The top Democrat on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday in response to the Trump administration's recent "Make America Healthy Again" report and exposés about fake citations, mischaracterizations of studies, and apparent use of artificial intelligence.
Since The MAHA Report: Make Our Children Healthy Again was published last month by U.S. President Donald Trump's Make America Healthy Again Commission, academics, campaigners, journalists, and lawmakers have raised concerns about it.
Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), who took over as acting ranking member of the House committee following the May death of Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), highlighted recent reporting by NOTUS and The Washington Post in his Monday letter to RFK Jr.
"Despite the report's insistence on 'pursuing truth' and 'embracing science,' public reporting has revealed that the report cites scientific studies that do not exist, misrepresents the findings of certain studies, and may have used artificial intelligence (AI) to draw conclusions that are not based on actual scientific research," Lynch's letter states.
"Given your history of promoting medical misinformation and conspiracy theories, I am concerned that the report—which you oversaw as chair of President Trump's Make America Healthy Again Commission—manipulates and falsifies science to advance President Trump's political objectives," he wrote to Kennedy.
NOTUS first revealed that the report cites studies that don't exist last Thursday. The outlet then noted Friday that "at least 18 of the original report's citations have been edited or completely swapped out for new references since NOTUSfirst revealed the errors Thursday morning. While some of the original report's inconsistencies have been changed, a few of the new updated citations continue to misinterpret scientific studies."
Meanwhile, the Post reported Thursday that "some references include 'oaicite' attached to URLs—a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of 'oaicite' is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company."
According to the newspaper:
A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate—as well as the tendency to "hallucinate" studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.
AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA report.
"Frankly, that's shoddy work," he said. "We deserve better."
Lynch also used that term in his letter to Kennedy, which says that "to understand the ways that the Department of Healthand Human Services (HHS) may have used AI to sidestep scientific and academic rigor in drafting the teport, I demand information about the process by which the report was drafted, reviewed, published, and later amended."
"It appears that the administration is already trying to cover up its shoddy work," he wrote. "The same day that these false citations were first reported, the version of the report available online was quickly updated to remove all 'oaicite' demarcations and to fix certain citations. For example, a citation that previously linked to a nonexistent study was replaced with a citation to a similar study by the same lead author—a study which notably has a different title and different co-authors."
"These substantive changes came after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt promised that 'some formatting issues' would be addressed and HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said that 'minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected,'" Lynch pointed out, demanding answers to a list of questions and documents by June 16.
In the letter's final paragraph, the congressman reminded Kennedy that "the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the principal oversight committee of the House of Representatives and has broad authority to investigate 'any matter' at 'any time' under House Rule X."