Forked: RFK Jr.’s ‘massive’ promise to ‘eliminate’ autism ‘exposures’
Is it possible that RFK Jr. believes autism research can be done so fast because he already thinks he knows what those causes of autism are? Other topics include: RFK Jr. “hitting his stride” after attending the funeral of a child who died of measles. How many people have been laid off at HHS and why doesn’t anybody know? Bipartisan bonhomie on the issue of plant-based milk, in a Senate proposal that almost no one thinks will pass. MAHA anti-vaxxers would rather RFK Jr. forget about food.
TRANSCRIPT:
Teresa Cotsirilos: You’re listening to REAP/SOW — dispatches from the frontlines of food, farming, and the environment. I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos.
RFK Jr.: “Autism destroys families—but most importantly, it destroys our greatest resource which is our children.”
Teresa: That, of course, was RFK Jr., who just vowed to miraculously find the root causes of autism by September. Let’s be real…it’s still hard to believe that this is the guy who’s ultimately in charge of overseeing Medicare, researching and preventing infectious diseases, and ensuring that the food on our table is both healthy and safe to eat.
So, welcome back to Forked—an insider’s look at the politics and policy that is turning the American food system on its head. In this episode, Helena Bottemiller Evich, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Food Fix, and FERN’s Editor-in-Chief Theodore Ross go deep on the MAHA movement and its many contradictions. I’ll let Theodore Ross take it from here.
Theodore Ross: Hi, Helena. We have a lot to get to today, so should we just jump right in?
Helena Bottemiller Evich: Yes.
Theodore: All right. So we try to start every episode of Forked with the Double Take, and that’s the one thing in the news that relates to food policy that is so bizarre and so outrageous that it kind of just makes you do a double take. What do you think it is this time around, Helena?
Helena: So for this week, I’m calling it the autism science bomb, and that is referring to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy saying just a couple of days ago that he expects to figure out what’s causing the increased rates of autism in the U.S. by September. Like, this September. As in, you know, what, five months from now?
I was astonished when I saw this comment. He actually made this comment in a cabinet meeting that was live streamed, which, by the way, I’m pro live-streaming cabinet meetings. I think the general idea is great, it’s great for transparency. But this statement was really shocking to a lot of people in the scientific community. I think there’s just so much concern that Kennedy perhaps has already decided what the cause of increased rates of autism, like, what’s causing it. And they’re really concerned that he’s gonna pin it on like one thing – like vaccines or fluoride in the water or whatever. Food dyes. I mean, who knows?
And so many people in the scientific community are just pointing out that this is not how science works. It takes a long time to run studies, to get to the bottom of things, to look at new data sets. And so there is just a ton of concern about what that statement means.
And it’s tangentially food related, right? Because as we talked about I think in our last episode, like MAHA – or the Make America Healthy Again movement – is really intertwining these issues of concerns about food policy and nutrition and additives and all of that with the concerns about vaccines, the criticism, the health freedom stuff, that kind of got braided together during the pandemic. So it’s something that I have to keep a close eye on, and I think a lot of people are pretty shocked by that statement.
Theodore: One of the things about it being live streamed in that meeting that I found interesting – one of the outcomes of associating yourself with Donald Trump is that you start to take on some of his mannerisms. I’m just gonna read you the brief quote that sort of gets around what RFK Junior actually said – and it was, quote, “We’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world by September. We will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.”
And I kind of think that that word “massive” is like a Trumpian tell. And you know – not that that really matters, it’s not the language, it’s the actual outcome – but I think the language here is pretty indicative of what we’re looking at. Here we have this public figure who– what was it, a year ago? – was the democratic presidential candidate for the United States. We’re not talking about a tried and true Republican here who’s been thinking all these things for decades. We’re talking about somebody who jumped ship from the Democratic Party and is now saying that his little pet theory about autism and vaccines is all going to be fixed by September.
That is a crazy-making thing, and the biggest part about it for me — and I know your newsletter is about food policy, it’s not about vaccines – but it’s an inescapable fact that when you talk about RFK you can’t just judge him in a compartmentalized way. You have to look at all the things that he brings to the table because each one of them is affecting the other.
And I think that this statement about the massive autism research study is a pretty good example of that. So I’m curious, what does that do for you? You’re a person who tries to stay in the food world: how do you take care of that?
Helena: Yeah, it is something I struggle with because I am quite happy staying in my lane, right? Part of the strength of my career has been focus: I focus on food policy, and I try to come at it with some expertise because I’ve been doing this a long time. And then every time I dip my toes into the vaccine debate I’m like, oh my gosh. Right? Like, we’re in totally different waters.
So I think all of those points about, kind of, the Trumpian language around massive testing and research effort are really on point. The scale of it sounds really big and really impressive. And as a parent, I wanna know what are the things, what are the factors that are driving increased rates of autism among children?
