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During a raucous hearing<\/a> before the Senate Finance Committee today that included both heckling and applause (neither of which are standard), Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) asked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Trump\u2019s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to explain his Make America Healthy Again<\/a> vision.<\/p>\n \u201cSomething is poisoning the American people and we know that the primary culprits are the changing food supply, the switch to highly chemical-intensive processed foods,\u201d Kennedy said. \u201cWe need to fix our food supply, and that\u2019s the number one.\u201d In his opening statement, he also said he \u201cwill scrutinize the chemical additives in our food supply.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite those comments, Kennedy\u2019s potential oversight of the FDA\u2014which regulates food additives, food safety recalls, and antibiotic use in agriculture\u2014was barely mentioned throughout the hearing. Instead, Republican senators generally praised his overall commitment to investigating the root causes of chronic diseases, while Democrats hammered him on his past false statements on vaccines<\/a> and anti-vaccine advocacy, his actions tied to a deadly measles outbreak<\/a>, and his recent about-face on the issue of abortion and how that might impact access to the medication mifepristone. Medicare and Medicaid were also popular topics.<\/p>\n And while no one asked him much of anything about the FDA, the USDA\u2014an agency he will not oversee\u2014came up several times, with several farm-state Republicans asking Kennedy to commit to working in collaboration with farmers and the agency that supports and regulates them. Kennedy said President Trump \u201chas specifically instructed me that he wants farmers involved in every policy and that he wants me to work with Brooke Rollins at USDA<\/a> to make sure that we preserve American farmers, that all of our policies support them.\u201d<\/p>\n Later, he said that while he won\u2019t have regulatory power over farms, he thinks the government should incentivize a transition to what he called \u201cregenerative agriculture, no-till agriculture, and to less chemically intensive. And by the way,\u201d he added, \u201cI\u2019ve also met with the chemical industry and the fertilizer and herbicide companies, and they want to do the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n (In our investigative reporting last year, we extensively documented the pesticide industry\u2019s tactics<\/a> for keeping chemicals in use despite documented health and environmental risks. Just this month, Bayer, one of the world\u2019s largest agrichemical companies, hired Ballard Partners<\/a>, a D.C. lobby firm with multiple ties to Trump\u2019s inner circle.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n