Money Talks.

The MAHA Moms are angry! These women are soldiers in the “Make America Healthy Again” crusade led by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They voted for Donald Trump in 2024 after Kennedy decided to support him. Among other things they are concerned about toxins in the environment and pesticides in our food. They’re mad because last Wednesday much to their surprise Trump issued an executive order to increase production of glyphosate—a widely used weedkiller and possible carcinogen used in “Roundup” that has been the target of hundreds of lawsuits, including one brought a few years ago by Kennedy.

According to The New York Times, one conservative podcaster who works with the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA exclaimed that “Women feel like they were lied to, that the MAHA movement is a sham…How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms? How can we win their trust back? I am unsure if we can.” But why were the MAHA Moms upset and surprised by Trump’s executive order?

The answer is money. Roundup’s maker, Monsanto, is now owned by Bayer AG. OpenSecrets.org reports that in 2025 Bayer AG spent $8.5 million on lobbying and employed 53 lobbyists. As far as I can tell, the MAHA movement didn’t spend a dime on lobbying.

Things were a little different when it came to elections, during the 2024 election cycle the MAHA movement’s political action committee, MAHA Values, spent $27,511. But its Super PAC, MAHA Alliance, spent $4,390,000. Meanwhile, the Bayer Corp. PAC spent $568,908.

In total, Bayer spent $9,038,908 trying to influence politics and policymaking while the MAHA movement spent $4,417,511. Bayer outspent the MAHA movement more than two-to-one! With that much of a financial advantage, it shouldn’t be surprising that one of the MAHA Mom’s pet projects—minimizing the use of glyphosate in agriculture—suffered a crushing defeat.

So, the MAHA Moms were likely outgunned financially. Had they fully appreciated the financial power they were up against, they wouldn’t have been surprised by the outcome of the glyphosate fight.

However, this is only one small example of a much bigger story about American politics and what influences policymaking. It’s a story with two parts.

The first part concerns lobbying. Figure 1 presents OpenSecrets data for money spent on lobbying since 2000 and the number of registered lobbyists hired with it. Although the number of lobbyists has fluctuated, overall, it’s been fairly constant. However, the amount of money being spent to hire them and finance their activities has skyrocketed from $1.6 billion to $5.1 billion—over a three-fold increase. And in that world agribusiness, which had a big stake in the glyphosate fight, is a significant player spending almost $220 million on lobbying just in 2025.

The second part of the story is about money in American elections. Figure 2, also based on OpenSecrets data, shows the dramatic increase in spending for federal election cycles since 2000. The red bars represent presidential election cycles, and the orange bars represent non-presidential election cycles. Spending for presidential cycles tripled from $5.6 billion to $14.8 billion. Spending for non-presidential cycles also tripled from $3.8 billion to $9.5 billion. What this means is that the cost of running for federal office has shot up. As a result, candidates are increasingly beholden to donors, political action committees, and especially Super PACs that often receive money from wealthy individuals, corporations, trade associations, and labor unions.

To put this into perspective, rough estimates from Reuters of recent elections in other large countries show that the United States spends far more on national elections than do other countries. For instance, India, with more than three times the population of the United States, spends about $8 billion—only about half as much as the United States spent on the most recent presidential election cycle. Brazil ($2.4 billion), the United Kingdom ($68 million), and France ($88 million) spend much less than the United States too. I don’t have cross-national data for lobbying but suspect that the story is much the same.

HHS Secretary RFK Jr. may have been in the MAHA Mom’s corner during the glyphosate struggle. But his voice was drowned out by big money. That's no surprise. In American politics money often talks louder than anything else—especially on Trump’s watch.

Thanks for reading this. Feel free to share it with others.