Regenerative Agriculture: A National Revolution or an Experiment?

President Trump’s Executive Order on Advancing Regenerative Agriculture has generated considerable enthusiasm among supporters of the MAHA movement. Headlines suggest that the administration is fundamentally reshaping American agriculture, reducing dependence on agricultural chemicals, and restoring the nation’s food supply.But let’s read the fine print.BrandingThe executive order contains real policy changes. It also contains considerable branding. Understanding the difference is important.The order directs USDA to expand its existing Regenerative Pilot Program, collect and publish performance data, and establish new public-private partnerships to support regenerative farming. It instructs EPA to accelerate review of alternative crop-protection products, revisit labeling for pre-harvest desiccants, and work with USDA and HHS to develop improved methods for evaluating cumulative chemical exposures.These are meaningful directives. At the same time, the order makes clear that nothing requires regulatory action beyond existing statutory authority and that implementation remains subject to appropriations.This is not a sweeping rewrite of agricultural law. It is an administrative roadmap.The $700 Million Program Isn’t NewOne of the most widely reported aspects of the executive order is the administration’s$700 million Regenerative Pilot Program. Reading the headlines, one might conclude that the executive order created a massive new federal initiative.It did not.The $700 million pilot was actually announced by the USDA inDecember 2025, six months before this executive order. The program was funded by redirecting existing conservation dollars, with$400 million from EQIPand$300 million from CSP. Since then, USDA has already begun implementing the program, completing tens of thousands of whole-farm conservation plans, enrolling millions of acres, and obligating hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts.The executive order does not appropriate another $700 million. Instead, it builds upon the existing pilot, expands interagency coordination, directs USDA to collect and publish results, incorporates EPA and HHS into the effort, and embeds the program within the broader MAHA agenda.That distinction matters.This executive order is less about creating a new program than about institutionalizing one that is already underway.The pilot itself is built around practices that many farmers have used successfully for decades. Participating producers enter a minimum five-year agreement that includes a whole-farm assessment, baseline and follow-up soil testing, and implementation of approved conservation practices.Those practices include cover crops, no-till and reduced tillage, rotational grazing, nutrient management, irrigation improvements, integrated pest management, contour farming, mulching, and related soil-health practices.Will the dogs eat the dog food?None of this is revolutionary. Much of it represents an expansion of conservation programs that the USDA has promoted for years. But promoting a practice is not the same as farmers adopting it.The real question is whether American agriculture, particularly large commercial producers, will embrace these changes. Farmers are practical businesspeople. They will adopt regenerative practices if they maintain yields, reduce input costs, improve profitability, or provide access to premium markets. If they do not, no executive order will change how millions of acres are farmed.In the end, the success of this initiative will be determined not in Washington, but in the fields.Follow the MoneyDespite the attention it has received, regenerative agriculture remains a relatively small component of federal agricultural policy.The administration has highlighted the $700 million pilot program, which sounds substantial until it is placed in context. This is not a massive new farm entitlement. It is funding redirected from existing conservation programs.Compare that with the rest of the USDA budget.Federal crop insurance costs taxpayers roughly$15 to $16 billion every year. Commodity support programs for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, dairy, beef, and sugar total well over a$100 billionin the coming decade. Corn producers alone are projected to receive nearly$40 billionin federal support. Wheat producers receive more than$20 billion. USDA’s broader conservation portfolio totals more than$70 billionover ten years.This allocation for this pilot program represents 1% of the USDA's $70 billion conservation program allocation.As long as Congress continues to subsidize industrial commodity production at that scale, regenerative agriculture will remain at a structural disadvantage. The government is effectively telling farmers, "We'd like you to adopt these new practices," while simultaneously making it far less risky and more profitable to continue farming the old way.Regenerative agriculture remains a niche conservation initiative layered onto an agricultural system that continues to be dominated by conventional commodity production.The headlines suggest a revolution.The budget suggests an experiment.The MAHA NarrativeThe administration also frames regenerative agriculture as part of its broader Make America Healthy Again agenda.The implication is straightforward. Healthier soils produce healthier plants. Healthier plants produce more nutrient-dense food. Better food contributes to healthier Americans and fewer chronic diseases.But it is important to distinguish aspiration from demonstrated policy.The executive order establishes no national nutrient-density standard.It creates no comprehensive food-quality monitoring system.It does not require the measurement of nutrient content before and after implementation,Nor does it establish a framework for demonstrating improvements in human health attributable to regenerative farming.These all remain aspirational rather than outcomes established by this policy.Public-private partnershipsThe most revealing language in the executive order may not concern farming at all.It concernspublic-private partnerships.At first glance, this appears entirely reasonable. Private companies may help finance conservation practices that farmers otherwise could not afford.But public-private partnerships also create markets.Whenever the government establishes measurement systems, certification standards, and reporting requirements, private companies inevitably emerge to verify compliance, collect data, certify performance, and monetize the results.This is where the executive order becomes more consequential than many might realize.USDA’s accompanying announcement does more than discuss soil health. It links regenerative agriculture to a proposedRegenerative Feedstock Ruleand a newFeedstock Carbon Intensity Calculator. Those are not simply conservation initiatives. They create the infrastructure needed to assign measurable environmental attributes to agricultural commodities.In practical terms, that means regenerative farming is becoming something that can be measured, certified, marketed, and potentially monetized through biofuels, premium supply chains, and other environmental markets.The $700 million pilot helps farmers adopt regenerative practices.The Feedstock Rule begins creating the economic incentives that encourage them to stay there.That may ultimately prove beneficial. Farmers could receive premiums for lower-input production while improving soil health and reducing costs.But it also opens the door to an expanding ecosystem of certification companies, verification systems, carbon accounting, environmental scoring, and supply-chain reporting. Yep, more bureaucratic control and reporting. More big government.Meanwhile, Congress continues to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars supporting the very industrial agricultural system that regenerative farming is supposed to replace. Until those subsidies are seriously reformed, regenerative agriculture will remain the underdog, regardless of how many pilot programs or executive orders are announced. Whether farmers ultimately benefit will depend upon who controls these new systems and who ultimately captures the money.The Chemical StrategyThat tension came into sharp focus in the recent Roundup case before the Supreme Court. The Trump administration argued that federal pesticide labeling law preempts many state-law failure-to-warn claims, effectively supporting Bayer's position that EPA-approved labels should shield the company from liability. Because that position relied on EPA's longstanding determination that glyphosate labels do not require a cancer warning, the grassroots MAHA movement viewed it as a profound betrayal.To many supporters, an administration that had promised to challenge entrenched agricultural interests instead appears to defend the existing regulatory framework governing one of the world's most controversial herbicides, siding with the very agricultural system it had pledged to reformThe regenerative agriculture executive order suggests another possibility.Rather than attempting to remove glyphosate, atrazine, and other agricultural chemicals through immediate regulation, the administration may be trying to reduce dependence on them by changing the economics of farming. Encourage regenerative production. Accelerate alternative crop-protection technologies. Improve methods for evaluating cumulative chemical exposures. Create premium markets for lower-input production. Then allow farmer adoption and market forces to reduce reliance on conventional herbicides over time.Whether that strategy could possibly succeed is another question.The regenerative pilot is real, but it remains a $700 million conservation initiative inside an agricultural economy supported by tens of billions of dollars each year in crop insurance, commodity programs, and other federal subsidies. Against that backdrop, it is difficult to imagine this executive order, by itself, fundamentally changing how Big Ag operates.The problem is scale.The American agricultural system was built around the philosophy championed by former Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz under Nixon: plant fence row to fence row, maximize yields, specialize production, and rely on synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and mechanization to produce the greatest quantity of food at the lowest possible cost. Every major federal program, from crop insurance to commodity payments, revolves around that model.Against that backdrop, a $700 million regenerative pilot program is little more than a rounding error. It is difficult to imagine that modest conservation incentives, however well-intentioned, will overcome an agricultural economy supported by tens of billions of dollars each year in subsidies, crop insurance, processing infrastructure, export markets, and decades of investment in high-input production.If the administration and Congress truly intend to reduce dependence on glyphosate, atrazine, and other agricultural chemicals, it will eventually have to confront the economic system that rewards their use. Until then, this executive order is more likely to influence a relatively small number of willing participants than fundamentally change how Big Ag operates.Whether this is the opening move in a long-term transformation or simply another conservation initiative wrapped in MAHA branding remains to be seen.We answer to our readers, not advertisers or corporate sponsors. If you value independent reporting grounded in evidence and original analysis, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriberConclusionThis executive order is neither empty symbolism nor transformational reform.There is real conservation funding, real policy direction, and genuine potential to improve soil health for a modest number of farms. There is also considerable branding, ambitious health claims that remain to be demonstrated, and the early architecture of new markets built around certification, environmental attributes, and private investment.  