It is a real thing we can debate. There is a lot of debate about the numbers and which stats, how much of it is an increase. There is an increase, but then there’s also been an increase in diagnosis. There’s a lot there, and we’ll set that aside. But I wanna know these things. I think every parent is concerned about chronic disease in children and – whether it’s autoimmune disease, autism, obesity, diabetes, pre-diabetes – these are real things, right? And when you hear “massive testing and research effort,” you’re like, Yeah, that sounds good. But we actually don’t know what that massive research and testing effort is.
He seemed to be referring to the MAHA commission. Later, on X, Kennedy posted kind of suggesting that this was part of that effort. But we know very, very little about how that commission is operating, who’s involved. There’s the regular cabinet officials across the government that are engaged in that effort, but most of the folks I talk to are really confused about how that process is gonna work. What science are they looking at, versus not? And we know that a lot of the MAHA agenda is going to flow from that commission, and so it was confusing to hear that.
Theodore: Confusing, chaotic, and typical. That’s what I think we need to stay with before we switch onto another topic. I wanna stay with the Trumpian nature of what’s happening for RFK Jr., who brings his own form of chaotic political brand to his role at HHS. But this is a very classically Trumpian thing, and I think what’s also equally Trumpian is the way that it gets covered in the media, right? So there has been a lot of attention paid to this vaccine statement, but I wanna talk about something else that RFK Jr. did very recently and how the coverage of it is, to my mind, a little bit strange.
So RFK Jr. went on a tour. He toured the western states to talk about different MAHA priorities, visit different kinds of places. He also, of course, had to make a little stop down in Texas at a funeral because another child died from measles. And the Times, the way they covered it – the headline is about how RFK Jr. was hitting his stride on this tour. And it starts out by saying how he was a little subdued, maybe stoic, maybe nervous, maybe it had something to do with going to a funeral for a child who died of measles. I don’t know. But by the next day he’s in Salt Lake City at a health center focused on nutritious diets, and they’re describing him sort of kibitzing with people and how comfortable he seems.
And for me as a reader, I don’t understand why we are talking about this at all. His style, his stride. The article ends with him talking about how much he enjoyed going on a hike with his dogs. What do you make of that? Why are we getting this kind of weird coverage for RFK Jr. when he’s doing things that are of very, very significant impact?
Helena: Well, I have a couple theories about this. I think one of them is that, and this is the soapbox I’m always on, is that food policy, food issues are not treated like a real beat. So I can’t remember which reporter was on that story, but I can guarantee – because they don’t have someone dedicated to food policy at the New York Times – it was not someone who’s following the ins and outs of these policies.
Theodore: Can I just interrupt? I’m gonna say to the Times, if the Times is out there listening, we have your solution. We have your food policy solution right here. Her name is Helena. You can get in touch. I can help you. No problem.
Helena: I’m not trying to even pick on the New York Times. This is a problem across a lot of different news outlets because food is often seen as this cute issue, like a cultural issue or a soft issue. I remember being in the newsroom at Politico and getting into, kind of, arguments with other reporters about the Michelle Obama thing being soft.
And I was like, she’s in a knife fight right now with the food industry. There’s nothing soft about this, taking these issues like school meals or regulating certain things, or even food labeling. You’re taking on a trillion-dollar market. This is a real part of the economy and it’s a real part of health. And so that’s just my soapbox.
Theodore: At FERN we always are talking about how in American society and culture right now, people to an increasing degree are defining themselves in all kinds of ways through their understanding of and their relationship to food. So if you’re not covering food as a serious political, cultural, and social issue, you are not doing your job as a reporter. So I think you’re probably right about them taking it as sort of a soft issue. But it is, first of all, wildly out of date. And it’s also just diluted. It is not a soft issue. These are things of great daily national importance.
Helena: And just to give maybe some context here, I think it is sort of a normal New York Times thing to do the profile, right? Like, they had great photos from the events. There is this sort of theme there, and I don’t remember which section this ran in, but there’s this theme of doing the more human kind of profile things. And I think that’s what this was. And they have had a couple of other stories about Kennedy’s – there was one a couple weeks ago about this kind of interesting realignment within the Republican party about these issues, which I’ve been writing about a lot. I thought that that story was pretty well done. So they have done some really strong coverage.
I think part of what is hard about all of this, and I think a lot of the public health advocates are struggling with this, is like certain pieces of the MAHA agenda, or the MAHA narrative, or the identification of the problem, are very evidence backed, are things that lots of health leaders have been talking about for a long time. Like not subsidizing less-than-healthy fare and then also having rising healthcare costs – trying to connect those dots. That’s one example. Evidence-backed public health leaders are like, Yes, we’re finally talking about this. And then it comes with all of this other sort of baggage around statements around vaccines that have been pretty thoroughly debunked by the scientific literature that’s looked into them.
