The incoming chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in a new administration determined to “make America healthy again” is a junk food lobbyist whose recent experience includes running the National Oilseed Processors Association (NOPA) and the Edible Oil Producers Association (EOPA).
On Tuesday, the USDA announced Kailee Tkacz Buller’s appointment under Secretary-Designate Brooke Rollins, who testified in a confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday. Buller also previously worked as a lobbyist for the snack industry trade group, SNAC International, and the Corn Refiners Association, another trade association behind ingredients for popular junk foods such as high-fructose corn syrup. The new chief of staff for the USDA became president and CEO of NOPA and EOPA after spending more than three years in the Department of Agriculture under President Trump’s first term.
Buller’s appointment became a trending topic on X Thursday night after Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., published a screenshot of the USDA’s press release.
Some pointed out the hire of a seed oil lobbyist seemingly contradicts the new administration’s platform to “make America healthy again” by way of eliminating corporate influence over the federal government’s most powerful agencies regulating food and medicine.
“Not the best of news,” wrote Max Lugavere, an author who appeared at a roundtable on nutrition organized by allies of President Trump’s health agenda last September.
President Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has repeatedly condemned seed oils as inflammatory drivers of obesity and chronic disease. In his August endorsement speech of the Republican nominee, Kennedy indicted foods that “consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils” engineered by “laboratory scientists” from the cigarette industry for proliferating the nation’s health care crises.
“We are mass poisoning all of our children,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy has been even more outspoken about the “corporate capture” of the nation’s most power regulatory agencies and pledged to “slam shut the revolving door” of influence. Kennedy said on NewsNation that eliminating corruption and conflicts of interest were his top two priorities delivered to him by President Trump just days before the November election. A series of the president’s senior picks at the USDA, however, according to Politico, have shown the “potential limits of Kennedy’s power to pursue his ‘Make America Healthy Again’ agenda in a Trump administration attuned to the concerns of industry.”
A source close to Kennedy told The Federalist his team had pushed for Massie as secretary of USDA and called the president’s latest choice of a seed oil lobbyist to serve as the agency’s chief of staff a “slap in the face to the MAHA movement.”
Nina Teicholz, Ph.D. in nutrition and author of Big Fat Surprise, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Examiner last December on why the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should re-examine the oils’ status of “generally recognized as safe” under Kennedy.
“Seed oil is chemically unstable. Its fatty acids degrade into oxidation products such as free radicals and degraded triglycerides. In one analysis, 130 volatile compounds were isolated from a piece of fried chicken, and these oxidation products can pass through the blood-brain barrier,” she wrote. “Seed oils degrade and oxidize even at room temperature, but heat accelerates the process, making frying especially hazardous… Yet, public health institutions remain staunch supporters.”
U.S. consumption of soybean oil jumped more than a thousand-fold from 1909 to1999 while grain consumption has increased nearly 30 percent since the 1970s. Seventy-three percent of the American food supply is now ultraprocessed products operating on colossal taxpayer subsidies. In a September op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy said he wanted to reform these subsidies given the incumbent program is “so backward that less than 2% of farm subsidies go to fruits and vegetables.”
“Soybean oil in the 1990s became a major source of American calories,” Kennedy wrote, “and high-fructose corn syrup is everywhere,” driven by a subsidy regime to make corn, soybeans, and wheat, “artificially cheap.”
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