SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Biden FDA moves to ban toxic Red Dye No. 3 in food
Chemical linked to cancer, memory problems in children
In a significant move to protect public health, the Biden Food and Drug Administration announced today it will ban the use of Red Dye No. 3 in food.
This decision comes after years of advocacy from organizations led by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, or CSPI, as well as the Center for Food Safety, Environmental Working Group and a number of other public health groups and activists who petitioned the FDA
to take action on this harmful chemical in 2022.
Red 3 is known to cause cancer in animals and has been banned in cosmetics since 1990.
“We wouldn’t be celebrating this historic decision today without the relentless leadership of public health champions like Michael Jacobson and others who took up this fight decades ago on behalf of consumers,†said EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook.
“We all owe a debt of gratitude to Michael and the other early leaders who pushed the FDA to remove toxic chemical ingredients from the nation’s food supply,†Cook said.
Jacobson, who co-founded CSPI
in 1971, has been a leading advocate in tackling the underlying causes of preventable diseases while championing a just and sustainable food system that makes healthy, nutritious options accessible to all. CSPI has remained at the forefront of these important efforts under the leadership of Dr. Peter Lurie.
Health concerns
Red 3 is a synthetic food colorant found in hundreds, if not thousands, of processed foods, particularly candy
and other sweets. The dye has been linked to a range of serious health concerns, particularly for children.
Recent research further underscores the dangers of this chemical dye in food. A 2021 study
by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment found that synthetic dyes like Red 3 are linked to a greater risk of behavioral difficulties in children, including decreased attention span and memory problems.
Red 3 has been singled out as a particularly harmful food dye because studies show it causes cancer in animals.
“Today’s action by the FDA marks a monumental victory for consumer health and safety,†said Cook. “For years, Red 3 remained in food products, despite growing evidence linking it to health problems, particularly in kids.
“This ban sends a strong message that protecting the health of Americans – especially vulnerable children – must always take priority over the narrow interests of the food industry.â€
‘Much-needed step’
Vani Hari, author and activist a FoodBabe.com
, has petitioned Kellogg’s to remove all artificial food dyes from their cereal. She said, “Red No. 3 being allowed in our food for over 30 years, after being banned in cosmetics, is one of the greatest examples of how conflicts of interest have prevented the FDA from protecting the American people.â€
Courtney Swan, M.S., an integrative nutritionist, food activist and founder of Realfoodology.com
, said, “It is unconscionable that it took the FDA decades to finally remove this toxic chemical from our food, despite knowing for years that it posed serious health risks.
“Today’s action by the White House is a much-needed step toward making our food safer and healthier for the American people,†Swan said. “However, this must be just the beginning. We now call on the FDA to take similar steps on other harmful chemicals still permitted in our food supply.
“Our health deserves nothing less than urgent, decisive action to protect us from unnecessary risks,†she added.
When the FDA restricted Red 3’s use in cosmetics in 1990, it cited evidence that high doses could cause cancer. But the chemical has remained in food products for all these years, continuing to pose a risk to consumers.
“Toxic chemical additives such as Red 3 are common in many foods, particularly candy and other sweets, putting millions of children at risk,†said EWG Senior Scientist Tasha Stoiber. “This widespread exposure has raised concerns about lasting behavioral difficulties, including ADHD.
“It’s essential to shield young children from harmful chemicals during these key stages of their development,†Stoiber added.
California takes action
The FDA action comes in the context of significant state-level progress tackling harmful food dyes and other additives.
In 2023, California enacted the California Food Safety Act, a groundbreaking law that bans four harmful chemicals, including Red 3, from food products manufactured and sold in the state starting in 2027. This marks the first state law in the U.S. to take comprehensive action against toxic chemicals in food.
EWG and the consumer advocates who successfully petitioned the FDA to ban Red 3 will continue to push for stronger federal and state regulation of food chemicals. It’s imperative to provide families across the U.S. with safer choices by ensuring all food products are free from toxic substances.
