MAHA health activists urge Trump to swap coal for renewables at AI data centers

Nearly 200 health activists from the Make America Healthy Again movement delivered a Friday letter to President Donald Trump, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and other Cabinet officials, first obtained by The Associated Press, asking the administration to drop its push to power AI data centers with coal and consider solar and geothermal instead.

The letter, titled "President Trump, Please Put America's Health First In The AI Boom", is, per AP, the first major MAHA mobilization specifically over fossil fuels. It targets a 2025 Trump executive order that ties federal permitting and financing for AI data center buildouts to coal and nuclear generation.

The 2025 order frames AI infrastructure as a national security and competitiveness priority. Utilities facing fast-growing AI load have begun leaning on existing coal plants to bridge the gap, and the order makes that pattern explicit federal policy. The letter's counter is that the same load can be served by solar arrays built next to the campuses and by geothermal capacity already in development in the West, and that the pollution costs of coal-fired generation should be counted up front rather than absorbed by neighboring communities.

Two former Kennedy 2024 campaign staffers signed the letter: Zen Honeycutt and Charles Eisenstein. Honeycutt told AP she asked MAHA Action, the Kennedy-aligned political action committee, to add its name. She said she never received a reply. The letter was mailed to Trump, Kennedy, and other Cabinet officials, but as of publication none of the agencies had responded to AP's request for comment.

The White House pushed back. Spokesperson Taylor Rogers pointed to a 30-year low in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions during Trump's first term and framed current policy as rolling back "radical climate policies." That claim sits against the Environmental Protection Agency's own baseline, which still puts electricity generation as the largest single source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, with coal historically the most carbon-intensive fuel on the grid.

Kennedy has separately advanced MAHA-aligned priorities, including scaling back childhood vaccine recommendations and pushing to remove artificial dyes from food, moves that have placed him at the center of an EPA confrontation over pesticide policy. The coal letter opens a different fault line: energy and AI infrastructure rather than food and chemicals.

The letter is the first time a named group of MAHA-aligned signers, including former Kennedy campaign staff, has put the conflict on paper against a specific executive order. The underlying tension is between a health-first policy that counts pollution costs up front and an energy agenda that treats those costs as the price of AI competitiveness.

The letter's asks are narrow: reconsider the executive order, redirect data center energy planning toward solar and geothermal, and incorporate health-cost accounting into AI infrastructure siting decisions. It does not call for repealing the order outright or halting data center construction, which suggests the signers are writing as MAHA stakeholders rather than as Trump opponents.

The letter lands less than three months before the November 2026 midterm elections, a window in which MAHA-aligned voters were a measurable share of the 2024 Trump coalition in swing-state precincts and have shown up in Republican primary challenges to incumbents they consider insufficiently populist on health or anti-establishment issues. A letter that puts two former Kennedy 2024 staffers on the record against a sitting Trump policy, even one written as a request, gives that faction a public document to point to. The White House's response was a clean reversion to the climate-policy line, suggesting the administration read the letter as outside pressure rather than a coalition correction.

The first signal will be whether any of the agencies that received the letter respond before Election Day.