In other words, a mixture of substance, potential, hype and political spin.The larger question is whether this strategy can meaningfully change American agriculture. A $700 million pilot is unlikely to reshape an industry that is supported by tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies and crop insurance each year. Farmers will ultimately decide. If regenerative systems maintain yields while improving profitability, adoption will spread. If they do not, no executive order will overcome the realities of the marketplace.For now, this appears less like a revolution than the opening move in a long game. Whether it becomes the beginning of a genuine transition away from high-input agriculture, or simply another well-intentioned conservation program, will depend far more on economics than on executive orders.JGM/RWMIf this article deserves a wider audience, please help us get it there. Share it, repost it, and cross-post it wherever thoughtful conversations are taking place. Your support extends far beyond a subscription.Share


Sunday Strip: Hold My Beer

One of the stranger developments in modern political journalism is that pregnancy itself has apparently become a partisan act. According to the New York Times, when Usha Vance is pregnant, it isn't simply a family welcoming another child. It is interpreted as a plot against democrats, a demographic strategy, or evidence of the MAGA takeover of the world - by having a baby boom.Apparently, having babies is no longer biology. It is politics. By this logic, pregnancy should require a panel discussion with sociologists, campaign strategists, and fact-checkers. One almost expects the next headline to read: "Area Couple Secretly Conceives Child in Coordinated Attempt to Influence the 2044 Electoral Map."Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThis is brilliant!Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Cause finding all these memes week and week, isn’t child’s play (or maybe it is)?


Stewardship and the Work of Freedom

Audio Version:This year, America marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. There will be fireworks, parades, speeches, and plenty of political debate about what America was, is, and should become. But long before Independence Day became a holiday, the founders understood that freedom was never just a political concept. A republic could survive only if its citizens were capable of governing themselves, providing for their families, and taking responsibility for their own lives.That is why we chose to end our new book,Homesteading for Health,with the chapter below. It is less about gardening, livestock, or preserving food than it is about the deeper purpose behind all of those things. We believe homesteading is one expression of American citizenship. Whether you live on hundreds of acres, a suburban lot, or in an apartment with a few pots of herbs on the balcony, the principle is the same: reclaiming agency over your food, your health, your household, and ultimately your future.As we approach America’s 250th birthday, it seems an appropriate time to share the closing pages of our book. We hope they remind readers that independence is not something celebrated only on the Fourth of July. It is something practiced every day.This is the final chapter ofHomesteading for Health. If it resonates with you, we hope you’ll consider picking up a copy of the book, where we explore in much greater depth the practical skills, scientific evidence, and philosophy behind building a healthier, more resilient life.HOMESTEADING FOR HEALTHStewardship and the Work of FreedomThe concluding chapter.Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781–1785)Something older than politics is happening across this country. Families are reclaiming land, gardens, chickens, cattle, dairy goats, orchards, and agricultural skills. They are planting raised beds in suburbs and rotating livestock on small acreages. They are reading ingredient labels. They are questioning supply chains. They are rediscovering that health begins at home. For most of American history, families grew food. They understood seasonality. They preserved meat. They planted gardens not because it was charming, but because it was necessary. They knew what hunger felt like and what self-reliance required. Industrial abundance severed that link. Convenience replaced competence. Farm families split apart to follow jobs in cities. Food became anonymous. Health became outsourced. A population disconnected from land becomes dependent in ways it scarcely recognizes.What we are describing here is a restoration of that connection. It is the recognition that liberty requires discipline, that property requires stewardship, that food security requires participation, and that health is not manufactured in a lab but cultivated in soil. This is not rebellion. It is restoration.When we cultivate a garden, we are not merely growing vegetables. We are practicing foresight. When we raise livestock humanely, we are practicing stewardship. When we teach our children to work alongside us, we are passing down competence instead of dependency. These acts are small. They are also civilizational.The American experiment was never built solely on speeches and documents. It was built on farmers, tradesmen, mothers, fathers, churches, local associations, and communities that governed themselves before asking distant authorities to intervene. Its strength lay in distributed, decentralized competence.Americanism is therefore not nostalgia. It is responsibility carried forward. It is gratitude expressed through stewardship. It is loyalty demonstrated in daily habits.It is choosing real food over convenience. It is choosing family meals over fragmentation. It is choosing ownership over dependence. It is choosing cultivation over consumption. The land teaches patience. Animals teach humility. Gardens teach planning. These lessons are not separate from civic virtue. They are its foundation.A republic survives only when its citizens are capable of providing for themselves, capable of critical thought, capable of restraint, capable of community. Homesteading, in its modern form, is one training ground for those virtues.Health is not merely biochemical. It is cultural. Food is not merely fuel. It is sovereignty. Farming is not merely an industry. It is an inheritance.When families reclaim responsibility for their food and health, they reclaim something larger. They reclaim agency. They reclaim dignity. They reclaim a measure of freedom that cannot be legislated into existence.Independence does not come from declarations or politics. It comes from daily practice. From planting, repairing, building, cooking, preserving, and caring for animals and people. It is earned, slowly, through habit.ShareThe modern world will continue to pull us toward convenience, abstraction, and dependency. It will promise ease while quietly eroding capability. Homesteading pulls in the opposite direction: toward reality, toward effort, toward meaning, toward a life where cause and effect are visible again.This is not a call for everyone to buy land or raise livestock. It is a call to reclaim agency. To grow something. To fix something. To know where your food comes from. To take responsibility for your health and your household. To participate, however modestly, in the work that sustains life.We think about this most clearly in the early mornings, when the farm is still quiet and the work of the day has not yet started. The horses stand in the pasture. The chickens are coming off the roost. The garden rows hold whatever this week’s harvest will be. There is always something that needs doing, and there is a deep satisfaction in that. Not because farming is easy, but because the connection between effort and result is so immediate, so honest. You cannot fake a thriving garden. You cannot shortcut healthy soil. You cannot outsource the kind of knowledge that only comes from doing the work year after year, in all weather, with your own hands. That is what this book has been about. We hope some part of it is useful to you as you find your own way forward.Because in the end, freedom is not secured in distant institutions. It is practiced at home.Cultivate your garden. The rest will follow.HOMESTEADING FOR HEALTHMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Homesteading for HealthORDER YOUR COPY NOW!Release Day deliveryTuesday, August 4 on Amazon“A compelling blend of memoir, practical wisdom, and eye-opening food science. This is the homesteading book that tells you not just how to build a self-sufficient life, but why it matters more today than ever.Written by Drs. Robert and Jill Malone,Homesteading for Healthis rooted in four decades of lived experience across six working farms in Maryland, Georgia, and Virginia. From hauling water in buckets on a derelict property with no heat or plumbing to breeding Percheron draft horses, rebuilding depleted soil from red clay, and raising their family on food they grew themselves, the Malones have done the hard work, and they share it all with honesty, humor, and hard-won authority.Inside, you’ll find practical, experience-tested guidance on:Finding and financinga homestead without taking on crushing debtRaising chickens, goats, sheep, cattle, pigs, turkeys, and exotic poultry,including breed-specific advice and frank warnings about what goes wrongRebuilding living soilthrough composting, cover crops, and rotational grazingPreserving food and organizing a householdthat actually functionsGardening for nutrient densityusing raised beds, heirloom varieties, and organic methodsButHomesteading for Healthgoes further than any typical how-to guide. In a frank, well-sourced investigation of modern food and agriculture, the Malones trace how industrial policy, corporate influence, and flawed nutritional science reshaped the American diet, and what families can do to take back control. From the hidden history of breakfast cereal and seed oils to the real evidence on raw milk, eggs, and regenerative farming, this book challenges what you think you know about what’s on your plate.Whether you have forty acres or a suburban backyard, this book will show you how small, deliberate steps (a garden bed, a few laying hens, a loaf of bread baked from freshly milled grain) can transform your health, your household, and your sense of purpose.”HOMESTEADING FOR HEALTHGET THE MERCH!

