The American diet is increasingly a state-managed affair. For more than a century, Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies like the FDA, USDA, CDC, and EPA have determined what goes into our food, how it must be labeled, which claims can be advertised, and even what counts as “healthy.” Yet despite all this oversight, Americans are heavier, sicker, and less active than ever.
This is no coincidence. The economics of government food control make success nearly impossible. Misaligned incentives, regulatory capture, and the knowledge problem ensure that bureaucratic management of something as personal and local as food can only produce failure. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. touts his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement, he would do well to recognize his limits. Although government has been promising to improve our diets for decades, the population has grown increasingly unhealthy.
A Century of Bureaucratic Control
The regulatory state’s reach into food has grown steadily since the early twentieth century, justified by crises and fortified by the permanent expansion of agencies. The result is a sprawling network of federal overseers that collectively shape nearly everything Americans eat.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which originated in 1927 as the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration, regulates around 80 to 90 percent of the nation’s food supply, essentially everything except most meat, poultry, and some egg products. Its rules govern the nutrition facts panels that dominate every package, the allergen warnings on ingredient lists, and the health claims that can be attached to cereals, beverages, or supplements. It polices food additives, infant formula, seafood, bottled water, and countless other categories. Inspections, recalls, and enforcement actions flow from FDA offices across the country.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), through its Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), handles what the FDA does not: meat, poultry, and processed egg products. Its inspectors are a constant presence in slaughterhouses and processing plants, ensuring compliance with federal standards. Beyond safety, the USDA certifies organics, sets grain standards, and administers the massive food assistance programs, SNAP, WIC, and school meals, that shape the diets of tens of millions of Americans.
Other agencies join the fray. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigates outbreaks of foodborne illness. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) establishes limits for pesticide residues and enforces water-quality standards that affect agriculture. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) oversees food advertising and polices marketing claims, especially those targeting children. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) guard America’s ports and borders, coordinating with FDA and USDA to prevent tainted imports from entering the country.
Taken together, these agencies form a web of control that is both ubiquitous and constantly expanding. For more than 100 years, the federal bureaucracy has asserted that such oversight is necessary for public health. Yet the results speak for themselves.
The State of American Health
The macro statistics are sobering. Adult obesity has more than doubled since 1980. Between 1999–2000 and 2021–2023, the prevalence of obesity among adults rose from 30.5 percent to 40.3 percent. Diabetes, including undiagnosed cases, afflicts nearly 15 percent of adults today, up from less than 10 percent at the turn of the millennium. Childhood obesity tells a similarly grim story: just 5 percent of children were obese in the early 1970s, compared to nearly 20 percent by 2020.
Life expectancy has stagnated. Americans can expect to live 78.4 years, still below pre-pandemic levels and far behind peer nations. Diet quality remains dismal, with the national Healthy Eating Index, a measure of diet quality, hovering at 58 out of 100. Ultra-processed foods now make up 57 percent of adult caloric intake, up from 53 percent in the early 2000s.
If bureaucratic control were a recipe for health, America should be thriving. Instead, despite decades of tighter rules, more labeling, and larger nutrition programs, the trajectory has been unrelentingly downward. Why? No doubt some portion of these results reflects Americans’ own poor decisions. But much of the answer lies not in a lack of good intentions but in the economics of centralized food governance. Three fundamental economic problems plague government management of food: misaligned incentives, regulatory capture, and the knowledge problem. This ensures that bureaucratic control fails where individual choice and market feedback are required.
Misaligned Incentives
Public Choice Theory teaches us that bureaucrats are not neutral technocrats acting in the public interest. They are people responding to incentives, just as consumers and businesses do. Economist William Niskanen famously argued that bureaucrats seek to maximize their budgets because bigger budgets mean more staff, higher salaries, greater prestige, and expanded authority.
Consumers want food that is tasty, affordable, healthy, and convenient. Each person weighs those trade-offs differently. Some value convenience over health, others seek the cheapest option, and still others are willing to pay more for nutrition or sustainability. These are diverse, individual preferences.
Bureaucrats, by contrast, want to expand their agency’s scope. They achieve this through “scope creep” (redefining risks to expand jurisdiction), tightening standards that require more paperwork, staging visible enforcement actions, and seizing upon crises to lock in permanent authority. Agencies build monopolies on expertise through labs, surveillance networks, and proprietary data. Their success is measured not in healthier citizens but in the number of inspections conducted, recalls issued, or guidance documents published.
Regulators often serve the interests of the industries they oversee, not the public. This is not accidental but inherent in the structure of centralized regulation.
The FDA, for instance, broadens its oversight by redefining what counts as “added sugars” or “healthy” claims. The USDA expands its inspection apparatus with new microbial tests and stricter hazard standards. The CDC launches more outbreak dashboards, the EPA tightens pesticide tolerances, and the FTC extends its advertising scrutiny. Each step justifies larger budgets and greater control, regardless of whether outcomes improve.
Over the decades, this dynamic has ballooned agencies far beyond their original mandates. The FDA, once a modest office, now regulates everything from biologics to tobacco. FDA headcount increased by 79 percent between 2007 and 2019. The USDA has morphed from an agricultural support agency into a sprawling bureaucracy whose budget ballooned by 61 percent in the eight years between 2006 and 2014. The CDC, founded to fight malaria in 1946, has become the nation’s vast public-health agency, tasked with everything from obesity to pandemics. The headcount at the CDC increased by 28 percent between 2007 and 2018. Growth is constant because growth serves bureaucratic self-interest, not necessarily the public’s health.