And so it creates this sort of vortex where I think people who care about these issues, like a lot of my sources in the health world, are like, “I support this thing and this thing is scary and this part is defunding an agency I think is really important.” And so I think “mixed bag” is a theme that we keep coming back to. But the New York Times is not alone –
Theodore: I don’t mean to point the finger at the New York Times. I think it’s just indicative of a common and sort of recurring phenomenon when you become part of the things that Donald Trump is doing. Because there’s all this talk about the tiny little kernel of truth in the distortions, or the idea that his back and forth on policy is some kind of strategic game of four-dimensional chess. And it just puts people who, and I think I am included in this category – I know you are – people of good faith, they don’t know what to do. And they don’t know what to say.
I’m gonna use that as a transition to our next section, which is our Forks and Knives, which is the broader issues that are surrounding food policy in recent weeks. And I’m going to take my cue from your newsletter, where you talk about tensions within the MAHA world between vaccine people and food people. And I’d like to hear: What do you mean by that? What are those tensions other than the obvious ones?
Helena: So as we just alluded to, I am in the food lane, right? I cover food policy. During the pandemic, I was not focused on our healthcare response or vaccines. That was not my focus at all. I was really focused on the food response, like the fact that we gave food banks a lot more resources. The Trump administration did food boxes. There were all these things that happened: they mandated the meat plants had to stay open. There were all these disrupted supply chains, and we were dumping food. So even during COVID I was, like, food policy – that’s my lane.
So now covering MAHA, I am increasingly getting somewhat dragged into the vaccine issue because of the way the MAHA coalition is put together. It’s this sprawling coalition that includes some health-freedom kind of ideas and also a lot of the food policy critiques that, frankly, have previously been on the left.
Theodore: Those contradictions that are very interesting.
Helena: There’s a lot of interesting contradictions. So just as an example of how much things have changed… And actually, the newsletter’s off this week because my kid’s on spring break and I hadn’t taken a break in a while, but I was kind of struggling with not writing this week because there’s a lot going on.
And one of the things that happened this morning – just to set a scene for folks – was Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas held a press event with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. And just imagine this: you’re in Little Rock, they’re outside the governor’s mansion, it almost looks like they’re in the Rose Garden or something. There’s green, lush gardens, they’re playing country music, it’s this very festive, beautiful day press conference. This just happened this morning. And the topic was: Arkansas is asking the USDA to ban sugary drinks and candy from the SNAP program. And add in rotisserie chickens, because right now you can’t buy hot foods with SNAP because it’s cooked.
I’m sitting there and – I watched part of this this morning – I almost took my five-year-old down there. I was like, That’s a great spring break activity, his first press conference!
Theodore: Little Rock in Spring. It’s a very nice place.
Helena: So I did consider that, but I was like, you know, we do need to take a break. He’ll probably go to another press conference, I’m sure. So I’m watching this this morning, and I’m just thinking, like, the idea that a Southern Republican governor, playing country music in the background, is essentially taking on Coca-Cola in this moment, saying, We are not going to spend taxpayer dollars on these products.
It was just sort of a shocking moment. Back in the day, you can remember when Michael Bloomberg in New York was getting called the nanny, the nanny state, for trying to get the soda sizes smaller, getting the Big Gulps down.
Theodore: Smaller soda sizes, and they put the calorie counts on the menu.
Helena: Yes, the calorie counts. He banned trans fats, he did all these things. It’s interesting now to think about how many of those policies would be MAHA, on the right. And so once you get into the specifics, there’s been some real political realignment, and I think that’s what is most interesting to think about.
But there’s been a major focus on food. So even when we think about MAHA being this coalition that includes a lot of vaccine critics, anti-VAX folks, health freedom folks, most of the policies, most of the events, almost all of the events the administration has done on MAHA in the last two months have been on food.
And a lot of them have been on SNAP restrictions or banning artificial dyes out of food products. That’s what West Virginia just did. So it’s sparked this incredible anger among the anti-vaccine folks because they were expecting more of the MAHA agenda to be focused on vaccines. They wanted the Covid shot pulled, they wanted a hammer to come down on the childhood vaccine schedule.
They had very high hopes for major change. And we have not seen that. Now we have seen some moves that really concern infectious disease experts. Like the head vaccine regulator has been pushed outta FDA, and they’ve made a lot of changes to the advisory committees that are very key in setting the schedule, and working on vaccine safety for children.
So I’m not saying they haven’t made changes, but the MAHA theme coming out of the administration has been decidedly focused on food. So in the newsletter that I recently wrote about this kind of food versus vaccine tension, I have these two quotes, which I thought were really telling. So one vaccine critic wrote in their Substack, or no, I think they wrote on X, “I still cannot believe that MAHA wasted the first 100 days on soda pop.” Like, this was the vibe. Right?
Theodore: I can’t believe that either. Who knew I was in agreement with this guy?
Helena: Well, you know, it’s just an interesting time. I’m actually not really that surprised, only because this is low-hanging fruit. Like, this is easier to do if you let states restrict products or apply for waivers. That’s, like, a way to get some wins in the media or these wins without doing anything federally, without regulating, without passing a bill through Congress.
