Throughout a raucous hearing earlier than the Senate Finance Committee right now that included each heckling and applause (neither of that are commonplace), Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) requested Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Trump’s nominee to steer the Division of Well being and Human Companies (HHS), to elucidate his Make America Healthy Again imaginative and prescient.
“One thing is poisoning the American folks and we all know that the first culprits are the altering meals provide, the change to extremely chemical-intensive processed meals,” Kennedy mentioned. “We have to repair our meals provide, and that’s the primary.” In his opening assertion, he additionally mentioned he “will scrutinize the chemical components in our meals provide.”
Regardless of these feedback, Kennedy’s potential oversight of the FDA—which regulates meals components, meals security remembers, and antibiotic use in agriculture—was barely talked about all through the listening to. As a substitute, Republican senators usually praised his general dedication to investigating the foundation causes of power ailments, whereas Democrats hammered him on his past false statements on vaccines and anti-vaccine advocacy, his actions tied to a deadly measles outbreak, and his current about-face on the difficulty of abortion and the way which may influence entry to the medicine mifepristone. Medicare and Medicaid had been additionally fashionable subjects.
And whereas nobody requested him a lot of something in regards to the FDA, the USDA—an company he is not going to oversee—got here up a number of occasions, with a number of farm-state Republicans asking Kennedy to decide to working in collaboration with farmers and the company that helps and regulates them. Kennedy mentioned President Trump “has particularly instructed me that he needs farmers concerned in each coverage and that he needs me to work with Brooke Rollins at USDA to guarantee that we protect American farmers, that every one of our insurance policies assist them.”
Later, he mentioned that whereas he received’t have regulatory energy over farms, he thinks the federal government ought to incentivize a transition to what he known as “regenerative agriculture, no-till agriculture, and to much less chemically intensive. And by the best way,” he added, “I’ve additionally met with the chemical trade and the fertilizer and herbicide corporations, and so they need to do the identical factor.”
(In our investigative reporting final yr, we extensively documented the pesticide industry’s tactics for maintaining chemical compounds in use regardless of documented well being and environmental dangers. Simply this month, Bayer, one of many world’s largest agrichemical corporations, hired Ballard Partners, a D.C. foyer agency with a number of ties to Trump’s interior circle.)
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