On the Bookshelf: Drew Miller Echoes MAHA Call for Fewer Government Regulations

By Mike Richman, Special to The MAHA Report

A key tenet of the Make America Healthy Again mission is to reduce the number of government regulations targeting outdated, unnecessary, and burdensome rules in the food, agriculture, and health care industries.

Author Drew Miller, a former U.S. intelligence officer and a retired Air Force colonel, is adamant that the United States is an incredibly overregulated society. In his new book, Preparing to Survive in the Age of Collapse: Political, Military, Foreign Policy, and Preparedness Reforms Vital for Our Survival (Skyhorse, 2026), he details 30 examples of how bad government policies, most of which he believes are unconstitutional because they violate the ninth or tenth amendments, are killing Americans and setting them up for “massive casualties” should society suffer a catastrophic collapse.The Ninth Amendment means the rights of people are protected, even if these rights are not spelled out. Those not listed, such as the right to privacy and the right to one’s body, are honored but are open to interpretation. The Tenth Amendment says the federal government can only do things it is authorized to do in the Constitution. Miller argues that “Obamacare,” the comprehensive health care reform law enacted in 2010 to make health insurance available to more people, is unconstitutional, as are health care regulations because they are not allowed at the federal level, unless they’re linked to public safety or national security.

Some of Miller’s 30 examples are relevant to MAHA. One singles out regulations on food and drugs that he believes violate the U.S. Constitution and natural rights, misleading people into using unhealthy drugs and foods that benefit special interests and big companies at the expense of Americans’ health and lifespan.

“Because Americans have been so buried in government regulations, subservient to government direction and control, individual and family responsibility for decision making on food, drugs, and personal health has been undermined,” Miller writes. “With big government regulating everything, replacing individual liberty and decision-making, citizens assume that the rules and government directions will keep them safe; no need for their own judgment or responsibility. You assume that the highly regulated food that gets through the regulatory morass must be good for you, and the highly regulated, tested, approved drugs must be safe.”

In an interview, Miller, a libertarian, adds: “Those regulations are unconstitutional and violate our natural rights. “[Conservative American columnist] George Will described our natural rights as the right to be left alone. That’s what we fought an American revolution for—the right to make our own decisions, not having government dictate to us. This is the United States of America. We are the most incarcerated people in the world on a per capita basis. That’s because there are so many damn regulations and rules and laws and lawyers in this horrible system.”

In a court battle he’s now immersed in in West Virginia, Miller is arguing a county ambulance authority is levying an unfair property tax on him for not paying an ambulance fee, whether one uses the service or not.

“It’s a gross violation of my Ninth Amendment rights to privacy, my rights to use my own property as I want, and my right to make my own health care decisions,” he says. “But that’s gone in the U.S. today. That’s where we have such a strong interest in what MAHA is trying to do by saying, `stop legislating vaccines and health care decisions and what we eat and drink.’”

In Preparing to Survive in the Age of Collapse, Miller writes that the U.S. has already entered “The Age of Collapse,” an era where mankind will suffer severe disasters that kill billions of people, in part, because of irresponsible government. In his opinion, a collapse could be triggered by H5N1, a highly pathogenic flu virus that mainly affects wild birds and poultry; a weapon of mass destruction (WMD); and/or an attack on the country’s electrical grid. Such an event, he says, would set off an economic disaster during which people would not go to work and widespread loss of law and order would take hold because grocery stores have no food and people would starve to death.

Currently, Miller runs eight survival shelters in the U.S. as CEO of his company, Disaster Preparedness LLC. The shelters, located in rural areas, are safe places people can go to survive a collapse. “Everyone becomes a working member during a collapse,” he says. “The staff’s in charge, and residents will be assigned guard duty, kitchen duty, and wood collection and wood stove duties.”

In Preparing to Survive in the Age of Collapse, Miller urges people who survive a disaster to move away from big cities and live in sparsely populated rural areas where they can grow their own food or buy the surplus of nearby farms and ranches. When the collapse happens, he says, big cities will become de-populated. “Sustainable agriculture with natural fertilizers and crop rotations, environmentally friendly land management, not imported nitrogen and fertilizers and pesticides, is more labor intensive but sustainable and survivable in the next collapse,” he writes. “Sustainable farming, and much less long-distance food shipments, are far more feasible when humans turn back to largely rural populations, not urban.”

For its part, the MAHA movement proposes easing regulations for small farms, such as simplifying organic certification, which ensures that farmers are following federal rules to produce products without synthetic fertilizers and prohibited pesticides, and allowing more flexibility for mobile meat processing units. The strategy also includes plans to remove “outdated and unnecessary” food standards that are seen as stifling innovation.

Miller has had his country’s welfare in mind since age 13 when he joined the Civil Air Patrol. He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy and earned a master’s degree and doctorate in public policy/operations research from Harvard University. After serving as an active duty intelligence officer in the Air Force, then the Air National Guard, he worked as a plans and programs officer in the Air Force Reserve, before retiring as a colonel in 2010 after 30 years in the military. He then served in the Senior Executive Service at the Pentagon; at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a think tank that focuses on critical national security and defense policy issues; in business management positions; and as an elected county commissioner and university regent in Nebraska.

While working in government for decades, Miller reached the conclusion that government entities are “absolutely unconstitutional and out of control.” The “perverted triangle” of government bureaucrats, career politicians, and lawyers has destroyed good American government and liberty, he argues.

Speaking of career politicians, “You’re always running for reelection, you’re always trying to buy votes,” he says. “You don’t buy votes by hardening the electric grid. If you harden the electric grid, which is the right thing to do so 90% of us won’t die when the grid goes down, you’re going to raise utility rates and lose elections. That’s what they’re afraid of. All they prioritize is reelection, so they’re always pandering, buying votes, offering illegal programs, regulating things that shouldn’t be regulated because it pleases some group, gets some campaign donations and votes, and in some cases costs lives.”

This is not Miller’s first venture into the publishing world. His first book, Rohan Nation: Reinventing America after the 2020 Collapse, is a novel that envisions how survivors of biological and electro-magnetic pulse warfare fight to defend and reinvent America. In one of his upcoming books, Profiles in Responsibility, he writes short biographies of Americans such as steel tycoon, industrialist, and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie; farmer, writer, military officer, and politician Ethan Allen; and Charles Murray, a political scientist, libertarian, and the author of many books on intelligence, socioeconomics, and the American welfare state. Currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent conservative think tank, he is quoted often in Preparing to Survive in the Age of Collapse.

“By and large, they’re people who did the right thing, acted responsibly, built great businesses, did great military service, did great family things,” Miller says. “I like them because they are what I consider true Americans: responsible, hard-working, great people that we should emulate. They did not advocate for government regulation or violating the number one key tenet of American government—maximum personal liberty, minimum authorized government activity. A lot of my own inspiration comes from this book.”