So it’s kind of like the path of least resistance, in a way. They’re letting the states do these initiatives, and then the Feds can just approve them. In some ways it’s also a federalism argument. And that’s what Brooke Rollins said today in the event.
She was like, This is an example of the states being the laboratories of democracy. Which has been for a long time, I think, a Republican or conservative idea – that the states should be driving things.
Theodore: But many, many are now. So what you’re talking about with going after low-hanging fruit: that’s important to focus on for a second because there are many other ways in which the Trump administration is not going after low-hanging fruit. They’re doing the big things that are very unpopular, whether it’s in the markets or in the media or in public opinion. But here, in this particular case, they’re saying, No, no, no: The American public is not ready for us to undo the entirety of vaccine policy. We’re just gonna have a massive study on it.
But meanwhile what we’re really gonna do is change –and these are not unimportant changes – but make changes to SNAP, changes to what you can do with school lunches, and things like that. Why do you think that is? Why is this the place where they feel some sort of reactivity to public opinion, whereas in these other places there is just none?
Helena: That’s an interesting question. I’m not familiar with the polling on these other issues. But I can say that the polling on vaccines versus some of these food issues is pretty starkly different. So if you ask the average American voter, Do you support revisiting the vaccine schedule or vaccine requirements? It’s a minority support, right? There isn’t a majority out there going, “Yeah, let’s do that.”
But if you ask the question – and the Associated Press had a good poll, right when Kennedy was going before the Senate – should we be reformulating processed foods to have fewer food dyes and less sugar? Basically, should we crack down on how processed foods are formulated? It’s overwhelmingly supported across the ideological spectrum. I think that is part of it here, but I’m not sure it explains the whole disconnect. And I don’t know if part of it is that food is easier to move on first, and then maybe later they’ll do more on vaccines. I just don’t know. I think RFK’s statement – that we’ll know what causes autism by September – makes people think that there will be a hammer later.
I was actually just listening to Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the NIH, who recently gave an interview. He just took office, or took that position over recently, and he said that he was personally satisfied with the science around the MMR vaccine and autism, which is what has gotten the most attention and also is getting the most attention right now because of the measles outbreak.
And so it’s interesting that, I think, there is some disagreement. There are going to be different views on this within the administration. And this is something to proceed carefully on because some of these diseases are very deadly to children, or dangerous. So going too far, too fast without a plan or without really strong science comes with risk in a way that you don’t have a risk of going too fast on red dye #3, or whatever.
I know the food industry disagrees with that. They’re like, It’s too fast; we don’t have time to reformulate. But nobody cares about that. The average person doesn’t care if a mid-size or large food company is gonna have to scramble to reformulate their product. That’s just not a concern for the average person.
I think certainly the administration has done other things that are not popular and they’re going forward with them anyway.
Theodore: I personally think they just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I mean, if you look at the resignation of Peter Marks, you mentioned already, the top vaccine scientist at the FDA. He’s resigning, and he uses the word “lies” when he talks about RFK Jr. in response to vaccines. I don’t think we’re done with vaccines just yet. I think those folks online who are part of the anti-vax MAHA part of that coalition just need to be a little patient. They’re gonna get their time to shine, eventually.
Helena: It’s gonna be interesting. I should have also noted that the autism community, the autism advocacy community, has been really strongly pushing back on this notion. So one of the quotes that I included in the recent newsletter, I think the email newsletter headline was “Food versus Vaccines,” just to put a fine point on it. But the Autistic Self-Advocacy network, which is really made up of people with autism who are very involved in advocacy, they actually called this statement from Kennedy “untrue, impossible and ableist.”
And I think the Autism Society and other groups have made similarly stark comments as well. I haven’t seen anyone in the autism community or the scientific community or really anyone in the research kind of vein here say like, Oh yeah, that makes sense, that we’ll know.
So you may be right that some patience on vaccine moves will pay off for those MAHA supporters who wanna see a hammer come down. I really do not know where this is all headed, but you can tell that infectious disease folks are really concerned.
Theodore: All right, I’m gonna change gears a little bit and go back to food. I’m gonna take you off of the superhighway of American politics, which you’ve been forced onto, and put you back in your lane and talk about the changes to the nutrition guidelines in the United States that RFK Jr.’s calling for. And I’m gonna read you a little quote. And he’s talking about the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which is an annual report where they talk about what–
Helena: Every five years.
Theodore: Sorry, every five years – what we should be eating and what we shouldn’t. And he’s criticizing it for its complexity and the inability of Americans to sort of access what it’s all about. And he says, “There’s a 453-page document that looks like it was written by the food processing industry. And we are going to come up with a document that is simple, that lets people know with great clarity what kinds of foods their children need to eat, what kinds of foods they can eat, what’s good for them, and what’s good nutrition.”
Are you buying it? What do you think?