Summary: The concluding chapter


The Quiet Death of American Federalism

For the Two Hundred and Fiftieth. July 4, 2026.The Audio Version… This essay is important, but it is long. Due to its length, many might prefer listening via audio:The Quiet Death of American FederalismWhat Switzerland Kept and the USA DiscardedThe argument in brief:At its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, the United States lives under a government structurally unlike the one the founders built. The founders did not trust parchment to limit power. They trusted structure: rival sovereign states competing for citizens and capital, each able to check the center, the arrangement the Austrian economists describe as competition disciplining a monopoly. Between 1868 and 1913, that structure was taken apart.The Fourteenth Amendment let the central government reach down into the internal law of the states.The Seventeenth Amendment removed the states' voice from the Senate by taking the power to appoint senators away from state legislatures and giving it directly to the voters, fundamentally changing the balance between the states and the federal government.In 1869, Texas v. Whiteeffectively sealed the Union by foreclosing secession as a constitutional option.Switzerland faced the same centralizing pressures in the nineteenth century after its own civil war, yet it chose a very different path. Rather than concentrating power in the national government, it preserved and later strengthened the institutional checks that still define Swiss federalism today: the cantonal veto, the double majority, and the referendum.The difference was constitutional design, shaped by the very different character of the two civil wars and, above all, by what each losing side had been fighting to preserve. What constitutional design dismantles, constitutional design can restore. This essay concludes with five practical reforms that could begin rebuilding America's federal balance.This month, America celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.The men of 1776 built a very specific kind of government. They created a federal government controlled by a leash built by limited, delegated powers, while the states retained sovereignty over nearly everything else. That constitutional balance defined the American experiment.The government Americans live under in 2026 is not that government. Somewhere between the Declaration and this anniversary, the leash was cut. The question worth asking this Fourth of July is not whether that happened; it did. It is how, when, and by what precise constitutional, judicial, and political instruments this happened, and what can be done to restore the intended balance.Twenty-five years ago, Jill and I stumbled onto the beginning of an answer in Bern, Switzerland, though we did not recognize it at the time.For a season, we lived in an apartment across from the Glockenspiel, the medieval clock tower whose gilded figures still emerge each hour, just as they have for six centuries. During the warmer months, our family often jumped from an upstream bridge and floated the Aare, the cold, green river that wraps around the old city in a tight oxbow. The current sweeps you downstream faster than seems wise until you learn to trust it. There were no nanny-state warning signs. Individual responsibility was assumed. Swimmers were expected to understand the risks and accept the consequences of their own decisions.We walked everywhere, absorbing the extraordinary architecture, history, and culture of this UNESCO World Heritage city. I will never forget the Swiss National Day celebration: a massive bonfire atop the hill overlooking Bern, reached by funicular, while bottle rockets and larger fireworks erupted from rooftops across the city despite its protected historic status. It was exuberant, confident, and refreshingly free. The city left a lasting impression of a different model of constitutional liberty. So did the country around it, though it took me years to understand why.What struck me most was how little the Swiss federal government seemed to do, and how much authority remained with the cantons. Taxes, schools, policing, and the texture of everyday law all stayed close to home and changed as you crossed a cantonal border. The wealthier cantons deliberately supported the poorer ones, but there were limits. The system softened differences without erasing them. It never reduced the cantons to administrative districts governed from a distant capital. My impression was simple and, I have since concluded, correct: the Swiss had preserved something much closer to what America’s Founders intended than Americans themselves had.That was no accident of Alpine culture or the advantages of a small country. It was a constitutional design. Both Switzerland and the United States built federal republics in the nineteenth century. One preserved the institutional machinery that keeps central government constrained. The other gradually dismantled it. In America, much of that transformation occurred quietly through constitutional changes that few citizens can explain, and fewer still appreciate.The Founders Trusted Structure, Not WordsTo understand what changed, begin with what the Founders actually built. They did not expect liberty to survive because politicians honored the Constitution. They expected it to survive because the Constitution made it difficult for any one part of government to accumulate too much power.James Madison explained this most clearly inFederalist No. 51. Liberty would be preserved by constitutional design, not by trusting the virtue of those in office. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Each part of the system would possess both the authority and the incentive to resist encroachments by the others. The Constitution was never intended to rest on parchment barriers. It rested on competing centers of power.That competition existed not only among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, but between the federal government and the states. The states were not administrative subdivisions of Washington. They were sovereign governments that had created the federal union and delegated only limited powers to it. They were expected to guard their own authority with the same determination that Congress guarded its own prerogatives.In many ways, the states functioned as the Constitution’s immune system. They possessed both the standing and the incentive to resist federal expansion. A constitutional system is only as durable as the number of institutions willing and able to defend its limits. In 1789, there were many. Over the next century, those defenders were steadily weakened until very few remained.Austrian School economists later explained why this structure mattered. The Government is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory. Like every monopoly, it expands unless constrained by competition. Federalism supplied that competition. States competed for citizens, businesses, investment, and talent. A state that taxed too heavily or governed too aggressively risked watching people and capital move elsewhere. Just as competition disciplines private markets, competition among the states disciplined government itself.This is why the Founders relied on constitutional structure rather than moral virtue. They did not assume officeholders would be wise or selfless. They assumed they would pursue their own interests and designed a system in which those interests would often align with the preservation of constitutional limits.Some scholars would take the story back even further. Murray Rothbard argued that the centralizing impulse appeared at Philadelphia itself, when the Constitution replaced the far looser Articles of Confederation. From that perspective, the Anti-Federalists correctly recognized that the new Constitution strengthened the national government and fought to preserve as much state sovereignty as they could. If that interpretation is correct, then the great constitutional changes of 1868 and 1913 did not create American centralization. They simply removed the strongest remaining barriers to a process already underway.The story that follows is not the creation of federal power. It is the systematic removal of the constitutional restraints that once kept it in check.The Original Constitutional OrderBefore the Civil War, the constitutional balance looked very different from the one Americans know today.The Bill of Rights restrained the federal government, not the states.The Supreme Court confirmed that principle in Barron v. Baltimore, holding that the first eight amendments limited only the national government. The protection of individual rights was primarily the responsibility of the states under their own constitutions. Americans looked to their state governments to secure their liberties, and to the federal Constitution to restrain the distant government they trusted least.The states also exercised direct influence inside the federal government itself.Under the original Constitution, state legislatures chose U.S. senators. The Senate was not simply a second legislative chamber. It was the institutional voice of the states within the federal government. No law could pass, no treaty be ratified, and no presidential appointment confirmed without the approval of senators who answered first to their state legislatures. Madison emphasized inFederalist No. 62that this arrangement was deliberate. Equal representation in the Senate, coupled with selection by the state legislatures, acknowledged that the states remained sovereign within their own sphere and retained a permanent seat at the federal table.A third safeguard stood quietly behind the other two. Although rarely discussed and never exercised successfully before