Trump Jr.’s searching habits have lengthy provoked outrage. He was as soon as photographed in Africa holding a useless elephant’s tail that he had apparently severed with a knife. More lately, Italian authorities opened an investigation after it was reported that he’d killed a protected species of duck often called the ruddy shelduck.
What expertise Trump Jr.’s searching buddy Diamantas will convey to the FDA’s Human Foods Program, the place he’ll handle its $1 billion finances, stays to be seen. An FDA spokesperson referred Vanity Fair to an company hyperlink that stated Diamantas “has extensive experience working with various federal and state agencies and policy makers, scientific organizations, consumer advocacy groups, and industry stakeholders.”
Reached for remark, a spokesman for Trump Jr., Arthur Schwartz, emailed Vanity Fair that, given the presidential son’s main position in staffing up the Trump-Vance administration, “Are you really asking whether a member of the transition team played a role in the transition? You people are a bunch of retards.” Regarding the protected duck in Italy, a spokesman beforehand informed The Washington Post that Trump Jr. follows all searching guidelines and laws “and plans on fully cooperating with any investigation.”
The nation’s controversial new well being secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has decried what he describes because the mass poisoning of Americans by the “Big Food” foyer. In taking the helm as overseer of the nation’s well being businesses, he has set his sights on reworking what and the way Americans eat. His said agenda contains limiting chemical components in meals, ridding college lunches of processed meals, and purging security internet meals packages of sugary drinks.
He has additionally pledged to rid the FDA of what he claims are compromised regulators, extra beholden to business pursuits than to their said missions. (Diamantas’s previous expertise representing food-and-beverage business shoppers seems to be simply the kind of battle Kennedy Jr. has critiqued.)
An apparent ally in that effort would have been the FDA’s Human Foods Program, which, by its personal description, “oversees all FDA activities related to food safety and nutrition.” Most lately, below the Biden administration, the division oversaw the banning of meals dye Red No. 3, a transfer proper consistent with Kennedy Jr.’s said “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) priorities.
But late final week, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency purged the division of an estimated 89 workers members, resulting in the resignation of James Jones, the deputy commissioner for human meals. An skilled regulator, Jones had spent nearly 20 years with the Environmental Protection Agency earlier than becoming a member of the FDA in 2023 to guide the newly reorganized meals division.
In his resignation letter, Jones referred to as the “indiscriminate” mass terminations “one more roadblock to achieving the Secretary’s stated objectives of making America healthy again.” He added, “The foods program staff at FDA is the envy of the world in its technical, professional and ethical standards. The Secretary’s comments impugning the integrity of the food staff, asserting they are corrupt based on falsities, is a disservice to everyone.”
Among the staff dismissed have been these with “highly technical expertise in nutrition, infant formula, food safety response and even 10 chemical safety staff hired to review potentially unsafe ingredients in our food supply,” in line with Jones’s letter.
“I can’t believe that American consumers are going to support losing staff that protects the safety of the food that every one of us eats every day,” says Susan Mayne, who served because the FDA’s director of meals security and utilized vitamin from 2015 to 2023. Particularly “horrifying,” she says, are cuts to the infant-formula staff, which she efficiently lobbied Congress to develop from 9 to 13 folks. With cuts to such a small workers, she says, “the whole program could dissolve and we would be in the biggest infant-formula crisis you could ever imagine.”
As if a reminder was wanted of the job’s life-and-death stakes, the FDA on Friday introduced a recall of listeria-tainted frozen dietary shakes that had been offered to nursing houses, amongst different establishments, and had been linked to 11 deaths and 37 hospitalizations.
Additional reporting by Liz Rosenberg.