Helena: I think they are going to do something simple. I do think that that is something that will happen. It’s hard, though, because what do you say that is not only science backed but also doesn’t raise massive fights within USDA?
So the thing to know about the Dietary Guidelines is that they’re jointly issued between USDA and HHS. And so it’s not just that the nutrition folks and the health folks are, like, Here is what the science says. That’s a big part of it, but then there’s also this other element of industry lobbying and industry influence and making sure it doesn’t say anything too bad about any one commodity. And there’s a whole industry built around influencing the Dietary Guidelines. It is kind of wild.
And then also we have a lot of evidence that shows that Americans mostly do not follow them. There’s a lot of things in there that have not changed over time, like eat fruits and vegetables, whole grains, lean protein. There’s all these recommendations that have been pretty consistent. And yet most people are not following them. So I do think they’re gonna do something different and something simple.
I think it’s probably gonna raise a lot of infighting within the agriculture community, especially if they do something saying, like, low carb is better or all of a sudden saying we’re not concerned about saturated fat at all. These are things that could happen.
At the West Virginia event, RFK Jr. did an event with Governor Patrick Morrissey there, and he actually – I think jokingly, but I’m not sure – said he was gonna put Morrissey on a carnivore diet. And then he said he would come back when he’d lost 30 pounds and do a celebratory event with him.
Governor Morrissey, by the way, throughout this event, was basically, like, I wanna improve my health, kind of insinuating he had some weight to lose, he wanted to be more active. So he kind of opened that door, and RFK really came in hot and also said he would be his personal trainer.
There was a lot going on there, but just mentioning the carnivore diet was, like, oh my gosh, to have a cabinet official mention that diet is kind of wild. That diet, taken in its most pure form, it’s mostly beef, maybe game meat, and salt, and water. That’s not a lot.
Theodore: I think what’s interesting about that for a political fight, though, is the role of corn and other commodity foods when it comes to ultra-processed foods. So if RFK Jr., in his simple vision for the nutrition guidelines, goes after those industries in the ways that he could, which is probably beneficial from a nutrition standpoint, what does someone like Rollins – who’s running the USDA, which is in charge of all these subsidies for our farmers who produce corn in all those states, where many of them are Republican states – how do those two viewpoints get reconciled?
Helena: I think there’s real tension here, and it’s not even just the processed food element, which is certainly there. One of the controversies about the dietary guidelines going into this round – so the last time they were issued was 2020, and now they’re due to be released in 2025 –was that the committee of outside experts that was asked to review all the evidence and then give the government a report, they had to look at ultra-processed foods and essentially whether or not there was enough evidence to tell people to eat less. I think they were specifically looking at the extent to which we have evidence that ultra-processed food consumption is tied to obesity and weight gain.
And that committee determined that there wasn’t enough evidence to make a recommendation on ultra-processed foods. Well, not everyone agrees with that conclusion, right? So this is a bit of a controversy within the nutrition community or within the research community.
Some folks think there is enough evidence – it’s mostly epidemiological or observational research. So we can associate higher consumption of these foods with poor health outcomes. It’s really hard to do randomized clinical control trials. It’s really expensive to do those with nutrition.
This is sort of a chronic problem with nutrition. So I think looking at what the administration could say on ultra-processed foods, regardless of what this committee said, is kind of where to look. And they don’t have to follow the recommendations from the committee.
There have been past instances where this committee told USDA and HHS to look at sustainability. They were, like, We think you should include sustainability as part of the considerations of the dietary guidelines, which in most cases would include recommending less consumption of meat because of the environmental footprint.
Well, that caused an all-out fricking war in Washington. And USDA and HHS during Obama were, like, No, we’re hands off this, we’re not gonna include this. So we’ve had past iterations where there have been, kind of, conflicts between what the advisory committee has said and what the government eventually does. And this may be a situation where we have an even bigger gap between what the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee says and what the government ultimately says.
But there is no question that there is going to be tensions between USDA and HHS because industry groups and commodities actually really care about what the dietary guidelines say. Like if it says to consume less of their product, they are going to lose it.
Theodore: It’s like the tobacco companies back in the day. I mean, the science, quote unquote, was not there on tobacco for many years, even though it was pretty apparent that you probably shouldn’t smoke for your good health. That seemed to be pretty clear before it became a public good.
Helena: And didn’t they specifically inject doubt, too, by funding studies that would say the opposite? There was just enough – I think there’s a whole book about this called Seeds of Doubt*, or something. I’m giving the wrong name. But there is a lot of history of industry at least confusing science or certainly funding science that is more tailored to their interests.
This is not new. But it’s particularly an issue with nutrition because we don’t have a lot of federal funding for nutrition research. I wrote about this a lot when I was at Politico. The funding for nutrition research is really, really small compared to the contribution of diet-related diseases to the overall health problems that we have as a country, and the costs.