the Civil War, many Americans understoodthat a state ultimately retained the option of leaving the Union if the constitutional compact were fundamentally broken.Whether that belief was legally correct remains debated. What matters is that it existed and shaped the relationship between the states and the federal government.Between 1865 and 1913, each of these constitutional restraints disappeared.The federal government became the primary guarantor of individual rights. The states lost their direct representation in the Senate when the Seventeenth Amendment transferred the election of senators from state legislatures to the people. And afterTexas v. White, unilateral secession was declared constitutionally impossible.The justification was preserving the Union. The result was something much larger: a fundamental transformation of the American constitutional order. The federal system the Founders designed became one in which the nation was increasingly governed from Washington, D.C., a town Steve Bannon now famously calls “the Imperial Capital of the World”The Fourteenth Amendment: A New Constitutional OrderThe Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, was born of both necessity and tragedy. After the Civil War, many of the defeated Southern states responded to emancipation with the Black Codes, laws designed to strip newly freed slaves of the rights they had just gained and push them back toward a condition resembling servitude.Here, the Founders’ original constitutional arrangement failed. Before the Civil War, the states were expected to serve as the primary guardians of liberty. In the South, many became its violators. Protecting individual rights required a power above the states themselves.The first section of the Fourteenth Amendment answered that need. It established national citizenship and prohibited states from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens, depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or denying any person the equal protection of the laws. Read in its historical context, the amendment was a shield for a people whose own state governments had abandoned them.The constitutional transformation lay not in that purpose, but in the mechanism required to achieve it.For the first time, the federal government acquired broad constitutional authority to review and invalidate state laws that violated federally protected rights. That authority would not remain confined to the circumstances that gave birth to the amendment. Its boundaries would be defined over the next century by the federal courts.The Supreme Court initially took a narrow view. In the Slaughter-House Cases, it interpreted the Privileges or Immunities Clause so narrowly that it became almost irrelevant. But another provision proved far more expansive. Over the twentieth century, the Court increasingly relied on the Due Process Clause to apply the protections of the Bill of Rights against the states, one guarantee at a time. Lawyers call this process “incorporation.” Freedom of speech followed in 1925, freedom of the press in 1931, with many other rights added over the decades.The structural consequence deserves to be stated plainly. Before the Civil War, the Bill of Rights primarily restrained the federal government. Today, it also restrains the states, with federal courts serving as the final arbiters of state law. An amendment adopted to protect individuals from abusive state governments also established a permanent constitutional pathway through which the federal government could supervise the internal law of every state.Whether any particular decision was right or wrong is a separate question. Many corrected genuine injustices and secured fundamental liberties. The structural reality, however, is undeniable. A constitutional channel had been opened from Washington into the internal affairs of every state, and the scope of that authority would thereafter depend largely on the federal judiciary.The Seventeenth Amendment: The States Lose Their VoiceIf the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government a new constitutional pathway into the affairs of the states, the Seventeenth Amendment closed off the states’ pathway back into the federal government.Ratified in 1913, it transferred the election of U.S. senators from state legislatures to the voters. It was presented as a democratic reform, and for good reason. Legislative deadlocks sometimes left Senate seats vacant for months. Corruption and outright bribery had tarnished the process, earning the Senate its reputation as the “millionaires’ club.” The reform addressed real problems.But it also fundamentally changed the constitutional structure.Before 1913, senators represented states as political institutions. They answered first to the legislatures that selected them and served as the states’ permanent representatives within the federal government. No major legislation, treaty, or presidential appointment could move forward without the consent of a chamber directly accountable to state governments.After the Seventeenth Amendment, that institutional connection disappeared. Senators no longer answered to state legislatures. They answered to statewide electorates, the same voters who elected presidents and members of the House. The Senate remained, but its constitutional role changed. The chamber Madison envisioned as the institutional guardian of federalism gradually became a second popularly elected legislative body.Viewed together, the Fourteenth and Seventeenth Amendments reveal a striking constitutional symmetry. The Fourteenth created a new avenue through which the federal government could supervise the states. The Seventeenth eliminated the states’ direct institutional influence within the federal government.One strengthened Washington’s reach into the states. The other weakened the states’ reach into Washington.Together, they fundamentally altered the balance the Founders had designed.The Last BrakeBehind the states’ constitutional immunity and their institutional voice in the Senate stood one final restraint on federal power: the possibility of exit.In 1869, the Supreme Court, in Texas v. White, declared the Union “an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States.”Whatever the constitutional arguments had been before the Civil War, and thoughtful Americans had debated them for decades, the question was now settled. In practice, it had been settled first by force and only afterward by the Court.A state could no longer leave the Union, even as a last resort.The Framers had never clearly affirmed or denied a right of secession. They left the question unresolved. AfterTexas v. White, it was resolved permanently.Within a single lifetime, the states had lost three of the principal structural restraints the Founders had built into the constitutional system.The Fourteenth Amendment subjected state law to broad federal constitutional review.The Seventeenth Amendment removed the states’ institutional voice in the Senate.Texas v. Whiteeliminated the possibility of exit.To Austrian School economists, this last change was the most significant because exit is the ultimate form of accountability.Ludwig von Mises argued that the principle of self-determination logically included the right of communities to separate from existing governments. Murray Rothbard carried the argument even further, extending it to the individual.One need not accept either conclusion to recognize the underlying principle: a government that cannot lose territory, population, or productive citizens faces less pressure to govern well. Competition disciplines governments no less than it disciplines markets.That is the larger significance ofTexas v. White. The decision did more than answer a constitutional question about secession. It removed the last structural check that had once limited the reach of the federal government.A perpetual Union, originally understood as a framework of mutual security among the states, became a Union from which no state could withdraw. Whether one regards that outcome as necessary or regrettable, it marked another decisive step away from the constitutional balance the Founders had created.Two Civil WarsThe divergence between the United States and Switzerland begins with two remarkably similar events. Both nations emerged from civil wars. Both defeated secessionist movements. Both faced the question of what kind of federal system would survive victory.Yet they reached very different destinations.In 1847, Switzerland fought the Sonderbund War, named for the alliance of seven Catholic, conservative cantons that had resisted the liberal majority’s efforts to strengthen the federal government. It was, in plain terms, a war over secession. The centralizing side prevailed, just as it would in America fourteen years later.On the surface, the parallels are striking. Two confederations. Two secession crises. Two victories for the center. Yet one produced a stable federal republic that remains highly decentralized today. The other became one of the most centralized constitutional systems in the Western world.The difference lies in the wars themselves and, even more importantly, in what the losing side fought to preserve.The first difference was the character of the fighting.The Sonderbund War lasted less than a month and claimed only about one hundred lives. General Guillaume Henri Dufour deliberately fought a limited war. He ordered his troops to care for the wounded, protect civilians and churches, and treat the defeated as future countrymen rather than permanent enemies. It is no accident that he later became one of the founders of the International Committee of the Red Cross.Because the war was brief and relatively bloodless, it left little permanent machinery