can think of is burn pits and shepherding the ACA enrollment. 5. Yes, I personally wasn't thrilled with how @calleymeans left last week. Part of me was disappointed to lose such a good operator in HHS, and part of me was sad about how this was going to be portrayed - as a deep divide between MAHA and MAGA. But, Calley was a good operator, though all accounts he was a force of nature for good within HHS and the Admin. Working inside of an Administration is one of the toughest jobs on the planet - and as any senior political appointee can attest - there are many times when you think you've gotten something to the finish line, only to be forced to go through another round of clearances that take weeks / months. It's the name of the game in complex bureaucracies. 6. No matter what happens in this election, there is a natural synergy between MAHA and MAGA that will not exist with the Democrat policy platform - especially in health where Democrats view everything through the lens of health equity and DE&I. For MAHA, the grass certainly ain't greener on the other side of the fence. Conclusion: I get how a fractured MAHA / MAGA is a great line of thinking / topic in the coming days before an election. But, in the MAHA sphere's I'm working in - there is a lot of optimism - no matter what the outcome of this election is. I firmly believe the last two years of Trump 47, under the guidance of @SecKennedy, will bring so many MAHA win's that Republican's will be able to talk about health and public health policy as an area of strength during the next Presidential election season.

“Changing the culture of health isn't a two-year ordeal — and it would be surprising to me if [Kennedy] departed with so many opportunities within his MAHA agenda still on the table and not fully baked," said former Trump HHS official David Mansdoerfer, who was just with Kennedy on Tuesday. axios.com/2026/10/26/rfk-mid…