Certain studies within the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report do not exist as cited, ABC News has confirmed.
Dr. Katherine Keyes, a researcher cited in the report as a first author of a paper on rates of depression and anxiety among teens during the pandemic, confirmed to ABC News that she did not write a paper cited in the report that the White House’s Make America Healthy Again Commission headed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled last week.
“I was surprised to see what seems to be an error in the citation of my work in the report, and it does make me concerned given that citation practices are an important part of conducting and reporting rigorous science,” Keyes wrote to ABC News in an email.
Keyes is cited in a paper titled “Changes in mental health and substance use among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic,” which appears on page 52 of the MAHA report and lists JAMA Pediatrics as the journal. A representative for the journal confirmed to ABC News the paper does not exist.
Keyes noted she has done research on the topic cited in the MAHA report, but that she and her listed co-authors did not write the paper cited. “I would be happy to send this information to the MAHA committee to correct the report, although I have not yet received information on where to reach them,” she noted.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., speaks as Secretary of Education Linda McMahon listens during a Make America Healthy Again Commission event at the White House in Washington, May 22, 2025.
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
At least two research journals, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the JAMA Network, have also confirmed to ABC News that they were not able to find certain papers within the MAHA report in their publications despite being cited as such.
The news first appeared in NOTUS.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday that the mistakes were due to “formatting issues,” and that they were being corrected and “the report will be updated.”
She said the citation issues did not “negate the substance of the report.”
Leavitt added the administration had “complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS.”
President Donald Trump, Health speaks with Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a Make America Healthy Again Commission event, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, May 22, 2025.
Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Calley Means, a senior adviser to Kennedy who was instrumental in coordinating the report, defended it, saying the “underlying data and conclusions are correct” and that “any formatting errors have been corrected.”
An updated version did remove mention of at least some reports that did not exist, replacing them with other sources. The new version also appeared to soften some language to accommodate the citation changes.
For instance, a section about direct-to-consumer advertisements initially claimed the ads “led parents to overestimate ADHD prevalence and to request ADHD drugs inappropriately.” The updated version claims that the ads “potentially” have that impact.
“Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA 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, our federal government is no longer ignoring this crisis, and it’s time for the media to also focus on what matters,” HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement.
All this comes as Kennedy has said he plans to direct federal researchers to stop publishing their work in independent, peer-reviewed journals and instead called on the National Institutes of Health to develop its own research journals.
“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” Kenned said on the “Ultimate Human” podcast earlier this week.
The MAHA report, led by Kennedy, has more than 500 citations listed, mostly from studies published in peer-reviewed, independent journals. Studies from JAMA, a top-tier journal published by the American Medical Association, were cited 30 times in the report.
It is standard practice in peer-reviewed research for authors to use citations when referencing science from another source. It also provides a roadmap to the research process and is often used to justify or back up the necessity of research.
Studies in peer-reviewed journals typically use a DOI, or Digital Object Identifier, to uniquely identify a paper that provides it with a permanent web address.
Some of the papers listed in the MAHA report, including the non-existent study with Dr. Keyes listed, result in a DOI not found error.
