White House scrambles to correct error strewn MAHA report
BMJ 2025; 389 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r1150 (Published 04 June 2025) Cite this as: BMJ 2025;389:r1150
The US government has hastened to correct multiple citations in its first Make Our Children Healthy Again assessment,1 which pointed to non-existent studies or dead internet links. New errors have crept in during the correction process, and several authors whose studies are named accurately in the report argue that their research does not support its conclusions.
Within hours of a 29 May report by the US news outlet NOTUS listing seven papers cited in the report that did not exist, the White House began replacing those citations with other studies.2 Initially it tracked and noted those changes in the report, following normal practice in scientific publishing. But as other errors have emerged—the New York Times found two more non-existent papers, and the Washington Post identified 21 dead links—the administration has stopped recording its changes while continuing to make them.
Officials have also scrubbed the tag “oaicite” that appeared in many citation links in the original report—a definitive indication that the research was gathered using the Open AI chatbot. AI chatbots have a known tendency to “hallucinate” imaginary studies, and students are frequently penalised for relying on them in academic settings.3
“This is not an evidence based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point,” said Georges Benjamin, director of the American Public Health Association. He told the Washington Post, “It cannot be used for any policy making. It cannot even be used for any serious discussion, because you can’t believe what’s in it.”
The White House’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt blamed the errors on “formatting issues,” the same reason used in a statement by the US health department. Another spokesperson, Andrew Nixon, said, “Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA [make America healthy again] report remains the same—a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.” Under President Trump and Secretary Kennedy [Robert F Kennedy Jr], our federal government is no longer ignoring this crisis, and it’s time for the media to also focus on what matters.”
Misleading language
But Kennedy’s predecessor as US health secretary, Xavier Becerra, who served under the Biden administration, told Mother Jones magazine that the report’s errors showed an absence of human review or fact checking. “This ‘formatting’ BS doesn’t sell,” said Becerra. “You’re supposed to do that checking before you publish, at least if you’re a rigorous publisher.”
At least 18 citations have been edited or replaced since the first critiques of the report emerged. But while the new links mostly lead to real articles, those articles do not necessarily support the claims of the report. One study, cited to support the claim that psychotherapy alone was superior to psychiatric medication in treating children, was pulled after the authors pointed out to NOTUS that their research had not assessed psychotherapy at all but had only compared medicines.
That citation was replaced with a “systematic overview” published in the Journal of Affective Disorders that did measure therapy against medication. But it did so in adults, lead author Pim Cuijpers told NOTUS, despite being cited to support the argument that “American children are highly medicated—and it’s not working.”
The MAHA report also fundamentally misrepresented the study’s findings, said Cuijpers, since the research found that the most effective treatment was psychotherapy and medication combined. As of 4 June 2025, the link to his study in the latest version of the MAHA report leads to a “DOI not found” page.
Cuijpers also pointed to misleading language in the report, which noted that “antidepressant prescription rates in teens increased by 14-fold between 1987 and 2014.” Cuijpers explained, “It is strange to say that. Modern antidepressants were developed in the late 1980s. So, it can also be said that these drugs were simply used for the adolescents who could benefit from them.”
The US government has declined to name the report’s actual authors. The 14 member MAHA Commission that published the report includes only two doctors.
Despite the flurry of amendments the report still contains basic errors. Describing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, whose fifth edition (DSM-5) categorises and defines mental illnesses, the report alleges that “the majority of the panelists who composed the DSM-5 were found to have conflicts of interest and their recommendations loosened criteria for ADHD and bipolar disorder, driving a 40-fold increase in diagnoses in children 1994-2003.” As of 4 June, the citation for that alleged increase is a dead link to an apparent news article. The fifth edition of DSM was not published until 2013.