Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using his central role in Donald Trump’s transition team to preach for policies he says will improve the nutritional value of American food. But as the U.S. again faces a swirl of foodborne illness, his public proposals give no sign of what he and Trump would do to strengthen the federal agencies that oversee food safety — agencies that experts say are underfunded and understaffed, leading to public health crises.
“You can’t really separate food safety and nutrition. The two go hand in hand,” said former director of the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Susan Mayne. Some of the most nutritious food products, like produce, are also “some of the highest risk from a food safety perspective,” she said.
Despite reportedly gunning for a cabinet position running one of the two departments in charge of food quality in the U.S., Kennedy’s concerns with food safety appear not to focus on existing safety regulation enforcement issues. Instead, his food improvement platform has centered on removing ultra-processed foods and food additives from the American diet, which he says lead to chronic disease.
“The most existential threat our country faces today is the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said during a Trump rally Wednesday in Duluth, Georgia. Research shows that a diet heavy in ultra-processed foods can lead to health issues, and five of the top 10 causes of death in the U.S. are or are strongly associated with chronic diseases.
But health experts say that while stricter food quality standards are a good idea, they’re concerned that the existing food safety standards aren’t being enforced in the first place.
Neither Kennedy nor the Trump campaign responded to requests for comment on Trump’s plans for food safety and nutrition if he wins back the presidency.
A call to a general inquiries number listed on Kennedy’s website was answered by a former campaign volunteer, who said the current Kennedy camp was “just chaos.” The volunteer declined to pass on a message because “there’s nobody to pass it on to,” she said.
Kennedy, who is perhaps still best known by many as an anti-vaccine activist, has indicated that he would like a role within the USDA or HHS, which includes the FDA. Trump said last week that Kennedy would have a role in his administration if he wins. A number of Kennedy’s associates have been floated for roles at the FDA, according to reporting from The Washington Post. These include Casey Means, a doctor who co-wrote a book on nutrition and alternative methods to prevent chronic disease, and Marty A. Makary, a doctor who was involved in health care policy decisions during the Trump administration.
In a recent video, Kennedy said that his biggest priority for a Trump administration will be to “clean up the public health agencies like CDC, NIH, FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”
“These agencies have become sock puppets for the industries that they’re supposed to regulate,” Kennedy said.
Recent FDA recalls and food illness outbreaks have called attention to the plight of food safety in the U.S. CDC pathogen surveillance data shows that rates of foodborne illnesses in the U.S. have gone largely unchanged over the past two decades, and the FDA is notorious for the glacial pace at which it generates practical rules for businesses even after regulations have been approved. While the FDA performs inspections and testing as a means of monitoring industry safety, enforcement consists mainly of warning letters to businesses suspected of unsafe practices.
“They sort of say, ‘You’re naughty, you did the wrong thing, and we want you to cut it out.’ And 9.9 times out of 10, there’s no follow-up,” said Rena Steinzor, a professor of law at the University of Maryland who studies food safety regulations and advocates for more aggressive penalties for corporations that knowingly flaunt the rules, including in the food industry.
“There is very little evidence that aggressive enforcement is going on,” Steinzor added. She cited the recent listeria outbreak that was connected to unsanitary conditions at a Boar’s Head facility in Virginia as an example of the dangers of lax oversight. Nearly 60 people fell ill after eating listeria-contaminated meat; 10 died.
Other major lapses in food safety have occurred just in the past few weeks — including an E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders that’s so far resulted in at least 75 illnesses.
Two days before the outbreak was announced, Trump made an appearance at a McDonald’s where he served fries to supporters. In response to Trump’s McDonald’s stint, Kennedy posted on X that “fast food was a part of American culture” and vowed to protect Americans from being “unknowingly poisoned by heavily subsidized” seed oils like those used in fast-food fryers. While seed oils have recently become a major target of health influencers, scientists say they can be part of a healthy diet when used in moderation.
Toni Kelley, a former Kennedy campaign staffer, said foodborne illness outbreaks were a “different level of safety” than what Kennedy was advocating for. Kelley, who was the campaign’s Washington state director before it was suspended, described Kennedy’s goals for food safety in the U.S. as the removal of “all the chemicals that are being pumped into our food,” which she said cause health issues in children, including higher rates of ADHD and autism. Some studies have suggested an association between food dyes and hyperactivity in children, but there is no conclusive evidence that any food dyes or additives can cause autism.
