WASHINGTON: A senior US Food and Drug Administration official who recently oversaw the agency’s banning of a coloring linked to cancer has resigned to protest “indiscriminate” firings by President Donald Trump’s government, reports said Tuesday.
Jim Jones, who joined the FDA in 2023, wrote in a letter seen by Bloomberg News that the layoffs of 89 staffers in the food division which he heads will severely hinder efforts to implement Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s agenda of improving Americans' diets.
“I was looking forward to working to pursue the department’s agenda of improving the health of Americans by reducing diet-related chronic disease and risks from chemicals in food,“ he said, but the new administration’s “disdain for the very people” needed to make these goals a reality meant it was “fruitless for me to continue in this role.”
The resignation was first reported by industry publication Food Fix.
Jones's departure comes amid widespread federal job cuts involving thousands of people, as Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency spearheads an aggressive downsizing initiative, particularly targeting employees still within their probationary period, which lasts at least a year.
Last week, AFP reported that nearly half of an elite team of epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), known as the “disease detectives,“ were also dismissed. Experts warn that such cuts could endanger public health, especially as concerns grow over the potential for a broader bird flu outbreak in humans.
Jones, who previously served in the Environmental Protection Agency, last month oversaw a ban on Red Dye No 3, a coloring long known to cause cancer in animals but still widely used in thousands of US food products.
Health Secretary Kennedy has positioned food industry reform as a cornerstone of his “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, advocating against harmful chemicals and non-nutritive additives while pushing for stricter labeling laws to combat the nation’s obesity epidemic.