behind. There was no massive standing army, no crushing national debt, no powerful creditor class whose prosperity depended upon an ever stronger central government.The American Civil War produced the opposite result. Four years of conflict and roughly three-quarters of a million deaths transformed the federal government itself. Washington imposed the first federal income tax, created a national banking system and national currency, instituted conscription, and accumulated enormous debts that permanently tied financial interests to the strength and stability of the national government. Much of that machinery survived long after the emergency had ended. This is the ratchet effect described by Robert Higgs. Crises expand government, and when the crisis passes, the expansion rarely disappears. Switzerland built almost none of that machinery. America did.But the deeper difference lay in what the two wars were actually about.The Swiss Sonderbund fought to preserve Catholic identity and cantonal autonomy. Those were causes that could survive defeat. A Catholic canton could remain Catholic. A defeated canton could remain largely self-governing. Reintegration required compromise, not reconstruction.The tragedy is that the same constitutional structure designed to preserve liberty from centralized power had, by 1861, become the constitutional protection for slavery in the South.At the moment Fort Sumter was fired upon, state sovereignty was being invoked to defend the right of one human being to own another. The constitutional autonomy the states had long claimed as a protection against federal overreach had, in the slave states, become the legal shield for the greatest violation of individual liberty in American history.That reality made American consolidation far more difficult to avoid than Swiss consolidation. A government that had fought a devastating war to end slavery could not simply restore the defeated states to complete control over their own internal laws. Those laws had created and protected the very institution the war had been fought to destroy. Reconstruction, military government, conditional readmission to the Union, and ultimately the Fourteenth Amendment all flowed directly from that reality.Switzerland faced no comparable dilemma. After victory, the losing cantons paid a modest indemnity, the Jesuits were expelled, and within a year the defeated cantons had resumed their place in the confederation as political equals. No comparable reconstruction was necessary because no comparable evil had existed.Here lies the tragic knot in the American story.An honest constitutional analysis cannot pretend slavery would simply have disappeared on its own. The historical evidence does not support that conclusion. Nor can it romanticize a form of federalism that, in 1861, was being used to defend human bondage.The harder question comes earlier.One of the most thoughtful advocates of this view is Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, who argues that the decisive constitutional choice was not Reconstruction but the decision to prevent secession by force. Had the South been allowed to leave, the Fugitive Slave Act would have become practically unenforceable. Enslaved people who reached a foreign nation could not simply be reclaimed, and a system built upon human property becomes increasingly unstable when that property can escape across an international border.Whether one accepts Hummel’s conclusion or not, it highlights the central tragedy. The same decision that preserved the Union also transformed it. The war that ended slavery also dismantled much of the constitutional structure the Founders had designed to restrain centralized power.Switzerland was not wiser than America. It was fortunate that the losing side had fought for something that could be accommodated within a federal system. America was not. The constitutional choices that followed were shaped by that tragic reality, and they permanently altered the balance the Founders had designed.What Switzerland keptWhat the Swiss did with the peace they had won so cheaply is the second half of the lesson. The 1848 constitution openly copied the American blueprint. It built a bicameral legislature with a lower house apportioned by population and an upper house, the Council of States, seating two members for each full canton and one for each half canton, regardless of size. That is the pre-1913 American Senate; the small units guaranteed an equal voice against the large.Then the Swiss did what the Americans did not. They kept adding structural vetoes, and they entrenched them so deeply that the center cannot grow without the standing, repeated consent of both the people and the cantons.The keystone is the double majority. Any change to the federal constitution must win not only a majority of the national popular vote but also a majority of the cantons, the people and the states counted separately, and both must say yes. A numerical majority of citizens cannot amend the constitution over the objection of a majority of cantons. The small cantons hold a permanent veto over the fundamental law, not by custom but by the amendment rule itself. Besides this, the Swiss added the optional referendum in 1874, which lets citizens challenge an ordinary federal statute and put it to a national vote, and the popular initiative in 1891, which lets citizens force a vote on a constitutional change of their own drafting. Consent is not given once, at a founding, and then presumed forever. It is demanded again at every step, through standing machinery that no officeholder can switch off.America had a state-based supermajority, too, in Article Five of the Constitution, which requires three-quarters of the states to ratify an amendment. On paper, it is a formidable brake. In practice, the growth of federal power has learned to work around it. Once the Fourteenth Amendment’s supervisory power and the commerce power could be enlarged by reinterpretation, the center rarely needed to amend anything. It grew by construction, through the courts, along channels that the amendment rule never touched. The Swiss referendum reaches ordinary legislation, so there is no comparable detour. In America, the standing brake was the states' representation in the Senate, and it was removed. In Switzerland, the standing brake is the people and the cantons voting directly on the laws themselves, and it was multiplied.The Power of the PurseThe fiscal story follows the same constitutional logic. It also explains the bounded cooperation I saw between rich and poor cantons during our years in Switzerland.In the end, the size of government is determined by the size of its revenues.In 1913, the same year the Seventeenth Amendment removed the states’ direct voice from the Senate, the Sixteenth Amendment gave the federal government a permanent claim on individual citizens’ incomes.Together, the two amendments transformed not only who governed but how much government could grow.Switzerland chose a different path. The cantons retained primary taxing authority, and they continue to compete for residents, businesses, and investment.A canton that taxes too heavily or regulates too aggressively risks watching taxpayers move across the cantonal border. That competition is exactly the discipline the Founders expected federalism to provide. It is a restraint that no written guarantee can replace.The cooperation is real, and it is the part most outsiders miss. Switzerland operates a fiscal equalization system in which both the confederation and the wealthier cantons help support the poorer ones. But the goal is not to erase differences. It is to ensure that every canton can provide essential public services while preserving meaningful autonomy and healthy tax competition. The stronger cantons help lift the weaker without absorbing them into a single national treasury.That distinction matters. Equality is not the objective. Balance is. Switzerland has demonstrated that solidarity does not require centralization and that cooperation does not require surrendering sovereignty.The Founders envisioned much the same relationship among the American states: cooperation where necessary, competition where beneficial, and constitutional limits that prevented either from swallowing the other. Switzerland preserved that balance. America gradually dismantled it.That is the real lesson. Federalism survives only when it is defended by institutions, not by sentiment. The Founders understood that. The Swiss never forgot it. Americans did.