And so in that vacuum, a lot of the nutrition research is industry funded and that creates, I think, more opportunities for conflicts of interest. That’s not to say that industry-funded research can’t be done well and in a rigorous, unbiased way. It can, but it introduces a lot more opportunities for conflicts.
So it’s just kind of a hot mess overall. And I think even if you see the government say something pretty different on nutrition, there’s gonna be even more noise about it because you’re probably gonna have a bunch of experts in the press saying, “This isn’t science based.” We probably have the opportunity for this to become, in some ways, even more confusing – even if they do issue something really simple, which I think they could.
One thing that’s also important to note: most people don’t know that we don’t have a food pyramid anymore. We have what’s called MyPlate. And if I had all my boxes unpacked in here, I would pull up the plate. I actually have one, and it’s basically just four quadrants. And it’s grains, protein, fruits, and vegetables. Half the plate’s fruits and vegetables.
And so that is fairly simple. The Obama administration revamped that to try to make it simpler, but the government hasn’t put very much money behind it. Most people don’t know that exists. There hasn’t been this massive campaign to promote that. Oh, by the way, it also has milk floating up there. So milk’s like its own thing. Drink milk with your plate. And there’s also lots of debate about whether or not that should be water or, you know, we could set that aside.
So, technically we do have a tool that’s kind of simple, but the government doesn’t really put much behind it.
Theodore: So I want us to get to another subject, and I think it’s somewhat related to the dietary guidelines and a simple plan, because you’re gonna need a simple plan to produce a document like this if everyone at HHS gets laid off. So why don’t we talk about that?
You had a number in your newsletter that there were up to 10,000 HHS workers who were laid off. I saw higher numbers than that. It’s pretty indicative of the way things are going these days that nobody actually knows how many people are getting laid off. But why don’t you talk to me about the impact of that, and not just the impact of the layoffs but the impact of us not knowing about the layoffs.
Helena: We don’t have a real total. And part of that is because this has come in multiple waves. So first we had the DOGE fork-in-the-road emails where they were kind of asking people to take, essentially, buyouts. So we had that. Then we had the probationary wave, which ended up knocking out a lot of new hires.
One of the challenges with that was that a lot of times the new hires are, specifically, what’s been identified as a need. Bird flu is a good example: we brought in new people to help deal with that because it was a huge issue. And so the probationary wave ended up being disruptive, but at each step we never got good numbers.
And even people within the administration or within the government were not often given the numbers. So they wouldn’t know how many people that I manage have taken a buyout, or have been swept up in these probationary firings. So there was that.
Then we get to this other wave, which is what’s known as a RIF — reduction in force. So that’s another acronym. It’s actually an acronym that I had not heard in my–
Theodore: It’s usually military related, I think.
Helena: Well, there you go. So yeah, it was not a term I was familiar with, with regard to FDA or USDA or CDC. I think, in general, past administrations, if they wanted to sort of shrink the size of government, they would just not backfill people. Or there are other ways of doing it, of having fewer people.
But this is a plan to actually drop out, in some cases, entire offices – just eliminate them. So actually almost the entire media and communications office at FDA has been RIFed. So all of the folks that I used to ask questions of have been laid off. Just to give you one example, which has been quite disruptive: Instead of saying, Here are my questions, and usually they take those to subject matter experts and then give them back – and I can usually get some substantive answers on things – now I have to submit everything through a contact form on HHS’s website.
Actually they have gotten back to me, I would say most of the time. But they’re pretty, usually pretty high-level responses and you’re not getting detailed responses to your question. So that’s just one specific example of how information flow is affected.
Engagement with outside stakeholders is also affected. So consumer groups, industry groups, a lot of people that are interfacing with these agencies, a lot of the folks they were usually meeting with or talking to and kind of facilitating those conversations – all those people have been RIFed. They did target more of the administrative roles. So on the face of it, you’re like, Oh, well, whatever. I’m sure every organization can lose some administrative folks or some overhead or whatever.
But it ends up having these other impacts – like those were the folks arranging the travel for the food inspectors. So they didn’t cut the food inspectors, and this was a big focus. And I think people understood that that part made sense. Like, nobody voted for fewer food inspections, right? That’s not part of MAHA to have less oversight. But if you are cutting some of the back-end functions or some of the support, like the labs that do some of the testing, if you’re getting rid of some of those kinds of ancillary functions, there ends up being a real impact. And so that’s kind of where we’re at now, sorting through what is gonna be the lasting effect of the RIFs.
Theodore: Plus you can also be re-RIFed, and un-RIFed.
Helena: You can be re-RIFed. And now the FDA commissioner has said that they’re gonna rehire some of these folks as contractors, or they’re going to hire contractors to do some of this work. And so it’s really hard to sort out how much of this is gonna really improve efficiency. A lot of people are not able to do their jobs right now because they’re confused about what’s going on. They don’t know who’s been let go or not.
I mentioned the probationary employees before: most of those people have been brought back, at least on the food side. So they ended up firing a lot of people who work on food additives. Well, this is a major MAHA priority, and they’ve brought back, I think, most if not all of those folks since then.
