When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his presidential campaign in 2024 and endorsed Donald Trump, he helped create the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) political movement within the overall Trump campaign coalition. This diverse movement has focused on lowering the prevalence of chronic diseases, increasing regulatory transparency, and improving healthy outcomes in our nation’s food and agricultural systems. The growth of this movement has helped spark a wave of state legislative actions to regulate food products. Dozens of bills in more than 15 states, from liberal enclaves like California and Oregon to conservative bastions like Louisiana and Texas, have been introduced as part of this MAHA wave. While food additives may deserve more attention from regulators, the emergence of a complex patchwork of 50 different state regulatory frameworks would limit available options to consumers, hamper healthy foods innovation, significantly increase state operating and regulatory costs, and greatly increase grocery store costs for taxpayers. In essence, this new haphazard patchwork of laws will hurt the health and wallets of the very Americans advocates are trying to help.
Instead of creating a random patchwork of food laws across our states, taxpayers would be better served by the creation of uniform safeguards at the federal level. The Administration has already taken great strides to improve the health of Americans. To build on these efforts, the FRESH and Affordable Foods Act, sponsored by Representative Kat Cammack (R-FL), would provide the Administration with the tools necessary to improve the quality of America’s food supply, making Americans’ diets healthier while also keeping more money in their wallets. This draft bill would create uniform food and beverage regulation standards, creating a consistent national framework for food ingredients and products. It would also establish standards for marketing, labeling, sale, use, and registration of food and beverages. It would require food and beverage makers to participate in mandatory “GRAS” (Generally Recognized as Safe) registration processes, ensuring transparency for customers and allowing for science-based decision-making. The bill also creates a process for the FDA to reassess food supply safety on an ongoing basis, including creating a pathway for third-party scientific panels to assess substances, as well as building a robust stakeholder input process. If ingredients are determined to be unsafe, the bill draft creates a system to quickly remove them from the market.
Unlike many other legislative proposals, this draft legislation includes language that pays for the new processes created by the bill. Food and beverage makers would be required to pay a biennial registration fee, with different levels based on firm annual revenue, to cover the costs of FDA’s review of their food ingredients. This provision would be subject to reauthorization, allowing Congress to assess how well the fee structure covers costs.
This legislation would go a long way toward returning the American food market to a broader national system that lowers costs through the benefit of interstate commerce, while also ensuring the federal government has the tools available to better regulate the ingredients in our food supply. It would lower costs by making labeling more uniform. As labeling errors were the primary cause of food recalls in 2024, this is no small feat. If the patchwork of state regulatory frameworks is allowed to multiply, it could cost product makers over 26 times their current costs ($361 million) to fully comply with the new labeling requirements.
As the market would be more uniform and transparent, the FDA would have the opportunity to encourage the food industry to use these tools to move the food supply in a healthier direction. This scenario would greatly increase the likelihood that the food and beverage industry would pursue innovative new ingredients and products that benefit the American consumer. At a time when a large percentage of Americans, who are paying 40% more for fruits and vegetables due to large, fixed costs in supplying them to stores, note that the high cost of healthy food is the biggest barrier to a healthy diet, this is not the time to stifle food product innovation.
Outside of improved nutritional outcomes, the key benefit of this proposed legislation would be lower costs for consumers, as recent research points to a possible increase in annual grocery costs of at least 12%, as well as a reduced variety of products available on grocery shelves, if the state-by-state food ingredient regulation patchwork is allowed to proliferate.
A clear national framework would also help American products compete better globally, with standards that are better understood by the international community. The FDA’s science-based focus on the regulation of food ingredients would also limit our exposure to trade disputes under international agreements governing the permissibility of imported food and beverage products.
This is not an entirely new dilemma for policymakers. Ten years ago, Congress stepped in to set up a clear standard for GMO (genetically modified organisms) food labels, and the original FDA was put in place partially in response to the chaos created by wildly different food standards in the various states, with food deception running rampant. This is a core reason why the Founding Fathers put the Commerce Clause into our Constitution, as they rightly understood that interstate commerce requires some federal oversight to ensure smooth and transparent operations.
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted this point in an interview a few months ago, noting that having different rules in 50 different markets would be “impossible.” The food industry is actively working with the Administration to help make healthier foods for Americans, and this draft bill would provide the FDA with the tools to help get this done.