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so feel free to share it.ShareThe Work of RepairDiagnosis without remedy is only complaint. What deliberate acts dismantled, deliberate acts can rebuild. The work does not wait on the election of better men. That is the whole point. A real structural reform binds whichever party holds the capital. Anything less is just another partisan wish.None of these measures restores the old republic whole. That world is gone. But each restores one of the brakes described above. Together, they begin to rebuild what America lost: a standing set of actors with both the means and the motive to hold the line.1: Restore the states’ voice in the Senate.The direct answer to the Seventeenth Amendment is repeal or reform, returning to state legislatures a formal role in the chamber built to represent the states as states. That is a generational project, and it requires a constitutional amendment. Honesty also requires admitting why direct election was adopted in the first place: deadlock, corruption, and public disgust with a Senate that had earned its reputation as the “millionaires’ club.”But repeal is not the only tool. State legislatures still possess older instruments they have allowed to atrophy. They can instruct their senators. They can pass formal resolutions against federal encroachment. They can put state governments visibly and repeatedly on record. The states’ voice can be partly reclaimed before any amendment is ever ratified.2:  Use the states’ own constitutional lever.Article V gives the states a power that does not pass through Washington. Two-thirds of state legislatures can compel a convention to propose amendments, and three-fourths of the states must ratify whatever emerges. This is the nearest American analog to the Swiss cantonal veto: a collective instrument the states have held since 1789 and have never once used to originate an amendment.Its natural subjects are fiscal restraints on the federal government, limits on the commerce and spending powers, and term limits. The fear of a runaway convention is real and should be taken seriously. But the ratification threshold is the answer. Nothing becomes law without the assent of thirty-eight states.3:  Reclaim the brake the states already hold.One vertical check has actually been strengthened by the Supreme Court. In cases fromNew York v. United Statesin 1992, toPrintz v. United Statesin 1997, toMurphy v. NCAAin 2018, the Court held that the federal government may not commandeer states into administering or enforcing federal programs.That power exists now. No amendment is needed. States may decline to carry out federal law and may withhold their own officers from federal enforcement. Jurisdictions across the political spectrum already use this tool on immigration, firearms, and cannabis. That is the proof that it is structural, not partisan. It is available, and it is underused.4: Cut the fiscal leash.Washington often governs the states less by command than by money, attaching conditions to federal grants and calling the arrangement voluntary. In the Medicaid portion ofNFIB v. Sebeliusin 2012, the Supreme Court recognized that federal conditions can become so heavy that they cease to be inducement and become unconstitutional coercion.States should litigate coercive conditions under that standard. They should build reserves that reduce dependence on federal transfers. They should press to convert conditional grants into unrestricted block grants. The revenue ceiling removed by the Sixteenth Amendment will not easily be restored. But the leverage federal money buys over the states can still be resisted where the money changes hands.5: Build in the states the brake that disciplines Bern.The most practical part of the Swiss model already exists in America at the state level. Roughly half the states give citizens some form of initiative or referendum, allowing them to propose laws or strike laws down at the ballot box. This is the ongoing consent mechanism the federal system lacks.Strengthen it. Extend it to states that lack it. Use it. Defend it against the quiet campaigns to raise signature thresholds beyond practical reach. Federalism will not be rebuilt from Washington. The direct checks that hold Bern in place can be built, one state at a time, from below.The Machinery of LibertyNone of this depends on the character of the men in office. That is the lesson the anniversary ought to carry.The Founders did not trust the goodwill of legislators. Goodwill is not a limit. They trusted structure: rival centers of authority, each with the standing and the motive to defend its own ground. A government is limited by the number of such actors, and by little else that lasts.Between 1868 and 1913, America reduced that number in the vertical dimension toward zero. Switzerland, facing the same centralizing pressures in the same century, multiplied them and locked them in.The two constitutions still look similar on paper. Both describe a federal republic of self-governing states, an upper chamber that protects the small, and a written charter of limited powers. Read the documents, and one might think the two countries had built the same machine.Only one of these two countries still operates that machine.The clearest surviving model of what the American Founders intended is no longer found in America. It is found in a small country in the Alps that copied the American design and then, unlike America, kept the parts that made it work.The 250th anniversary of the Declaration is an appropriate time not only to celebrate the American founding, but to examine the constitutional structure the Founders built. If that structure has changed, and I believe it has, then understanding how it changed is the first step toward deciding what, if anything, should be restored.The Swiss kept theirs. The question for the next fifty years is whether Americans can recover ours.The answer will not be found in better men. It will be found, if it is found at all, in the rebuilding of structure.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.A Supporting BibliographyFoundational textsHamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay.The Federalist. 1788. Numbers 51 and 62. The founders’ own statement that liberty is secured by structure and rival interest rather than by the virtue of officeholders, with Number 62 defending the Senate as the states’ institutional foothold in the national government.Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation of 18 April 1999. Articles 138 through 142, on the popular initiative, the referendum, and the double majority. The living text of the standing consent mechanisms that have no counterpart in the United States Constitution.Theory and historyMises, Ludwig von.Liberalism. 1927. Carries the right of secession to its logical end as the ultimate discipline on government, and supplies the theoretical ground beneath this essay’s treatment of exit.Hayek, F. A.The Constitution of Liberty. University of Chicago Press, 1960. On competition as a discovery and disciplining process, and on the constitutional forms that keep power divided and rivalrous rather than consolidated.Rothbard, Murray N.Conceived in Liberty. Arlington House, 1975. Locates the first American consolidation not in 1865 but at the Constitutional Convention itself, with the Anti Federalists as the clearest seers of what was coming.Rothbard, Murray N.A History of Money and Banking in the United States. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2002. The monetary spine of the consolidation story, running from the wartime banking acts through the creation of the Federal Reserve.Rothbard, Murray N.The Case Against the Fed. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1994. The compressed argument for why control of the money completes the centralization that the war and the amendments began.Higgs, Robert.Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. Oxford University Press, 1987. The definitive account of the ratchet, the mechanism by which each war and depression leaves the state permanently larger, and the analytic engine behind the periodization used here.Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers.Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War. Open Court, 1996. Second edition, 2014. The indispensable book for this argument. It defends the right of secession while condemning the Confederate cause, and shows that letting the South depart would have collapsed slavery faster than the war did. The way past the Lost Cause trap.Church, Clive H., and Randolph C. Head.A Concise History of Switzerland. Cambridge University Press, 2013. A reliable modern narrative of the Sonderbund War, General Dufour’s deliberate restraint, and the 1848 settlement that reintegrated the defeated cantons as equals.Linder, Wolf.Swiss Democracy: Possible Solutions to Conflict in Multicultural Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, 1994. The standard English language account of how Swiss federalism and direct democracy work in practice, including the fiscal equalization that lifts the poorer cantons without dissolving them.CasesBarron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243 (1833). Establishes the pre war default, that the Bill of Rights binds only the federal government and not the states.Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1869). Declares the union perpetual and secession void, foreclosing exit as the last structural check.Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873). Guts the privileges or immunities clause, diverting the Fourteenth Amendment’s force into the more elastic channel of due process.Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925). The first application of a Bill of Rights guarantee, free speech, against a state through the Fourteenth Amendment. Incorporation begins.Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931). Extends incorporation to the freedom of the press, continuing the transfer of supervisory power to the federal courts.South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987). Upholds federal control of the states through conditions attached to spending, the fiscal leash in doctrinal form.New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992). Revives the anti-commandeering principle, that Washington may not compel a state to enact or enforce a federal program.Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997). Extends anti-commandeering to state executive officers, the strongest of the surviving structural brakes.National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012). Holds for the first time that a spending condition can be so coercive as to be unconstitutional, the opening for cutting the fiscal leash.Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 584 U.S. 453 (2018). The most recent and most sweeping anti-commandeering ruling, the lever this essay urges the states to use.

Summary: Thoughts on the Two Hundred and Fiftieth.


