It’s Not Plagiarism If It Doesn’t Exist. RFKJr’s MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) Is Riddled With Imaginary References

May 31, 2025 06:08 PM EDT, Sat

As more fake citations emerge in the ‘MAHA’ report, White House struggles with a defense

To describe references to nonexistent scientific research as “some formatting issues” is like saying the Titanic confronted “some evening issues.”

May 30, 2025, 8:52 AM EDT By Steve Benen

Almost immediately after Donald Trump and his White House team unveiled ““The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again””1 last week, problems emerged. The Washington Post reported, for example, that some of the report’s suggestions “stretched the limits of science,” and offered “misleading representations” of scientific research.

A week later, a devastating report published by NOTUS advanced the underlying story considerably, highlighting the unambiguous fact that the MAHA document “misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.” Soon after, The New York Times identified “additional faulty references” in the report. From the Times’ article:

The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues. But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.

While there’s been no official explanation for how, exactly, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his team managed to release a much-hyped official document with fake citations, multiple reports noted the likely culprit. As The Washington Post reported, “Some of the citations … appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.”

In a normal administration functioning in a healthy political environment, a fiasco like this would lead to multiple resignations. But in the Trump era, officials play the game by a different set of rules.

For example, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was pressed for some kind of explanation for the MAHA debacle. The president’s chief spokesperson responded by claiming there were “some formatting issues” with the document.

In case this isn’t obvious, “formatting issues” tend to refer to things such as page margins, font size or perhaps misnumbered pages.

To describe references to nonexistent scientific research, in an official federal document related to public health policy, as “some formatting issues” is like saying the Titanic confronted “some evening issues.”

Leavitt nevertheless added that the White House has “complete confidence” in Kennedy. She didn’t elaborate as to why, exactly, Kennedy remains in the president’s good graces, though it appears to have something to do with Trump’s indifference to whether the conspiracy theorist leading the Department of Health and Human Services gets things right or wrong.

Steve Benen Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

  1. @RalphHightower: Kennedy’s suggestion that cod liver oil cures measles has damaged kids’ livers.
    Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cure for measles is making infected kids even sicker
    Since the beginning of the measles outbreak in Texas, Kennedy has downplayed the role of vaccines in preventing measles.
    April 5, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT
    By Dr. Omer Awan, physician and public health expert ↩

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