Consumers concerned about Red 3 and other potentially harmful chemicals can explore EWG’s Food Scores database, which provides nutrition, ingredient and processing details for over 80,000 products. More than 2,000 foods in the database contain Red 3.
The Environmental Working Group is a community 30 million strong, working to protect our environmental health by changing industry standards.
(202) 667-6982LATEST NEWS
'Office-Peddling' Pam Bondi Grilled by Senate as Watchdogs Blast Trump AG Pick
"The U.S. Attorney General should be the American people's lawyer—not a corporate lobbyist with a closet full of conflicted clients," said the head of the watchdog Accountable.US.
Jan 15, 2025
As President-elect Donald Trump's attorney general pick Pam Bondi faced Senate questioning on Wednesday, progressive critics opposed to her nomination cited her record as a lobbyist, her role in amplifying Trump's claims of election fraud in 2020, and her history of catering to corporate interests to argue she is unfit to lead the U.S. Justice Department.
Bondi, for her part, told senators in the first of two scheduled hearings that her Justice Department would not be used to target people based on their politics—though she stopped short of saying that the agency would not investigate foes of Trump. She also spent much of her confirmation answering questions about Kash Patel, Trump's controversial pick for FBI director whom she repeatedly defended, according to Politico.
Jon Golinger, democracy advocate for the watchdog group Public Citizen, was among Bondi's detractors who argued Wednesday that she is deeply unqualified to be the nation's top law enforcement officer.
"The U.S. Attorney General should be the American people's lawyer—not a corporate lobbyist with a closet full of conflicted clients, many of whom seek government contracts or are being investigated by the very Justice Department Bondi now seeks to lead," Golinger said in a statement.
After eight years as Florida's attorney general, Pam Bondi left that post in 2019 and joined Ballard Partners, a corporate lobbying firm that has also employed Trump's pick for White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. At Ballard Partners, Bondi worked on behalf of numerous corporate clients, including the private prison firm the Geo Group, Uber, and Amazon.
Bondi also served as a lawyer for Trump during his first impeachment trial and pushed Trump's claims of election fraud in 2020.
Tony Carrk, the executive director of the watchdog Accountable.US, went after Bondi's time as Florida Attorney General, writing that she "frequently played favorites with big corporate donors and political insiders at the expense of everyday consumers, patients, and the public good" while she held that office and that "nothing indicates Bondi would change her office-peddling modus operandi as America's top justice official."
Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert, who will testify as an outside witness Thursday at day two of Bondi's hearing, said Wednesday that Bondi's record could lead to a politicization of the agency and called her "unsuitable" for the role given her ties to powerful corporations.
Meanwhile, the civil rights coalition the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, joined the pile on in a statement submitted Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Ms. Bondi lacks the commitment to defending the core tenets of our democracy and the civil and human rights of all people. Indeed, her active participation in and support of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election ought to be disqualifying in itself," the group wrote.
But Bondi—who "acquitted herself coolly," according to press account—appears on track for likely confirmation.
Raising the specter of the pressure Trump has placed on his Department of Justice in the past, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) asked, "let's imagine Trump issues a directive or order to you or to the FBI director that is outside the boundaries of ethics or law. What will you do?"
"I will never speak on a hypothetical, especially one saying that the president would do something illegal. What I can tell you is my duty, if confirmed as the Attorney General, will be to the Constitution and the United States," said Bondi.
Bondi would not answer directly when asked whether Trump lost the election in 2020 and also would not denounce some of the former president's extreme stances, like calling those arrested for participating in the January 6 insurrection "hostages" or "patriots."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Progressives Slam 'Extremist' Plans of Project 2025 Architect Tapped for Key Trump Post
Russell Vought, Trump's pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, was questioned by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee during a Wednesday confirmation hearing.