So part of this is a lot of wheels spinning. We’re like, Oh, did this happen? Did it not? Is it lasting? And it’s really difficult as a reporter to sift through what is a real impact. What is lasting? What is actually materially affecting our health and our safety and whatever. And what is a threatened change that didn’t actually happen but caused a lot of stress and chaos? There is a lot of sorting through that.
Theodore: So I’m gonna give RFK the last word on that hot mess, as you’ve described it. I’m gonna read a quote from him that you, I believe, put in your newsletter. So he’s talking about people getting fired or laid off and then being brought back, and he says we’re reinstating them. “That was always the plan…. We talked about this from the beginning. We’re gonna do 80 percent cuts and 28 percent of those are going to have to be reinstated because we’ll make mistakes.”
And this is – a technical term I use occasionally – banana cakes. Right? That this is the plan? Banana cakes even if you take that at face value, which I do not, I do not believe that that is the plan. But if you believe that that is the plan, it begs a particular question. Why is that the plan? And I’m curious, I mean, this is the last word and then I want us to move on to something a little happier, but tell me why that’s the plan.
Helena: So I think what Kennedy was referring to with the 80/20 is like an Elon Musk thing. I think it’s this general theory that you’re not cutting enough if people are not complaining or saying things are gonna break. And then once things break, you sort of get back the people you need. This is what he did at X, formerly Twitter.
Theodore: That worked out fantastically. They lost, what, 50 percent of their stock value through that.
Helena: I’m not an expert in X’s stock, but certainly that company’s not worth anything close to what it was. So that’s definitely true. That is, I think, part of the theory. And so what he was doing there was, I think, defending that theory of, you know, we’re going to be aggressive in our cuts and then we are going to make mistakes and we’ll bring those people back.
And specifically what he was talking about there is that he got asked by a reporter – I was at that event where he said that – about CDC’s children’s lead surveillance program. And so this is a program that actually a lot of people who have little kids have gotten their blood tested for lead at the pediatrician. This is just a routine screening, and we have a federal-state kind of partnership on screening kids for lead so that if their lead levels are too high, they will go into their homes and try to figure out why these kids are getting exposed to lead.
This is obviously something that would fall into MAHA, right? This is affecting the developmental potential of children, their IQ potential. I mean, there is no safe level of lead.
Theodore: Lead poison is bad. The whole Roman-empire-falling thing about lead, this is not good. You want the government to make sure kids are not ingesting lead in their homes.
Helena: And also it’s kind of an ironic thing because Kennedy first rose to prominence within the environmental movement over concerns about mercury in fish, which is another heavy metal contamination that is, by the way, caused mostly by pollution, by air pollution, that then gets in the food chain.
And so, like, that’s a whole other topic, which we should do another time, of how environmental regulations fit in with MAHA or not. But, so, anyway, he got asked about this and that’s where he said those people are gonna be reinstated.
Theodore: That’s not a very satisfactory answer, though.
Helena: Oh, I meant to check: did those people actually get put back on the job? One of the key things that that division did – it was about a year and a half ago – is they played an important role in figuring out – remember the lead applesauce pouch fiasco? Do you remember that? Hundreds of kids got lead poisoning from these cinnamon applesauce pouches that were imported and the cinnamon was highly contaminated with lead, and one of the only reasons we figured that out is because of this screening. They connected the dots and some state health officials were very on the ball.
You know, those are the things – those impacts where you can actually say consumers or kids could be less safe because of these cuts – I think those are the things that are important to focus on instead of, like, government officials are stressed out and confused.
I’m not saying that’s not a real impact, but I think right now when you’re trying to sort what are the facts on the ground, what are the cuts, which ones actually came into effect, and what is the impact of that – that’s what I’m trying to focus on as a reporter because there is so much chaos. There is so much change happening all at once, and it’s really hard to nail down the real story of what has happened.
Theodore: So I think we should change gears, but before we do I wanna give one last sort of thought about what that kind of chaos exemplifies. And I’m gonna quote, as I like to do, a New York Knick point guard from the 1970s, ’80s, the fabulous and much missed Michael Ray Richardson. And he was talking about basketball, but I think it’s applicable in this situation. He’s talking about a Knick season and he says, and I quote, “The ship be sinking.” And that’s sort of where we are.
All right, so with that in mind, I wanna change to our final segment, which we call Good Vibes, which is something, in many cases it’s unexpected, that’s happening in food policy that we kind of like. In this case, I’d like to hear from you as, and I am not a soy latte drinker, but you can tell me why this is a good thing. Go ahead.
Helena: Well, okay, so I try to steer clear of saying what is a good thing or a bad thing, but I think one of the things we were looking at is, What is bipartisan right now? Or what are people agreeing on? And there’s kind of two things that come up right now. And they both relate to milk, which is always a fun topic. And I say that because there’s just lots of fights about milk, it seems like, over time. There is a bill by, I think, Fetterman, Booker, and Kennedy, in Louisiana.
