Happy Friday, and welcome to Food Fix. This is the 230th edition of this newsletter! For anyone new around here: My name is Helena Bottemiller Evich, and I’ve been reporting on food policy in Washington for the past 15 years. (For more: My bio and why I launched Food Fix.)
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Alright, let’s get to it –
Helena
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FDA’s incoming deputy commissioner for foods is all in on MAHA. Is more regulation on the horizon?
The Trump administration is expected to name attorney Kyle Diamantas as deputy commissioner for human foods at FDA, an agency with jurisdiction over roughly 80 percent of the food supply, per sources familiar.
The news was first reported by Bloomberg on Thursday. FDA did not respond to a request for comment.
Who? Diamantas is not well known in the Washington food policy world — he’s a partner at Jones Day, a global corporate law firm, in its Miami office — but I’m told he is committed to the “Make America Healthy Again” or MAHA agenda.
I asked Vani Hari, a key leader of the MAHA movement, what she thought of the pick. (For those of you who may not be familiar: Hari, better known as the Food Babe, has been pressing for much stricter regulation of food chemicals for more than a decade. She’s written a pile of best-selling books and now commands a very large online following dubbed #FoodBabeArmy.)
“He’s in lockstep with Secretary Kennedy and Dr. Marty Makary [Trump’s pick for FDA commissioner], and he understands the sense of urgency around addressing these food additive issues that have been plaguing the American food system for so long,” Hari told me.
I asked Hari – whose X bio reads: #1 Public Enemy of Big Food – if she was worried at all that Diamantas was previously a lawyer for the food industry. (Note: I don’t know who his clients were, but Jones Day is an expensive corporate law firm, so it’s safe to assume the rolodex was more industry than consumer groups).
“He has a lot of Big Food contacts,” Hari said. “I think that actually serves him. It puts him in an interesting position because he understands the stakeholders at play. There’s going to be conversations and lobbying that’s going to try to prevent a lot of this regulation from being changed.”
“I think that puts him in a good position to figure this out,” she added. “He gets this issue.”
Diamantas’ record: I couldn’t find too much of a record for Diamantas online, which isn’t all that unusual for a lawyer. He has written some legal articles on food policy that are pretty standard fare, lay of the land type pieces. I searched for him on X and couldn’t find an account, but I did find a fun picture of him hunting turkeys with his “good friend” Donald Trump Jr., who has been a particularly big supporter of MAHA.
Food chem layoffs: News of Diamantas as our new top food leader at FDA comes after a chaotic week at the agency, to put it mildly. Last weekend, a rash of employees across FDA were laid off, including 89 within the foods program. But what was most notable, for insiders and outsiders alike, was the fact that the firings disproportionately impacted the agency’s division focused on oversight of chemicals already in the food supply. This struck many people as highly ironic considering stricter food additive regulation is one of the top MAHA priorities.
The firings prompted Jim Jones to resign as deputy commissioner of human foods on Monday — news that I scooped earlier this week. Jones had held the top job since September 2023 when then FDA Commissioner Robert Califf brought him on to help fix the agency’s dysfunctional foods program. One of the major reasons Jones was chosen for the job is that he had a track record of strengthening chemical oversight at EPA. Jones had been recently focused on hiring more staff to focus on food chemicals at FDA (this is why the division was disproportionately hit, as the layoffs targeted probationary employees).
In a letter to Acting FDA Commissioner Sara Brenner, Jones said he’d been looking forward to helping Kennedy improve oversight of food chemicals and tackle diet-related diseases, but argued that the “indiscriminate” firings at the agency would make that work much more difficult and that it would be “fruitless” for him to continue in the role.
In an interview, Jones told me that the firings made no sense. The FDA already has such limited staff it can only re-review a handful of food chemicals at a time. (Here’s a list if you want to see what’s currently being re-assessed.)
I asked Jones if there was any way for FDA to beef up food chemical oversight without more staff. He laughed. “No.”
One thing that’s always been a big question is how many staff the FDA needs to have competent oversight of food chemicals — to police additives more aggressively so consumers feel like the agency is on it and state lawmakers stop feeling like they need to take things into their own hands. (California, for example, has leaned in on banning controversial additives and is essentially setting de facto national policy right now because FDA has been so slow to act.)
Jones told me that the number of staff needed depends on how ambitious the administration wants to be. If, for example, the FDA wanted to formally re-assess 10 food chemicals a year, he estimated that might require 40 staff focused on it. To look at 20 food chemicals, you’d need roughly 80 staff. (For context: I’m told the agency had 29 staff dedicated to post-market assessment pre-layoffs, and about a third of them were fired).
“You need people who have the academic background and the training to do risk assessments…that gives you the evidence to make the determination,” Jones said. “It’s not crazy expensive like building an airplane for the Defense Department, but it’s not cheap. You need staff to be able to do that.”
Talking about staffing might sound boring, but it’s also one of the key ways the government grinds things through an onerous regulatory process.
Shake up: It’s certainly possible, however, that this administration doesn’t plan to use the typical processes we have in place for tackling food chemicals. Hari, who wants FDA to pull many additives on the market, thinks all the fuss about staffing totally misses the point.
“The whole idea of this new administration is to gut the agency and put people in place that have some intellectual honesty around these additives, and the willingness to work faster and more furious and be disruptive,” she said. “The fact that Jim Jones just resigned…and you’ve got Kyle ready to take the reins. That didn’t happen overnight, that’s been in the works for months. They’ve been working on the plan and the personnel for months.”
