Since President Donald Trump tapped Casey Means to serve as U.S. surgeon general, the public health establishment has been holding its breath for a showdown over vaccines. But as she made clear in her recent appearance before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the real battleground for Means isn’t the pharmacy—it’s the farm.
In a testimony defined by the rhetoric of the Make America Healthy Again movement, Means distanced herself from the federal vaccine agenda driven by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and emphasized that her passion lies instead with food and environmental exposures. Her vision for improving health outcomes through food and farming policy is just as incoherent and unsupported by science as RFK’s promotion of vaccine skepticism.
One of Means’ self-proclaimed top goals is addressing how "cumulative environmental exposures” are making Americans sick. She said she is "gravely concerned" about the health impacts of the chemicals used in U.S. farming and cast doubt on the science backing regulatory decisions, implying she doesn’t trust the EPA’s assessments of pesticides.
Essentially, Means is bringing the vaccine skeptic’s playbook to food: promoting distrust in regulators, voicing fear of synthetics, and advocating for “natural” alternatives, all without evidence letting these concerns drive choices will improve the health of Americans.
By stating that glyphosate—one of the most extensively studied compounds in agricultural history—has been ignored or under-evaluated, Means is needlessly sowing public fear about the safety of the American food supply. Her claims ignore decades of scientific review from the U.S. and European regulatory agencies affirming that glyphosate-based products pose no significant health risks and are far less toxic to most wildlife than the herbicides they replace. By dismissing these findings, she replaces rigorous, peer-reviewed data with a "gut-feeling" approach to public health that prioritizes ideology over empirical safety records.
Her proposed solutions are equally detached from economic reality. Means claimed that by leveraging the Dietary Guidelines for Americans to shift federal procurement toward "local, organic, whole foods" for schools, the military, and prisons, the government can create a "healthier food system" that is also "more affordable."
Any farmer or economist could tell her this math doesn't work. Organic and local operations come with significantly higher price tags and lower yields. Nor does research suggest organic produce is healthier. Suggesting that a massive, federally funded shift to organic farming will lower costs and improve health outcomes is divorced from reality. Research suggests that forcing a shift to organic food would actually reduce overall consumption of fruits and vegetables by making them too expensive for the average household.
The consequences of the ideology Means champions are not hypothetical. In 2021, Sri Lanka instituted a nationwide ban on synthetic agricultural inputs in an attempt to go organic. Within months, agricultural yields plummeted and food prices skyrocketed, worsening a broader humanitarian and economic crisis. By advocating for a wholesale rejection of modern inputs, what Means calls “the SINGLE most effective strategy” to solve major health issues, she is flirting with a policy path that historically leads to scarcity, not wellness.
This should be unsurprising. Her rebuke of today’s modern farming system fits a broader, reflexive pattern apparent in Means’ past messaging where she conveys a visceral fear of everyday chemicals and urges followers to avoid products they have long relied on, from birth-control pills to vegetable oils and even tap water.
The surgeon general is meant to be the nation’s doctor, a steward of science-based evidence, not a purveyor of institutional distrust. Means has proven herself to be unbeholden to science and therefore, an unreliable partner not only to the American farmer but also to the American consumer.
Emily Bass is the director of federal policy for food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute.