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, 7:52 AM CDT
By Steve Benen
Almost immediately after Donald Trump and his White House team
unveiled “The MAHA
Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again” 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.
