RFK Jr. Weighing FDA Crackdown on Food Additives Under Trump

Advisers to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are weighing a significant rewrite to the Food and Drug Administration’s rules governing food additives, to fulfill Kennedy and President-elect Donald Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” pledge to get toxic chemicals out of the food supply.

The proposed crackdown, which is still in its early stages and will need to get a sign-off from Trump and his transition team, targets a provision in the FDA’s regulations on which food additives are considered by the agency to be “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS.

Advisers to Kennedy, Trump’s pick for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, have also floated other approaches to curbing the use of food additives, including working with agricultural producers to change the subsidies and incentives offered by the government for certain kinds of foods Kennedy argues are unhealthy.

“I think the overall posture of the FDA should be actually a lot of deregulation. I think we should have a golden age of innovation and drug development. Nobody’s standing in the way of that,” Calley Means, a top adviser to Kennedy’s transition team, said this month on “The Liz Wheeler Show.”