The news organization NOTUS took a deep dive into last week’s “Make America Healthy Again Commission report and found it contains numerous errors, citing some sources that don’t exist and others that have broken links and misstated conclusions.
The Make America Healthy Again Commission (MAHA) report outlined the factors that have led American children to become the “sickest generation” in the country’s history. The commission, led by Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., next plans to produce a strategy to address these factors based on the report’s findings.
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In last week’s announcement, Kennedy said he was grateful to President Donald Trump for trusting him to restore scientific integrity and reclaim the health of American children.
But NOTUS, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news site, found seven citations to the 500 studies mentioned in the report that don’t exist, as well as misinterpretations of actual studies. In addition, many citations had broken links, incorrect authors listed, and wrong issue numbers.
The White House dismissed the citation inconsistencies as formatting issues and said that the substance of the report remains the same. Later, the administration updated the MAHA Commission report to remove the references to reports that don’t exist.
Dr. Ivan Oransky, a journalism professor at New York University who runs Retraction Watch, a website that tracks fraud and errors in medical publishing, told CNN that the discrepancies indicated they might have been generated by artificial intelligence. The Trump administration did not respond to CNN’s question about the possible use of AI in the report, but Oransky said it’s clear nobody reviewed the report for errors before it was released.
AI experts told the Washington Post they agreed it is likely AI was used in the development of the report. Thirty-seven of the footnotes to scientific research appeared multiple times in the original report, and some references included “oaicite” attached to URLs — a marker that indicates the use of OpenAI, according to the Post. The White House updated the report on Thursday to remove mentions of “paicite.”
The questionable citations in the report come a week after the White House announced Trump’s executive order to restore gold standard science. The order states that “scientific integrity in the production and use of science by the Federal Government is critical to maintaining the trust of the American people and ensuring confidence in government decisions informed by science.”