How Government Quietly Redefined What Americans Call "Food"

GRAS: How Government Quietly Redefined What Americans Call FoodWalk through any supermarket today and pick up a loaf of bread. Chances are, the ingredient list contains twenty or thirty items. Yogurt often includes gums, stabilizers, modified starches, emulsifiers, flavor systems, and preservatives. Salad dressing reads like a chemistry experiment. Ice cream may contain ingredients your grandmother never heard of, much less kept in her pantry.We have become so accustomed to these long ingredient labels that we rarely stop to ask a very simple question.Who decided this was normal?It wasn’t consumers asking for more emulsifiers. It wasn’t farmers demanding additional stabilizers or modified starches. It certainly wasn’t physicians asking for more processing aids, anti-caking agents, artificial flavor systems, or texturizers.The answer is that this food system evolved through thousands of decisions made over the past seventy years by Congress, federal regulators, and the food industry. Together, they fundamentally changed what Americans eat. The result is a regulatory philosophy that assumes if another industrial ingredient can be shown to be reasonably safe, then it probably deserves a place in our food.I believe that assumption deserves to be challenged.One of the pillars supporting that philosophy is a regulatory designation known asGRAS, or “Generally Recognized As Safe.” Most Americans hear those words and assume the FDA has independently reviewed the ingredient, declared it safe, and given it the government’s blessing. That is not what GRAS necessarily means.In fact, the phrase itself deserves much closer scrutiny.Generally recognized by whom?Most consumers probably imagine panels of independent government scientists reviewing years of evidence before deciding that a new ingredient belongs in the food supply. That is not how the modern system works.Today, manufacturers commission safety studies, assemble scientific evidence, hire outside experts to review the data, and conclude that their own ingredient meets the legal standard for GRAS. Those experts are often accomplished toxicologists, physicians, and food scientists. Their credentials are usually not the issue. The more important questions are who selected them, who paid them, and whether the public should consider that an adequate substitute for truly independent review.Even more surprisingly, companies are not always required to submit those determinations to the FDA before marketing an ingredient. Many voluntarily notify the agency. Others do not. The FDA may never independently review some GRAS determinations before products appear on grocery store shelves.Imagine applying that philosophy somewhere else.Suppose a pharmaceutical company commissioned its own safety studies, hired its own panel of experts, concluded its new drug was safe, and then placed it on the market without mandatory FDA review. Americans would rightly object. We expect an independent referee for medicines.  Well, to be honest, the independence is an arguable point.  But you get the issue.Yet when it comes to thousands of food ingredients that millions of Americans consume every day, the public has been led to believe a level of independent oversight that rarely exists.Underlying all of this is the persistent problem of regulatory capture. The FDA is charged with protecting the public, yet it operates in a system where the industries it regulates wield enormous financial and political influence. Senior officials routinely move between regulatory agencies and the food, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and consulting industries, creating the perception, and at times the reality, of a revolving door.Congress has repeatedly expanded the FDA's responsibilities without demanding a corresponding level of truly independent scientific oversight. Industry-funded studies often form the backbone of regulatory decisions, advisory committees may include experts with financial ties to regulated companies, and post-government employment opportunities inevitably raise questions about institutional bias. None of this requires outright corruption to erode public confidence.A regulatory culture can gradually come to identify with the industries it oversees rather than the consumers it is supposed to protect. When that happens, the agency's default question shifts from "How do we protect the public?" to "How do we accommodate industry while managing acceptable levels of risk?" That is the essence of regulatory capture, and it is a problem that extends far beyond food regulation.To be fair, food additives and prescription drugs are not the same. Congress never intended them to be regulated identically. That is not the point. The point is that the phrase “Generally Recognized As Safe” conveys a level of independent scientific consensus that many consumers assume includes the government itself. In many cases, it does not.America has become heavily dependent on overseas manufacturers, particularly in China, for a wide range of food ingredients, vitamins, amino acids, enzymes, gums, and food-processing chemicals. That dependence means our food supply increasingly relies on manufacturing practices occurring thousands of miles away, with FDA oversight largely exercised through importer verification. There is no country-of-origin labeling for most food additives, leaving consumers unable to make informed choices about where these industrial ingredients were manufactured.Why was GRAS created?This is the opposite of what Congress intended when it created GRAS in 1958.At the time, lawmakers were trying to solve a practical problem. They wanted genuinely new food additives to undergo safety review, but they also recognized that no one needed federal scientists determining whether salt, butter, vinegar, wheat flour, or black pepper were safe. Those foods had already survived the most important safety study imaginable: centuries of human consumption. GRAS was designed to protect real food from unnecessary bureaucracy. Instead, somewhere along the way, GRAS became part of the framework supporting an increasingly industrialized food supply.Today, depending on how they are counted, the American food supply contains roughly 10,000 to 12,000 intentionally added ingredients.Preservatives. Emulsifiers. Stabilizers. Gums. Sweeteners. Modified starches. Artificial and natural flavor systems. Processing aids. Enzymes. Coloring agents. Texturizers. Countless compounds that did not exist when Congress wrote the law.That raises another simple question.Needed by whom?Most of these ingredients were not developed because consumers demanded them.They exist because manufacturers wanted products with longer shelf lives, more consistent textures, improved freeze-thaw stability, standardized flavors, nationwide distribution, lower production costs, and fewer losses during transportation.Those are perfectly rational business objectives.They are not public health objectives.At some point, the government stopped asking whether a new industrial ingredient actually improved the American diet. Instead, regulators increasingly asked only whether the ingredient appeared sufficiently safe under existing standards.Those are profoundly different questions.Perhaps the greatest irony is that government nutrition policy has spent decades warning Americans to eat healthier while simultaneously building a regulatory environment that made ultra-processed foods easier and more profitable to manufacture.History demonstrates why that philosophy deserves far more skepticism than it has received.For decades, partially hydrogenated oils, better known as artificial trans fats, carried GRAS status. Manufacturers loved them because they were inexpensive, extended shelf life, tolerated repeated heating, and improved the texture of countless processed foods. Crackers, cookies, pastries, margarine, frostings, fried foods, and packaged snacks all benefited.Consumers trusted them because they assumed ingredients found throughout the food supply had already been thoroughly vetted.Eventually, science caught up.Large epidemiologic studies have demonstrated that artificial trans fats increase the risk of cardiovascular disease by raising LDL cholesterol, lowering HDL cholesterol, and promoting systemic inflammation. What had once been considered an innovative food technology became recognized as one of the most harmful dietary changes of the twentieth century. After years of pressure from scientists and consumer advocates, FDA finally revoked their GRAS status.The lesson is not simply that regulators got one ingredient wrong.The lesson is that they asked the wrong question.The question was never whether trans fats could be manufactured safely.The question should have been why Americans needed industrially hydrogenated oils in their food in the first place.But it gets worse: eliminating trans fats did not eliminate highly processed foods. Instead, manufacturers often replaced them with refined seed oils, palm oil, and engineered fat blends that remain common in ultra-processed products. Thus, while one class of harmful fats largely disappeared, another experimental GRAS product replaced it.The same philosophy continues today.Take seed oils. Soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, and similar oils all qualify as GRAS. That designation says they are generally recognized as safe food ingredients under their intended conditions of use. It says nothing about whether replacing traditional animal fats with industrially refined vegetable oils has improved metabolic health. It says nothing about oxidation products created during repeated heating, the dramatic increase in omega-6 consumption, or the central role these oils play in ultra-processed foods. Those questions remain the subject of vigorous scientific debate, yet they largely fall outside the traditional GRAS framework.Modern chronic disease is not driven by a single preservative, one emulsifier, or one food dye. Americans consume thousands of industrial ingredients in combinations that no human population had ever experienced before the second half of the twentieth century. Our regulatory system continues to evaluate most of these ingredients