Trump Administration Faces Lawsuit Over Meat and Dairy Influence in Dietary Guidelines
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) filed the case in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Its complaint alleges that the Trump administration replaced the independent Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee with a panel assembled without the transparency and public involvement required under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).
The lawsuit says the resulting guidance supports eating beef, pork and other red meat, gives renewed prominence to whole milk, and promotes butter and tallow. It also retains a recommendation that saturated fat should account for less than 10% of total calorie intake. PCRM president Neal Barnard said, “The government allowed the meat and dairy industries to ghostwrite the dietary guidelines.”
Under the usual process, the Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Agriculture establish an advisory committee whose scientific report forms the basis for the recommendations. The previous committee, created in January 2023, had 20 independent nutrition experts and spent two years holding public hearings and consultations. Its report recommended giving greater priority to plant-based proteins than to animal sources.
PCRM says the replacement panel consisted of nine members, eight of whom had received funding from the livestock industry. Three had received grants or done consulting work for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association; one of those had also received a research grant from the National Pork Board and served as an adviser to it. Five members had financial connections to dairy organisations including the National Dairy Council and Dairy Management Inc.
Another panel member co-founded HLTH, a high-protein meal-replacement brand based on whey, egg whites and hydrolysed grass-fed collagen. More than half of the advisers also had links to organisations associated with USDA checkoff programmes. PCRM says those programmes promote agricultural commodities, while federal law prohibits them from influencing government policy or action.
The replacement panel completed its work in three months and did not conduct the comprehensive food-pattern modelling used in the standard process, according to the complaint. PCRM alleges that the final guidelines reduced recommended fruit and vegetable servings by half, removed daily limits on alcohol consumption and endorsed fad diets as medical treatment for people with certain chronic diseases.
The organisation argues that the guidance could affect children because school meal programmes must follow it, as well as people with medical conditions and Americans at risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. It is seeking an order requiring the administration to withdraw the recommendations and preventing agencies from using them in future decisions while new guidelines are prepared under FACA. PCRM previously brought challenges involving the 2000, 2010, 2015 and 2020 guidelines; in the 2000 case, a federal judge found violations of FACA and the Freedom of Information Act.
