\n<\/p>\n
Trump Jr.\u2019s hunting habits have long provoked outrage. He was once photographed in Africa holding a dead elephant\u2019s tail that he had apparently severed with a knife. More recently, Italian authorities opened an investigation after it was reported that he\u2019d killed a protected species of duck known as the ruddy shelduck.<\/p>\n
What skills Trump Jr.\u2019s hunting buddy Diamantas will bring to the FDA\u2019s Human Foods Program, where he will manage its $1 billion budget, remains to be seen. An FDA spokesperson referred Vanity Fair<\/em> to an agency link that said Diamantas \u201chas extensive experience working with various federal and state agencies and policy makers, scientific organizations, consumer advocacy groups, and industry stakeholders.\u201d<\/p>\n Reached for comment, a spokesman for Trump Jr., Arthur Schwartz,<\/strong> emailed Vanity Fair<\/em> that, given the presidential son\u2019s leading role in staffing up the Trump-Vance administration, \u201cAre you really asking whether a member of the transition team played a role in the transition? You people are a bunch of retards.\u201d Regarding the protected duck in Italy, a spokesman previously told The Washington Post<\/em> that Trump Jr. follows all hunting rules and regulations \u201cand plans on fully cooperating with any investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n The nation\u2019s controversial new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.<\/strong>, has decried what he describes as the mass poisoning of Americans by the \u201cBig Food\u201d lobby. In taking the helm as overseer of the nation\u2019s health agencies, he has set his sights on transforming what and how Americans eat. His stated agenda includes limiting chemical additives in food, ridding school lunches of processed food, and purging safety net food programs of sugary drinks.<\/p>\n He has also pledged to rid the FDA of what he claims are compromised regulators, more beholden to industry interests than to their stated missions. (Diamantas\u2019s past experience representing food-and-beverage industry clients appears to be just the type of conflict Kennedy Jr. has critiqued.)<\/p>\n An obvious ally in that effort would have been the FDA\u2019s Human Foods Program, which, by its own description, \u201coversees all FDA activities related to food safety and nutrition.\u201d Most recently, under the Biden administration, the division oversaw the banning of food dye Red No. 3, a move right in line with Kennedy Jr.\u2019s stated \u201cMake America Healthy Again\u201d (MAHA) priorities.<\/p>\n But late last week, Elon Musk<\/strong>\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency purged the division of an estimated 89 staff members, leading to the resignation of James Jones,<\/strong> the deputy commissioner for human foods. An experienced regulator, Jones had spent almost 20 years with the Environmental Protection Agency before joining the FDA in 2023 to lead the newly reorganized foods division.<\/p>\n In his resignation letter, Jones called the \u201cindiscriminate\u201d mass terminations \u201cone more roadblock to achieving the Secretary\u2019s stated objectives of making America healthy again.\u201d He added, \u201cThe foods program staff at FDA is the envy of the world in its technical, professional and ethical standards. The Secretary\u2019s comments impugning the integrity of the food staff, asserting they are corrupt based on falsities, is a disservice to everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the employees dismissed were those with \u201chighly 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,\u201d according to Jones\u2019s letter.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t 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,\u201d says Susan Mayne,<\/strong> who served as the FDA\u2019s director of food safety and applied nutrition from 2015 to 2023. Particularly \u201chorrifying,\u201d she says, are cuts to the infant-formula team, which she successfully lobbied Congress to grow from 9 to 13 people. With cuts to such a small staff, she says, \u201cthe whole program could dissolve and we would be in the biggest infant-formula crisis you could ever imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n As if a reminder was needed of the job\u2019s life-and-death stakes, the FDA on Friday announced a recall of listeria-tainted frozen nutritional shakes that had been sold to nursing homes<\/a>, among other institutions, and had been linked to 11 deaths and 37 hospitalizations.<\/p>\n