Regulatory Capture
Even if bureaucrats sought only the public good, they face another trap: regulatory capture. Nobel laureate George Stigler described this phenomenon in the 1970s: regulators, meant to discipline industry, are instead co-opted by it. Industry actors, who have strong financial stakes, invest heavily in shaping regulation to their advantage, while the public remains diffuse and underrepresented.
Food regulation is riddled with capture. The FDA relies heavily on industry “user fees” to fund its drug programs; 46 percent of its budget comes directly from the companies it regulates. This dependence creates perverse incentives to accommodate the industry. The controversial approval of Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm revealed “atypical” backchannel coordination between the FDA and the company, according to a bipartisan congressional investigation.
The CDC has faced scandals over corporate influence as well. Emails obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that Coca-Cola was cultivating ties with CDC officials, shaping conversations about obesity to emphasize “energy balance” over sugar consumption. Such episodes illustrate how private donors and the CDC can bend public-health priorities toward corporate goals.
The USDA’s conflicts are perhaps the most blatant. It is tasked both with promoting American agriculture and regulating its safety, a dual mandate the Government Accountability Office has criticized for decades. The USDA subsidizes corn more than any other US crop, driving down the price of high-fructose corn syrup and fueling its widespread use in foods, a trend closely linked to rising obesity rates. In 2010, the USDA worked with Domino’s Pizza to introduce pies with 40 percent more cheese, all while warning the public about saturated fat.
The EPA, too, has long been vulnerable. Its pesticide program relies heavily on studies conducted by manufacturers themselves. Political appointees with industry ties have tilted decisions on controversial chemicals like glyphosate and chlorpyrifos, sometimes in defiance of the agency’s own scientists.
These examples reveal a pattern: regulators often serve the interests of the industries they oversee, not the public. This is not accidental but inherent in the structure of centralized regulation.
The Knowledge Problem
Even if incentives were perfectly aligned and capture eliminated, government would still fail at managing food because of the knowledge problem. F. A. Hayek explained that no central planner can ever gather the dispersed, tacit knowledge held by individuals in society. Food, perhaps more than any other good, is intensely local and personal.
Consider the FDA’s drug approvals. Decisions are based on limited clinical data, yet populations are diverse. Vioxx was approved after showing efficacy in trials, but widespread use revealed severe cardiovascular risks. That crucial knowledge emerged only through the decentralized observations of doctors and patients.
Another shortcoming of FDA regulations is the notion of preemption. The practice of preemption locks the entire country into the cautious instincts of federal regulators, no matter how poorly those instincts fit real-world needs. When federal regulators preempt, they set one-size-fits-all rules that override state and local discretion, or even individual choice, removing whole categories of options from the table.
The FDA’s drug approval process illustrates this dynamic. Regulators are judged harshly if they allow an unsafe product to slip through, but they face no penalty for blocking, or indefinitely delaying, drugs that might help millions. As a result, they are biased toward excessive caution. This dynamic means patients, doctors, and even states cannot legally choose differently, even if they are willing to accept the risks. What looks like “safety” from Washington often translates into fewer choices and slower innovation on the ground.
The CDC suffers from the knowledge problem when it issues uniform guidelines on disease response, but these prescriptions often clash with local realities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, national directives on school closures or masking frequently ignored the economic and social trade-offs of particular communities. Rural schools with few cases faced the same mandates as dense urban districts, despite vastly different conditions.
The USDA’s dietary guidelines set national standards for programs like school lunches and SNAP. Yet diets are shaped by culture, affordability, and supply chains. Mandates for low-fat dairy or whole grains often result in wasted food because they do not match local tastes or budgets. A centralized prescription cannot capture the variety of American diets.
The EPA’s one-size-fits-all environmental rules encounter the same problem. The Clean Power Plan attempted to impose national carbon standards, but regional energy grids differ dramatically. Pesticide regulations fail to account for local pest pressures that vary by climate and soil. Central planners cannot incorporate the granular, context-specific knowledge held by farmers, families, and communities.
The knowledge problem guarantees that bureaucratic food governance will misfire, even under the best of circumstances.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement has tapped into a genuine crisis. Americans are indeed unhealthy, and the decline is alarming. But the answer is not another layer of federal control. The economics of government regulation ensure that centralized solutions will fail.
If Americans are serious about restoring health, they will need a different approach: empowering individuals, families, and communities to make their own choices about food, unencumbered by the dictates of distant bureaucracies. Knowing how to live a healthy lifestyle is challenging; there is a constant interplay between diet, exercise, food safety, and environmental factors. This complexity no doubt poses intrinsic challenges in an incredibly multifaceted and free society. But the answer is not to give bureaucrats top-down control over what can and cannot go into our food.
The answer lies in a multipronged approach. Let farmers innovate, let entrepreneurs experiment with labeling, guidelines, and ingredients, and let consumers decide. Health will not be restored by more recalls, more labeling mandates, or more bureaucratic programs. It will be restored by food and health freedom.
In the end, the only way to make America healthy is to let Americans cook.