Theodore: An interesting trio right there.
Helena: Yes, a really interesting trio. There’s a new bill to essentially make sure that schools can serve plant-based milk options if they’re nutritionally equivalent with milk. And there’s a lot of students that are lactose intolerant or they don’t wanna drink milk or they maybe culturally don’t drink milk. I mean, there’s just a lot of layers here.
Theodore: Booker is a vegan, right?
Helena: He is a vegan, yeah. And milk is a really big part of the school meals program. It’s also a pretty significant – I can’t remember what the percentage is, I once knew this – but a significant percentage of the overall fluid milk demand is for the National School Lunch Program and the breakfast program.So they’re basically saying we should have plant milk as an option for schools.
Now maybe the downside here, the not-good vibes here, is that any bill like this that wants to change school meals is gonna face an uphill battle because Congress is so dysfunctional right now that they’re not really putting forward any big legislation other than this big budget bill, which we should do another episode on.
But school meals – we used to update those standards and policies every five years. And we don’t do that anymore because Congress is so dysfunctional. So any change like this that’s bipartisan, and maybe some people would consider common sense, has very little chance of being enacted.
The other thing that’s really bipartisan, and Fetterman is also on this bill, is trying to get whole milk back in schools. So at the same time we have this push for choice, right – it’s not even pushing plant-based milks, it’s just saying kids should have this choice in school – we also have this big push to get whole milk back in school. So basically the backstory here is ever since the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was the Michelle Obama era update to school meals, we took out whole milk and 2 percent and we went to non-fat and 1 percent milk.
And the idea was fewer calories, trying to address the childhood obesity epidemic. But since then there’s been more of a debate about whether or not that was the right thing to do because there’s some evidence that whole milk consumption is actually associated with a lower risk of obesity. So that gets kind of complicated, as all these nutrition debates are.
Theodore: It’s also kind of a nanny state thing where, Oh, well, the government is telling us we can’t drink real milk. My parents drank it, my grandparents, whatever, it –
Helena: It resonates, yeah, for sure it does. And that’s also bipartisan. There’s Democrats in the House that are pediatricians. I think Kim Schreyer from Washington state is one of the cosponsors of that bill in the House. And people don’t realize that back in 2023, the House actually passed a whole milk bill out of the full – like, the House of Representatives is barely voting on anything, right? They’re super dysfunctional. They passed that bill and it was like 330 to 99 or something. It was incredibly bipartisan to put whole milk back in school. So it’s just an interesting side example of where there randomly can be these strange-bedfellow coalitions and there can be some bipartisan cooperation.
I think the worry among some in the nutrition world is that the more you have Congress involved in these nutrition things, the more political they get. Like they would rather have the Institute of Medicine or the National Academies or, well, I guess now it’s the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, NASEM, it used to be IOM. But they wanna have these expert panels look at these issues so that it’s not Congress deciding what kids should be eating because that’s much more open to political conflicts of interest and political donations being the main driver. And so it is sort of a complicated question of how involved should Congress be in setting these rules? But it’s so interesting to see these very, very disparate interests and politically divided members agree on something like whole milk.
Theodore: Or, anything.
Helena: Yeah, it is. And I think a lot about how this moment we’re in with food and food policy has just been so scrambled. You can no longer tell if someone is liberal or conservative based on what foods they’re eating or what they’re talking about or whether or not they support certain things, like whole milk or plant milk. Like these are – they’ve just been scrambled. It’s just a very interesting time.
Theodore: So I think we’re gonna have to call that a moderately good vibe. It doesn’t make the full good-vibe standards.
Helena: The good vibe thing is hard because there’s so much news going on and there’s so much chaos in the media. And then also I truly try to not endorse ideas. But I do think, in general, bipartisanship is good. I’m willing to stake my flag on that.
Theodore: In the spirit of bipartisanship, I will agree with you, even though I don’t always agree.
Helena: Well, it can be bad too. Yeah.
Theodore: So I think that’s gotta be enough for today. We’ve had a lot to talk about and I really enjoyed it. I’m gonna take the last word: It’s gonna be very quick and then we’re just gonna say goodbye. But before we do that, tell everybody how they can sign up for your newsletter.
Helena: Yeah, you can just go to foodfix.co and you can sign up for free. Every Friday, except not this one – I’m not sure when we’re gonna post this.
Theodore: You’ll be back at it, after spring break–
Helena: Yes, it’s mostly every Friday.
Theodore: So last thought before we go. Egg prices: still up. Thank you very much.
Teresa: REAP/SOW and Forked are both productions of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross, Tom Laskawy, and Brent Cunningham. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Katie Gardner is the producer of Forked and the video producer for REAP/SOW. I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos.
Special thanks to Food Fix’s Helena Bottemiller Evich for her work on this episode.
Find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent, non-profit reporting at www.thefern.org
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