FDA announced on September 30 a nationwide push to recruit new members for its advisory committees — more than 30 of them. Scientific experts, consumer representatives, the whole range. Here is the FDA news release.
Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas said the agency is “actively inviting people from across the country who are on the forefront of their fields — clinicians, researchers, and community voices who can bring the latest science, real-world experience, and fresh perspectives to the FDA’s deliberations.”
Good. Advisory committees matter. They are one of the few places where outside scientists get to put hard questions to the agency in public.
But as Dr. Susan Mayne pointed out on LinkedIn, there is a hole in the middle of this announcement that you could drive a truck through.
“It is great that FDA is trying to expand scientific expertise on an advisory committee meetings, with one major exception — where is the ‘F’ in FDA? FDA is accepting nominations for >30 advisory committees, not one of which is devoted to food and/or nutrition. The FDA Science Advisory Board is the only one that mentions food or nutrition expertise.”
“I understand that running advisory committee meetings takes expert time and resources, and with the losses of experts and supporting staff at FDA in the foods program the remaining ones likely do not have bandwidth to do this right now, but if we really want to support food and nutrition at FDA then I would love to see a Food and Nutrition Advisory Committee on the list (as has been done in the past — I served on an FDA Nutrition Subcommittee to the Food Advisory Committee in the early 2000s). Also noting that the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria in Foods (NACMCF), which supported both FDA and USDA, was abruptly terminated by the Trump administration in 2025.”
When Susan Mayne says this, it is worth stopping to listen.
Dr. Mayne ran the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition — CFSAN — from January 2015 until she retired in May 2023. CFSAN is the part of FDA responsible for the safety and labeling of roughly 80 percent of the American food supply. She did that job for eight years, under two administrations, through outbreak after outbreak. She knows exactly what the agency can and cannot do, and she knows what it costs when the science function gets thinned out.
Before FDA, she spent nearly three decades at Yale, where she held an endowed chair as the C.-E.A. Winslow Professor of Epidemiology, chaired the Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, and served as Associate Director of the Yale Cancer Center. She is now Professor (adjunct) of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. Her research career focused on diet and nutrition as determinants of chronic disease. In other words, she is not a commentator with an opinion about food policy. She is one of the people who built the evidence base, and then went and ran the agency that has to act on it.
So read the FDA release again with her question in mind. The vacancies listed span oncology, cardiovascular medicine, neurology, genetics, medical devices. All of it serious, all of it necessary. And not one committee devoted to food or nutrition — at an agency whose first letter stands for food.
This is the part that should trouble people. Food is where most Americans actually encounter FDA. Not once in a lifetime at a cancer diagnosis, but three times a day, every day, for every one of us. And the harm is not hypothetical. I have spent over thirty years representing the people on the other end of that failure — children on dialysis after E. coli O157:H7, families burying a parent after Listeria, infants hospitalized with botulism from powdered formula.
Dr. Mayne’s point about NACMCF deserves its own paragraph. The National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria in Foods was the body that gave both FDA and USDA independent, expert advice on the microbiological side of food safety — the pathogens, the criteria, the sampling. It was terminated in 2025. So the agency has now eliminated the standing committee that handled foodborne pathogens, and in the same breath announced it is recruiting broadly for everything except food.
There is also an irony here that should not go unmentioned. The Acting Commissioner issuing this release, Kyle Diamantas, came up through the Human Foods Program. Of all the people to let a 30-committee recruitment drive go out the door without a food seat at the table, you would not expect it to be him.
I take Dr. Mayne’s point about bandwidth seriously, and she is being fair in raising it. The foods program has lost experts and support staff. Running an advisory committee properly is real work, and a committee that meets once and goes quiet is worse than none at all. But bandwidth is a budget decision, not a law of nature. If FDA has the capacity to stand up and support more than 30 committees across the rest of the agency, the absence of one for food is a choice about priorities.
The fix is straightforward and FDA has done it before. Reconstitute a Food and Nutrition Advisory Committee. Bring back NACMCF or something that does its job. Put the microbiologists, the epidemiologists, the nutrition scientists and yes, the consumer representatives, in a room and let them ask hard questions in public.
Nominations for consumer representative positions are due November 15, 2026, and nominations for scientific and technical voting members are due November 30, 2026. Self-nominations are accepted. If you work in food safety or nutrition science, put your name in anyway — and say in your nomination what Dr. Mayne said.
The “F” came first for a reason.