Hari said she’s hopeful that FDA is going to be aggressive and not afraid to regulate in this MAHA era, even as other parts of the administration are decidedly deregulatory. “I’m feeling very optimistic about it, and I’m a pessimistic person when it comes to government,” she said.
Pushback on cuts: Stakeholders in Washington meanwhile, are very concerned about staff cuts at both FDA and USDA. In addition to the layoffs, an untold number of employees have taken the DOGE buyout offers within these agencies. A large coalition of food industry, public health and consumer groups issued a statement this week on staff cuts:
“Ensuring the safety of our nation’s food supply is a shared responsibility,” read the statement, signed by the American Frozen Food Institute, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Consumer Brands Association and many other groups. “Food companies are committed to producing safe products. Maintaining safe, accessible, and affordable food is a fundamental public health priority and a key component of the Make America Healthy Again platform. An under-resourced food safety agency could jeopardize Secretary Kennedy’s stated objectives to improve nutrition and ingredient safety for children and adults.”
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What I’m reading
USDA says it is trying to rehire bird flu experts the agency accidentally fired (CBS News). “The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it is trying to rehire bird flu experts that the agency accidentally fired as part of its efforts to cut costs based on recommendations from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE,” reports Megan Cerullo. “‘Although several positions supporting [highly pathogenic avian influenza] were notified of their terminations over the weekend, we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters,’ the USDA said in a statement to CBS News. The agency added that several types of workers, including veterinarians and other emergency response personnel, had been exempted from job cuts so that they could continue to work on the USDA’s bird flu efforts. The agency said it ‘continues to prioritize the response to highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).’ The USDA’s job cuts come as the Trump administration is seeking to cut costs partly by reducing the size of the federal workforce. Federal agencies on Thursday began firing probationary employees, who are typically workers with less than one or two years of experience in their current jobs and haven’t yet gained civil service protections.”
Federal layoffs spark concerns over nation’s food safety (Marketplace). “The rapid and widespread reductions in the federal workforce are ongoing, and some have experts worried about what the layoffs and firings will mean for the nation’s food safety,” writes Kimberly Adams for NPR’s Marketplace. “This week, the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety division resigned saying, according to multiple reports, that the cuts will damage the FDA’s ability to safeguard our food supply. We still don’t know the full extent of layoffs at the FDA, which oversees the safety of most of our food supply, but they are widespread, noted Darin Detwiler, a food safety expert and consultant teaching at Northeastern University. ‘These are technical experts, nutrition experts,’ he said. ‘Their jobs are extremely important in terms of outbreak response and disease investigation.’ Frontline food inspectors and investigators have been laid off or fired; some because they were newer employees on probation. The USDA, which handles some aspect of food safety nationally, said in a statement that the agency is “committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.” But many experts and former food safety officials are unconvinced.”
Spared by DOGE—for now (The Atlantic). “Americans have plenty to worry about these days when it comes to infectious-disease outbreaks. This is the worst flu season in 15 years, there’s a serious measles outbreak roiling Texas, and the threat of bird flu isn’t going away,” writes Nicholas Florko. “As of this week, the federal government may be less equipped to deal with these threats. Elon Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce have hit public-health agencies, including the CDC, NIH, and FDA. The Trump administration has not released details on the layoffs, but the cuts appear to be more than trivial. EIS fellows told me they were bracing to be let go last Friday afternoon, but the pink slips never came. This doesn’t mean EIS is safe. Both DOGE and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s newly confirmed health secretary, are just getting started. More layoffs could still be coming, and significant cuts to EIS would send a clear message that the administration does not believe that investigating infectious-disease outbreaks is a good use of tax dollars.”
A closer look at RFK, Jr.’s stance on ultra-processed foods (MinnPost). “While Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recorded positions on vaccines – including falsehoods concerning autism and a statement that Black people should not receive the same vaccination schedule as white people – are controversial at best, his positions on food may seem less so, on first glance,” writes Deanna Pistono. “Kennedy sees nutrition as a key part of health, with the removal of ‘food additives and chemicals’ and the reduction of ‘the dominance of ultra-processed foods’ cited as priorities for the incoming secretary. What exactly constitutes processed foods, though? Kennedy has been critical of the use of seed-based oils in cooking, like canola, corn and soybean oil. Kennedy has also listed raw milk – milk that has not undergone pasteurization – as a casualty in what he called the Food and Drug Administration’s ‘war on public health.’ Though Kennedy’s opinions on seed oils and raw milk may be controversial, the idea of changing the food system to reduce the amount of additives in food has popular support.”
Dozens of attorneys general urge FDA to crack down on counterfeit obesity drugs (STAT). “More than three dozen attorneys general are urging the Food and Drug Administration to take ‘decisive action’ against a host of companies that they argue are illegally profiting off skyrocketing demand for pricey obesity drugs,” Ed Silverman reports. “In a Feb. 18 letter to the agency, the state officials maintained that ‘supply shortages and high costs have created opportunities for wrongdoers to cash in and endanger consumers.’ In particular, they pointed to counterfeiters, online retailers selling active ingredients without requiring a prescription, and some compound pharmacies that ‘cut corners’ in preparing custom-made versions of the drugs. The missive from the state officials come as obesity drugs have become not only blockbuster products but cultural touchstones for countless Americans looking to lose weight. But unprecedented demand has made it difficult for the companies to manufacture sufficient supplies, even though Medicare and some private health plans do not cover obesity drugs, especially given the $1,000 a month or more cost. As a result, a growing number of companies have attempted to fill the void.”
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