Kelley said she believed the regenerative agriculture and small-scale farming Kennedy has pushed for would reduce rates of foodborne illnesses.
“It’s like backyard chickens, right? We have backyard chickens, and I’m not concerned with salmonella one bit,” Kelley said. Research is limited on whether farm size or regenerative agriculture practices correlate to foodborne illness risk levels.
Some of Kennedy’s proposed policies appear to run directly counter to current food safety guidance. While campaigning for his own presidential bid in July, Kennedy posted on X that improving access to raw milk would be a priority of his administration. Unpasteurized milk can carry bacteria like E. coli that cause foodborne illness, as well as the H5N1 virus. Sales of raw milk are currently prohibited or restricted by some states.
The federal government has been trying to improve food safety for decades. The Obama administration designed the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act to shift the FDA to a “prevention framework,” according to Mayne, who was the director of the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition from 2015 to 2023. The FDA also recently underwent a major reorganization that included an overhaul of the food safety division, partly due to the 2022 contaminated baby formula crisis. Mayne said the reorganization was meant to put food safety, enforcement and nutrition all under the same roof.
But funding remains a perennial problem for the FDA’s food safety division, according to Mayne. The agency’s food arm is often overshadowed by its higher-profile drug program. During a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in September, FDA Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods Jim Jones asked Congress for additional funding and regulatory legislation that would allow the FDA to act more quickly to keep contaminated food products from ever reaching store shelves to begin with, instead of issuing recalls after the fact.
“The food safety system in the United States is based on both the government and the industry following the rules. If a manufacturer is going to choose not to follow the rules, they’re going to likely have some opportunity to get away with it until they are caught,” Jones said.
Kennedy’s decision to endorse Trump surprised some Kennedy supporters who felt that Trump’s first administration sought to reduce the regulatory power of the food oversight agencies. A 2019 Science investigation found that FDA warning letters significantly decreased during the first years of the Trump presidency.
Mayne said resource allocation reveals an administration’s commitment to food safety.
“A phrase we often use at FDA is we can always do more with more,” said Mayne, adding that resources lead to more inspections and sampling, as well as more outreach to encourage consumers to demand healthier foods.
Kennedy’s vision for a more regulated food landscape conflicts with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan, a set of policies for any future Republican president from which Trump has attempted to distance himself, though a CNN investigation found that nearly 140 former Trump administration members were involved in creating the plan.
The plan’s “Mandate for Leadership” proposes major reductions to the federal workforce and states that the USDA “can and should play a limited role, with much of its focus on removing governmental barriers that hinder food production or otherwise undermine efforts to meet consumer demand.” The section of the plan dedicated to the FDA is focused on the FDA’s role in regulating drugs, biological products and medical devices and does not mention the FDA’s food safety and nutrition division.
In interviews, Kennedy has brushed off questions about whether his proposed policies run counter to Trump’s. During an interview with the “All-In” podcast in late August, Kennedy said that he believes Trump has “changed as a person” and that Trump has told him “many interesting things about what he did wrong the last time.”
Mayne said that while she “didn’t hear the Trump administration prioritize nutrition as part of their key platform,” she felt that the FDA commissioner during the Trump administration, Scott Gottlieb, recognized the importance of nutrition.
“Important signature things were done” during Trump’s four years in office that “reflected [Gottlieb’s] commitment and prioritization of nutrition,” Mayne said.
Steinzor said she was doubtful that a second Trump presidency, even one with Kennedy in the cabinet, would do much to sharpen the teeth of food regulatory agencies since it was “not clear that it was a priority” during the first.
Steinzor pointed to food production safety issues that took place during the Trump presidency, such as workers in meatpacking plants being ordered back to work and experiencing high COVID-19 transmission rates and a number of deaths, that she felt indicated a lack of concern. While Steinzor said that could, in part, be due to the pandemic taking up a majority of the FDA’s energy, she said she didn’t have any reason to think a second Trump administration would behave any differently.
Mayne said that regardless of what happens in the election, the fact that nutrition is seeing newfound bipartisan support was an “exciting opportunity” that could lead to “both parties trying to do more to address the problem of diet-related chronic disease” in the U.S.
“We may be at a bit of a tipping point,” Mayne said.
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.