individually, while paying comparatively little attention to the cumulative effects of an increasingly industrialized diet.If you think this article raises important questions, please share it.The more Americans understand how our food supply has changed and why, the harder it becomes to ignore the need for real reform. Conversations like this don’t begin in Washington. They begin with informed citizens.ShareThank you for helping spread the word.This brings us to MAHA.Much of the current discussion in the government focuses on banning a handful of food dyes, removing several controversial preservatives, or replacing one additive with another. Those efforts may be worthwhile. But they leave the underlying philosophy untouched.Lipstick on a pig.If MAHA spends the next four years banning GRAS food additives one by one, it will still leave intact the regulatory system that produced thousands of them in the first place. That is not reform. It isn’t even maintenance.The larger question is whether the government should continue to assume that every industrial ingredient deserves a place in the American food supply unless someone can eventually prove it is harmful.I would argue exactly the opposite.Manufacturers should never be the primary arbiters of what enters the American food supply, and the FDA should never function as little more than a passive reviewer of industry-generated science. If a company wishes to introduce another industrial ingredient into foods consumed by millions of Americans, the burden should rest with both the manufacturer and the FDA to demonstrate not only that the ingredient is unlikely to produce obvious toxicity, but that it provides a meaningful public health benefit that cannot reasonably be achieved through simpler, more traditional foods. Extending shelf life, improving manufacturing efficiency, surviving cross-country shipping, reducing waste, and increasing corporate profit margins may be excellent business objectives, but they are not public health objectives.The FDA's mission is not to facilitate the industrialization of the food supply. Its mission is to protect and improve the public's health. Somewhere along the way, those two goals became reversed.Americans should know what chemicals are entering their food, and in the short term, the FDA should review every new (and old) GRAS determination. But requiring another form, another notification, or another government database is not the same as reforming the philosophy that created the problem. It simply adds another layer of process to a system that still begins with the assumption that another industrial ingredient probably belongs in our food unless someone can prove otherwise.The real failure of GRAS is not that companies frequently self-determine the safety of their own ingredients. The real failure is that Congress and the FDA rarely ask whether another industrial ingredient is needed in the first place. The government has spent decades evaluating whether additives can be safely incorporated into increasingly processed foods, rather than asking how to encourage a food system that relies on fewer additives altogether.  How can Congress modify GRAS back to its original intent? HHS Secretary should be lobbying Congress to do exactly that. It is the conversation MAHA should be leading and isn’t.Perhaps the most important question is not “Generally recognized by whom?”It is “Benefiting whom?”Consumers?Farmers?Public health?Or an industrial food system that has become extraordinarily good at manufacturing products that make America progressively sicker?Congress created GRAS to protect salt, butter, flour, vinegar, and other real foods from unnecessary regulation. Instead, it created a regulatory philosophy that has steadily expanded the industrialization of the American diet while reassuring consumers that everything was “generally recognized as safe.”It is time to retire that philosophy.The purpose of food policy should not be to determine how many industrial ingredients can be squeezed into the food supply under an increasingly elastic definition of safety.The purpose of food policy should be to maximize the amount of real food on the American dinner table.Somewhere over the past seventy years, Congress forgot that distinction.I am increasingly concerned that the DC MAHA has forgotten it as well.If you found this essay valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.The real story is almost never in the headlines. It takes time to dig through legislation, regulatory history, scientific papers, and government documents to understand how we got here and, more importantly, where we are headed. Your subscription helps make that work possible.Subscribe nowThank you for reading and for supporting independent journalism.


Homesteading: The Dog Days of Summer

Flags are flying, and we are getting ready for the fourth!But June was busy here on the farm:Last month brought us the birth of three fillies.Tantra’s filly, named Xhaphire is super friendly - aggressive friendly, as long as you are scratching her rump… which is kind of silly when a little filly is pushing her little ass to you, for many, many scratches.She is going to be tall and strong, just like her mama.The fillly above, who we think is black, will have to get tested for color (she could be a sooty black, bay-black, or even a buckskin).Still searching for the right “X” name for her. Suggestions are appreciated.The last born is below:This filly, named Xassandra (Casi) is super high-energy and so much fun!We thought we were finished building our broodmare band. The plan was to keep just a handful of exceptional mares and call it good.Well... that plan lasted about five minutes.Now we have three more outstanding fillies, and it looks like we’re backtracking on that decision. The reality is that there are so few people breeding quality Lusitanos in the United States that it’s hard to justify not continuing. Every time one of these special youngsters comes along, we look at each other and say, “I guess she’s staying.”Summerhas definitely arrived. By Wednesday, temperatures are expected to top 100 degrees.That means the mares and foals will spend the hottest part of the day in the barn. So it’s the usual summer routine: cleaning stalls, filling water buckets, checking that all the fans are working, then bringing in the mamas and babies and getting everyone settled before the worst of the heat arrives.Jade especially dislikes hot weather, so he’ll be joining them in the barn until temperatures become more reasonable.In the meantime, the mares are grazing in the fields closest to the stallion paddocks. Let’s just say that everyone is keenly aware of everyone else’s presence. The hormones are definitely flowing, which makes riding the young stallions a bit more... entertaining than usual.The baby peafowlare still living indoors in a brooder. We have six total, three indoors and three being raised by a pealady in the coop.This little baby is very tame, as she was the only one born in the first batch of eggs. So… somehow she ended up on my shoulder (a lot)…With this stretch of hot weather, the three babies will probably be houseguests for at least another week before they're ready to move outside.Our young peacock, Reepicheep, named after the fearless mouse fromThe Chronicles of Narniaand son of Prince Caspian (the peacock), has become completely fascinated by the constant peeping from the brooder. He also seems to have concluded that the human house is a rather luxurious place to spend the day.The other morning, we were sitting in bed with the side door open so Kitty could come and go. Suddenly, Robert looked toward the bathroom and said, “What the heck?”Sure enough, Reepicheep had quietly wandered into the house and made his way into the bathroom. There he stood, calmly surveying what he had apparently decided was his new kingdom.After a few ruffled feathers, the brave explorer was gently returned to the world beyond the wardrobe.My vegetable garden is growing like crazy, with so much produce we can’t possibly use it all, particularly the squash.One of the biggest crops coming on right now is the blackberries. It looks like we’re going to be harvesting bushels of them, and I can’t wait to start picking gallons of berries by mid-July.The garlic harvest is finished, yielding about 50 pounds fresh. Once the tops finish curing and are trimmed off, that will probably come down to around 20 pounds of usable garlic.After the bulbs cure for another week or two, I’ll separate the cloves, blend them with olive oil, and freeze the mixture in ice cube trays. It’s a trick I’ve come to rely on because, no matter what I do, my garlic rarely keeps much past Christmas. This year I also sprayed the harvested bulbs withhypochlorousfood spray to help prevent mold and fungal growth during storage. So far, it seems to be working.The basil is thriving. I tucked it into one of the ornamental beds, where it’s surrounded by marigolds and gladiolas. It makes a surprisingly attractive combination while providing plenty of fresh basil for the kitchen.The beets are coming in nicely as well. Most of them will end up pickled and canned so we can enjoy them throughout the winter, although we’ll certainly be eating plenty of fresh ones over the next few weeks.Beet tops taste surprisingly like spinach. Sautéed with young squash, fresh garlic and olive oil, they make a great side dish.We have been so busy that we still haven’t had a chance to AI (artificially inseminate) the cattle.  It is getting late in the season, so this is high on my to-do list.But Miss Evie remains as sweet as pie.  I am smitten by this bovine and love introducing her to children.On another note, Robert planted white clover in many of our pastures this spring. The primary goal was to establish a living cover crop that would outcompete certain weeds, particularly pigweed. So far, it’s doing exactly what we had hoped.The added bonus is that the bees absolutely love it. The pastures are alive with pollinators, and the hives have been buzzing with activity. If all goes well, we’re hoping for a really nice honey harvest later this summer.Well, that all the news here on the farm.Off to do more chores.JGMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.Share