Jan 15, 2025
As a U.S. Senate committee held a confirmation hearing for Russell Vought—Republican President-elect Donald Trump's pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget—progressive critics underscored what they called the extremism of the controversial nominee, who played a key role in crafting a proposed initiative to expand executive power and purge the federal civil service.
Vought—who was questioned Wednesday by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee—served as both acting director and director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump's first term. He currently leads the think tank Center for Renewing America, whose motto is "For God. For Country. For Community."
The defender of Christian nationalism recently co-authored the policy portion of Project 2025, which includes dramatic cuts to critical public programs, abolishing or gutting essential government agencies, a national abortion ban, and a litany of additional far-right wish list items. While Trump has tried to distance himself from the deeply unpopular proposal, at least 140 people who worked in his first administration—including six former Cabinet secretaries—have been involved with Project 2025.
Tapped to oversee an agency that plays a key role in managing civil servants, Vought was secretly recorded saying he wants government officials to be "traumatically affected" by his reforms "because they are increasingly viewed as the villains."
Debra Perlin, policy director at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility in Washington, submitted written testimony to the Senate committee in which she warned that "should he be confirmed, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Vought intends to misuse his authority as director of OMB to harm civil servants, and as a result, endanger the American public."
Perlin continued:
During his tenure as OMB acting director and then director from January 2019 to January 2021, Mr. Vought was a central figure in attempting to implement Schedule F, President Trump's executive order that would have upended the merit-based civil service system by stripping employment protections away from thousands of career civil servants had President [Joe] Biden not rescinded it. Mr. Vought has called for reinstating Schedule F and was a key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's sweeping—and wildly unpopular—conservative policy plan that advocates for dismantling the civil service. If Schedule F is reinstated, it would not only harm federal employees but would also cause catastrophic harm to government services, as well as causing deep economic impacts in places with significant populations of government workers including California, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., among others.
In addition to Mr. Vought's intention to dismantle the civil service, he has pushed extreme strategies to consolidate presidential power under the banner of "radical constitutionalism." He supports the president withholding congressionally appropriated funds in violation of the Impoundment Control Act, bypassing the advice and consent of the Senate to push recess appointments, invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military on the American public, and abusing emergency powers. These plans to expand presidential power are even more troubling taken with Mr. Vought's stated desire to reduce the independence of federal agencies such as the Department of Justice, in part by purging agencies of career civil servants that are seen as standing in the way of the president's agenda. Mr. Vought has called for "an army of investigators" to prosecute current and former government officials who sought to hold President Trump accountable.
"These are just some of the ways Mr. Vought intends to misuse his own authority and craft plans for the president to subvert the law and, in the process, American democracy," Perlin added.
In a statement coinciding with Wednesday's hearing, Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said: "Vought has no business going back to OMB. His extreme ideological opposition to regulations that protect consumers, workers, our environment, and public health and safety will lead to more deregulatory disasters that harm all of us."
"He wants to slash funding for critical government agencies and services, interfere with agencies that are supposed to be politically independent, exclude the benefits of regulation from cost-benefit analysis, and fire vast numbers of civil service employees simply for doing their jobs," Gilbert added. "In addition, he abused his power during his last tenure at OMB to override agency experts, repeatedly endangering public health and safety. The Senate should reject this dangerous and extreme nomination."
Congressman Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), founder of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force, said Wednesday that "we don't have to guess if Russ Vought will enact the radical vision laid out in Project 2025 if he is confirmed, because he literally wrote the playbook and his record shows that he will stop at nothing to enact it."
"He is a self-avowed Christian nationalist who plans to dismantle the civil service—replacing thousands of qualified, nonpartisan federal employees such as scientists and engineers with political lackeys who will be selected to follow partisan orders above the law or the Constitution," the lawmaker continued. "He has vowed to ignore the Constitution by seizing unlawful power for Trump to unilaterally withhold or redirect funds for entire agencies or programs that Congress appropriated."
