Calley Means, a leader of the Make America Healthy Again movement, resigned from the Trump administration on Thursday, signaling a further erosion of a coalition that helped propel President Trump to power a second time.
Mr. Means, a top adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, was a key official behind policies around food quality, including an effort to increase disclosure of the chemicals in food, remove artificial food dyes and ban soda from the federal food assistance program known as SNAP.
He also worked on an executive order to support the development of psychedelic medications, which got a boost from the podcast host Joe Rogan.
“I leave with tremendous respect for President Trump and R.F.K. Jr. — two historic figures who are committed to confronting a corrupt D.C. bureaucracy that is doing everything possible to protect the status quo,” Mr. Means said in a statement.
In recent months, though, he began to feel stymied in his attempts to deliver on promises to improve the food supply, such as by defining ultraprocessed foods, an initial step to regulating them, according to a person close to him.
Vani Hari, a MAHA leader and healthy eating influencer, said that a turning point for Mr. Means came when the White House roiled the MAHA movement with an executive order supporting the increased production of glyphosate, a pesticide that the movement is particularly focused on eliminating.
“It became very clear in the last few months that no progress was getting made,” she said. “And when you’re spinning around in circles, you can only take so much.”
Mr. Means’s profile rose before he joined the administration, during a podcast tour on which he decried the manipulative tactics of lobbyists from his experience with the beverage industry. He continued to view lobbyists as a corrupting force in Washington, said Ms. Hari.
“Calley was the architect of MAHA,” Ms. Hari said. “He was one of the most successful food policy advocates in history, in my opinion, at this point. And it’s a sad day for the U.S. government to lose him.”
Mr. Means, who was a campaign adviser to Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Trump, played a key role in brokering their agreement to join forces in the final months of the 2024 campaign.
After Mr. Trump was shot in the ear during a rally in Butler, Pa., in July 2024, Mr. Kennedy spoke about wanting to offer support, given his family’s history of tragic political violence. Mr. Means encouraged Mr. Kennedy to call the president, starting what would become a running dialogue.
Their alliance has been credited with helping Mr. Trump win the White House again, given the support of voters who embraced a message of pushback on corporations to protect children from a toxic food supply.
The administration quickly secured agreements from food companies that pledged to remove artificial dyes and seed oils from their products. Mr. Means also played a key role in MAHA reports outlining goals to reduce chronic disease in children. He worked on other initiatives to require nutrition education in medical school, and on a revised food pyramid.
Mr. Means has shown little interest in Mr. Kennedy’s work on vaccines, finding it to be a polarizing topic. He has preferred to see Mr. Kennedy focus more on the healthy eating part of his agenda.
Before his work on the presidential campaigns, Mr. Means cowrote a book with Casey Means, his sister. They argued that people could avoid chronic disease through careful attention to diet, exercise and some less conventional efforts, such as monitoring glucose levels.
Mr. Trump last year nominated Ms. Means to be the surgeon general, but withdrew her from consideration when it became clear that she did not have enough Senate votes for confirmation.
Mr. Means also ran Truemed, the company he co-founded, for most of his first year at the Department of Health and Human Services, advising on an array of health topics while holding a significant stake in a company. The company offered a marketplace of items people could buy with health savings account funds, which were opened to additional people under a policy that Mr. Trump enacted in 2025.
In the administration, Mr. Means could be outspoken and direct, and was a pugnacious profile on social media, castigating critics. In recent days, his frustration became apparent in his posts on one of his signature issues — the health effects of ultraprocessed food consumption, which he said was “highly tied to our chronic disease crisis that is killing Americans and bankrupting our country.”
Still, he wrote in his resignation statement that “the past two years have seen historic policy and cultural change to confront the chronic disease crisis and health care incentives that profit from us being sick. This movement is in the first inning and just getting started.”
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