America’s Food Safety Is Now in the Hands of Donald Trump Jr.’s Hunting Buddy

Late last week, amid mass purges of key personnel at the nation’s health agencies, a Florida attorney with a surprisingly slim résumé was named acting deputy commissioner for human foods at the Food and Drug Administration.

The role, which is not subject to Senate approval, is an important one. In it, Kyle Diamantas, 37, will be responsible for ensuring the safety of roughly 80% of the nation’s food supply. The already-overtaxed division is vital to public health, responsible for everything from overseeing the complex manufacturing of infant formula to responding to deadly bacterial contamination and managing food supplies in the wake of hurricanes and floods.

Diamantas’s LinkedIn profile is a study in brevity. He received a law degree from the University of Florida in 2013. He started his next-listed job, as an attorney at the law firm Jones Day in Miami, in 2021, ascending to partner last year.

His now archived Jones Day bio described him as having “more than 10 years of experience advising food, cosmetic, dietary supplement, drug, and other life sciences and consumer goods clients on a wide range of regulatory, compliance, and enforcement matters.” Prior to that job, he worked as a senior associate at the Orlando office of the law firm Baker Donelson.

Diamantas’s limited experience for such a major regulatory position, when compared with the experience of his predecessor, appears to have been offset by another significant qualification. The young attorney is a friend and hunting buddy of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s firstborn son, Vanity Fair has learned.

In March 2021, the two men were photographed holding dead Osceola wild turkeys and grinning. A post on X by Mike Tussey, the founder of the hunting outfit Osceola Outdoors, which also organizes hunts of alligators and hogs, described the scene as follows: “Don Jr. With his good friend Kyle Diamantas! Kyle’s first Osceola!” A photograph of Trump Jr., Diamantas, and Tussey, with a single turkey, is also featured in a gallery of pictures on Osceola Outdoors’s website.

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Osceola turkeys, known for their striking plumage, were long ago on the brink of extinction due to overhunting and habitat destruction. According to the Florida Wildlife Federation, they are named after Chief Osceola of the Seminole Indian Nation.

Though the FDA position appears to be Diamantas’s first government job, the Osceola was not his first dead bird. In November 2015, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers posted an image of a dead duck captioned: “‘A Saturday morning Redhead.’ Shared by Kyle Diamantas here.”

Trump Jr.’s hunting habits have long provoked outrage. He was once photographed in Africa holding a dead elephant’s tail that he had apparently severed with a knife. More recently, Italian authorities opened an investigation after it was reported that he’d killed a protected species of duck known as the ruddy shelduck.

What skills Trump Jr.’s hunting buddy Diamantas will bring to the FDA’s Human Foods Program, where he will manage its $1 billion budget, remains to be seen. An FDA spokesperson referred Vanity Fair to an agency link that said Diamantas “has extensive experience working with various federal and state agencies and policy makers, scientific organizations, consumer advocacy groups, and industry stakeholders.”

Reached for comment, a spokesman for Trump Jr., Arthur Schwartz, emailed Vanity Fair that, given the presidential son’s leading role in staffing up the Trump-Vance administration, “Are you really asking whether a member of the transition team played a role in the transition? You people are a bunch of retards.” Regarding the protected duck in Italy, a spokesman previously told The Washington Post that Trump Jr. follows all hunting rules and regulations “and plans on fully cooperating with any investigation.”

The nation’s controversial new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has decried what he describes as the mass poisoning of Americans by the “Big Food” lobby. In taking the helm as overseer of the nation’s health agencies, he has set his sights on transforming what and how Americans eat. His stated agenda includes limiting chemical additives in food, ridding school lunches of processed food, and purging safety net food programs of sugary drinks.

He has also pledged to rid the FDA of what he claims are compromised regulators, more beholden to industry interests than to their stated missions. (Diamantas’s past experience representing food-and-beverage industry clients appears to be just the type of conflict Kennedy Jr. has critiqued.)

An obvious ally in that effort would have been the FDA’s Human Foods Program, which, by its own description, “oversees all FDA activities related to food safety and nutrition.” Most recently, under the Biden administration, the division oversaw the banning of food dye Red No. 3, a move right in line with Kennedy Jr.’s stated “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) priorities.

But late last week, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency purged the division of an estimated 89 staff members, leading to the resignation of James Jones, the deputy commissioner for human foods. An experienced regulator, Jones had spent almost 20 years with the Environmental Protection Agency before joining the FDA in 2023 to lead the newly reorganized foods division.

In his resignation letter, Jones called the “indiscriminate” mass terminations “one more roadblock to achieving the Secretary’s stated objectives of making America healthy again.” He added, “The foods program staff at FDA is the envy of the world in its technical, professional and ethical standards. The Secretary’s comments impugning the integrity of the food staff, asserting they are corrupt based on falsities, is a disservice to everyone.”

Among the employees dismissed were those with “highly technical expertise in nutrition, infant formula, food safety response and even 10 chemical safety staff hired to review potentially unsafe ingredients in our food supply,” according to Jones’s letter.

“I can’t believe that American consumers are going to support losing staff that protects the safety of the food that every one of us eats every day,” says Susan Mayne, who served as the FDA’s director of food safety and applied nutrition from 2015 to 2023. Particularly “horrifying,” she says, are cuts to the infant-formula team, which she successfully lobbied Congress to grow from 9 to 13 people. With cuts to such a small staff, she says, “the whole program could dissolve and we would be in the biggest infant-formula crisis you could ever imagine.”

As if a reminder was needed of the job’s life-and-death stakes, the FDA on Friday announced a recall of listeria-tainted frozen nutritional shakes that had been sold to nursing homes, among other institutions, and had been linked to 11 deaths and 37 hospitalizations.

Additional reporting by Liz Rosenberg.