"His aggressive plan to gut checks and balances clears the way for Trump to enact his entire Project 2025 agenda to sell out the middle class, threaten personal rights and freedoms, and impose biblical morality codes on all of us," Huffman added. "We cannot take that risk and let this authoritarian architect of Project 2025 anywhere near the federal budget or the Oval Office."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Hearing for Trump DOT Pick Highlights Conflicts of Interests, Push for More Auto Pollution
"Will Duffy use his power to protect the bottom line of his former corporate clients by scrapping basic transparency protections at the expense of everyday Americans?" asked one critic.
Jan 15, 2025
U.S. senators on Wednesday held confirmation hearings for numerous nominees for positions in President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet, including two who would oversee pollution rules—and climate action groups warned that both men would face major conflicts of interest due to their work for the very industries they would be tasked with regulating.
As Common Dreamsreported, energy secretary Chris Wright is a longtime denier of the climate crisis who's made his fortune in the fossil fuel industry, and as lawmakers were hearing from him Wednesday, transportation secretary nominee Sean Duffy was testifying before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on his experience and political views.
The hearing, said government watchdog Accountable.US, "failed to resolve concerns around a major conflict of interest" tied to Duffy due to his past lobbying for the same airlines that are currently suing the Department of Transportation (DOT).
Duffy, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin, became a lobbyist for BGR Government Affairs in 2019, after serving in the House. He and the firm were hired by "Partnership for Open Skies," which includes as its members American, United, and Delta airlines, to lobby for a "U.S. open skies policy."
Those airlines all joined a lawsuit against the DOT last May, challenging the Biden administration's rule to "protect airline passengers from surprise junk fees when purchasing a ticket."
"DOT needs leadership that prioritizes strong safety standards and environmental justice—not someone with limited qualifications to address these urgent challenges."
"Sean Duffy's lobbying work for the same airlines now suing to overturn a Transportation Department rule against surprise junk fees poses a major conflict," said Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable. "Will Duffy use his power to protect the bottom line of his former corporate clients by scrapping basic transparency protections at the expense of everyday Americans? Duffy is just one of several Trump nominees with similar conflicts of interest that confirm the incoming administration intends to take care of wealthy corporate special interests first and working people last."
At the hearing, said Accountable, Duffy failed to answer questions about his past lobbying and his comments in 2022 about the DOT's push to investigate Southwest Airlines' holiday scheduling crisis.
"Southwest will fix this… [Secretary of Transportation] Pete Buttigieg never will," said Duffy at the time.
Accountable said the nominee's position begged the question, "If Duffy had been the transportation secretary during this crisis, what, if anything, would he have done to protect consumers? Or would he have solely relied on market forces to determine Southwest's penalty, allowing the company to avoid accountability while leaving current and future passengers without restitution or support?"
Kelsey Crane of the climate group Earthworks warned that Duffy's "complete disregard for climate science and disdain for clean energy is deeply concerning."
The DOT plays a "critical role in regulating methane emissions from oil and gas pipelines and permitting oil and gas export terminals that threaten public health and the climate," said Crane, but similar to Wright, Duffy has dismissed the warnings of "climate alarmists" and suggested climate science is an "agenda of control."
"Frontline communities are already suffering the effects of climate pollution and inadequate oversight," said Crane. "DOT needs leadership that prioritizes strong safety standards and environmental justice—not someone with limited qualifications to address these urgent challenges. Sean Duffy's close ties to the oil and gas industry and denial of clear climate science raises serious doubts about his ability to safeguard public health and the climate."
In his post-congressional career as a Fox News host, Duffy used his platform to attack Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards aimed at expanding access to clean vehicles, said the Sierra Club's Katherine GarcÃa—evidence of his "dangerous and misinformed beliefs."
"We need a secretary of transportation that understands the reality that transportation is the leading source of climate emissions and is committed to clean transportation solutions that will help protect our communities," said GarcÃa, the director of the group's Clean Transportation for All campaign. "Sean Duffy has no business running DOT and we urge the Senate to reject him."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular