RFK Jr. and the Pepperoni-Pizza Paradox

If there was a mascot to represent everything that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sees wrong with food, it would be Big Daddy’s Primo Pizza. A staple of school cafeterias, Big Daddy’s pizza bills itself as an “over-the-top exceptional slice to entice students” that’s made with whole-wheat flour. It’s mass-produced in a factory with industrial additives so that it just needs to be reheated right before serving. That makes the pizza an ultra-processed food, which Kennedy is set on removing from school lunches. Except he can’t. The Department of Agriculture, which sets the rules for school nutrition, isn’t under his jurisdiction as secretary of Health and Human Services.

RFK Jr. sometimes talks as though he has the power to unilaterally fix America’s food problems. But his attempts to do so will go only so far, at least in part by virtue of the absurdity of how food is regulated. The job is split between the FDA and the USDA, sometimes in ways that make little sense. Consider the issue of food safety. Regardless of whether a pepperoni pizza will be sold in schools or the grocery store, its safety is overseen by the USDA. Inspectors typically visit facilities where frozen pizza is topped with pepperoni at least once a day—inspectors are also present at the slaughterhouse where the pig is butchered and the plant where the actual pepperoni is made. Meanwhile, because frozen cheese pizza is meatless, its safety falls to the FDA, which inspects most facilities at least once every five years. Open-faced sandwiches that contain meat are also regulated by the USDA, but slap another piece of bread on top, and they’re the FDA’s problem.

Yes, two different agencies both employ inspectors to do ostensibly the same thing—inspect food products—in some of the same factories, solely because a USDA employee inspecting a company making open-face sandwiches isn’t allowed to address the health and safety of the closed sandwiches nearby. None of this is efficient. In fact it is so inefficient that the Government Accountability Office, the government’s independent watchdog, has warned that the food-safety system is at high risk for “fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” Are you listening, Elon? The Trump administration is sleeping on a move that would please both the MAHA crowd and the backers of DOGE: creating a single agency for food safety and nutrition policy. Call it the Department of Food Oversight and Optimal Diets.

Democrats, too, should want a Department of FOOD. In fact, Democratic lawmakers in Congress have introduced legislation proposing a single food agency at several points over the past 20 years. America’s discombobulated approach to food is the by-product of a century’s worth of bureaucracy. In 1906, Congress passed two separate laws setting different food-safety standards for meat and nonmeat products. At the time, both sets of rules were enforced by the USDA, until the FDA was carved out of it in 1940. Since then, the question of who is in charge of what has gotten only more complex. When the EPA was created during the Nixon administration, for example, regulating how much pesticide can be present on the food you buy was transferred to the new agency.

Perhaps most maddening about the status quo is that food is simultaneously over- and under-regulated. The USDA is understandably rigorous about the safety of meat, but pepperoni pizza being inspected three different times is hard to justify, argues Sandra Eskin, who led the USDA’s food-safety arm during the Biden administration. At the same time, the FDA lacks the staff to inspect every factory, and the result is that meat receives far more scrutiny than many other products, such as bags of chips and frozen cheese pizzas. The different levels of oversight is “hard to defend,” Thomas Gremillion, the director of food policy at Consumer Federation of America, which advocates for more stringent food-safety regulations, told me. A single food agency would be able to more easily reallocate resources to even out the gaps. (Neither the FDA nor the USDA responded to a request for comment.)

The Department of FOOD wouldn’t just be more efficient; it could also help address the nation’s diet woes. Consider salt. Americans are estimated to consume nearly 50 percent more than what the U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend, and advocacy groups have long urged the FDA to do something about it. But Congress has balked at the USDA’s and FDA’s relatively modest attempts to clamp down on how much salt can be added to our food. Last March, lawmakers added language into a government funding bill that would delay the FDA from releasing new sodium-reduction goals and prevent the USDA from further restricting the amount of salt in school meals. Regulators’ hands were tied.

A Department of FOOD that is funded independently of Congress would be a way out of this mess. Independent agencies can pursue policies without as much fear of Congress revoking their funding for pursuing a politically unpopular rule. All of this might seem a bit pie in the sky; creating a new independent agency is no small feat. Congress would very likely need to pass a law to make it happen, even though the Department of FOOD would be insulated from their demands. To create any new agency takes “just a hell of a lot of work to pull it off,” Peter Lurie, the head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which led the campaign for the FDA to mandate lower salt levels, told me. But something similar has happened before: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau centralized various agencies’ responsibilities into one independent organization after a raft of subprime mortgages led to the financial crisis of 2008.

Political inertia is on the Trump administration’s side. Diet-related disease is a crisis in its own right. More than 40 percent of American adults are now obese, as is approximately one in five children. Kennedy himself talks a lot about how food is making Americans sick, and other Republicans are listening. Several Republican lawmakers have insisted in recent weeks that the FDA needs to get more serious about regulating food additives, such as dyes. If Kennedy were to argue that a new food agency was the best way to achieve these goals, surely Republicans would have to listen. At the same time, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and its efforts to dissolve whole government agencies are opening the door to drastic action.

Of course, Musk seems more intent on outright destroying the federal agencies than creating government reform. Kennedy, likewise, seems focused more so on overly simplistic solutions, like firing the staff of FDA’s food center, than on altering the structures that have made those workers so inefficient. That neither Kennedy or Musk has said anything about consolidating the food agencies says a lot in its own right. If you actually wanted to make the government more efficient, the Department of FOOD would be an easy place to start. But right now in the Trump administration, proposing a new agency isn’t nearly as good of a talking point as blowing one up.