If you’re a large company and you’d like some favorable treatment from, say, the Food and Drug Administration, you’re in luck. The MAHA Summit is open for business, baby.And by “open for business” I mean “available for bribes … er, corporate sponsorship.”

The MAHA Summit is ostensibly a private event run by whatever weirdos run MAHA events. But in reality, it’s just another way for corporations to buy access to this administration.

That’s why I can’t technically say that Walmart, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other enormous companies are bribing officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Those behemoths are just footing the bill for the summit, which is totally different, right?

Look, why should President Donald Trump have all the fun and ill-gotten gains? Why can’t other officials fully lean in to opportunities for corruption?

The MAHA Summit has the same vibe as Trump’s crypto dinner grift, where massive purchases of Trump’s worthless crypto got people—specifically those in need of pardons and deregulation—a sit-down with Trump.

Or perhaps it’s the same vibe as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s seven-month family field trip that was also somehow a reality show that was also of course “sponsored” by the very companies that Duffy regulates.

The MAHA Summit is “sponsored” by companies like Walmart, even though it’s essentially ultraprocessed foods central—a thing that MAHA ostensibly detests. Other sponsors include companies pimping psychedelic drugs and peptides, two of the hallmarks of MAHA wellness scumminess.

The summit also has a panel consisting of United Health and AHIP, an insurer trade group—because nothing says “Make America Healthy Again” like cozying up to insurers, right?.

The MAHA Summit folks aren’t even being subtle about this attempt to purchase face time and influence.

Bloomberg News reviewed the full menu of “sponsorship” options, topping at $300,000 for a speaking slot with “meaningful input on the panel composition and topic” and dinner with Kennedy and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz.

Honestly, I’d pay a substantial sum not to have dinner with those two.

Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services is busy pretending that, somehow, the MAHA Summit sponsorship people went rogue and that department officials listed as speakers were “not involved in the planning or sponsorship activities” and were “not aware of the sponsorship arrangements.”

Okay well, that’s easy enough to solve. Just have Kennedy, Oz, and other officials make a public statement repudiating any existing sponsorships, confirming that there’s no grifty dinner and that there will be no corporate sponsors of this shindig—or simply saying that they won’t attend because it’s chock-full of conflicts of interest.

But we all know full well that none of that will happen.

Instead, what we have is a gross symbiosis, like medical device company ResMed Inc. being a prominent sponsor and having its chief medical officer appearing on a panel with the head of the National Institutes of Health.

Sadly, this really isn’t much different than last year’s MAHA Summit, where companies could do “exclusive networking” with FDA and NIH leaders, and the whole thing was an unholy mix of Trump health officials, biotech CEOs, and wellness grifters.

This year’s summit is just making the cash on the barrelhead, pay-to-play part more explicit.

Well, at least they’re no longer making us all pretend that this is government business as usual. The very slimmest of silver linings.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos