Today's Opinions

By Amanda Katz Senior assignment editor Email

In today’s edition:

• Weighing RFK Jr.’s food safety strategy, and his ideas in general
• Who (or what) are D.C.’s bike lanes really for?

Food safety needs an upgrade — but not this one

Similac Alimentum Hypoallergenic Infant Formula, imported from Puerto Rico, on sale at a grocery store in Yonkers, New York, in June 2022. (Ted Shaffrey/AP)

With “fast food is poison except when I’m eating it on a private plane” activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. poised to be Donald Trump’s head of Health and Human Services, you might think at least the nation’s food supply is going to get cleaner. But the Editorial Board calls RFK Jr. “exactly the wrong person to overhaul” the host of agencies overseeing the regulation of food manufacturing in the United States.

Kennedy isn’t wrong about the existence of a problem, the board writes. Take the baby formula shortage, which our now-letters and community editor and then-columnist Alyssa Rosenberg wrote about to powerful effect in 2022 and 2023. The origins of that crisis lay partly in dysfunctional regulation.

But the “solutions” Kennedy is floating involve, for example, mass firings of agency staff. What is actually needed is the opposite: “Real reform would start by surging resources to the Food and Drug Administration to carry out its mission, as leaders at the agency have advocated for years.” There is real and useful work to be done to streamline the agencies that oversee this important task so they’re not working at cross-purposes. But, as the editorial points out, that’s a lot more complex a task than just gutting them.

Here’s hoping that whoever survives the nomination process to oversee our nation’s food safety gets the memo. As the board writes: “The challenge exists, and it requires a serious, science-informed response.”

Chaser: On our Opinions podcast Impromptu (sign up here!), Chuck Lane, Leana Wen and Rob Gebelhoff recently discussed the kernels of good ideas (surrounded by conspiracy theory chaff) within RFK Jr.’s belief system.

Local D.C. politics has been locked in war about what sounds like a minor infrastructure issue: Should some lanes used for traffic or parking be converted to bike lanes?

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That’s because something bigger is at stake, columnist Marc Fisher writes: “Though they might seem a narrow concern, bike lanes have proved an enduring and powerful symbol of Washington’s central divide: Who is the city for? Is it forever Chocolate City, proud capital of Black America, or is it a fast-morphing magnet for hyper-educated young people — most of them White — who migrate to the city to populate think tanks, law firms, nonprofits, and government and its contractors? Can it be both?”

Fisher points out that, in practice, people who get to work by bike dropped by two percentage points between a 2017 high of around 5 percent and 2022, the most recent year for which we have data. (It’s no real mystery where those bikers went, I would argue — over the same period, as a pandemic struck and remote office technology improved, the portion of Washingtonians working from home went from 7 percent to a whopping 34 percent.) With that data in hand, Marc believes that the true goal of the bike-lane gang is less to serve bikers and more to put the city on a “road diet,” discouraging drivers by worsening traffic. And that, Marc says, is “not an honest way for government to push its goals.”

Smartest, fastest

• The housing market is genuinely bad, Heather Long writes, but whether Trump can fix it pretty much depends on his abandoning a laundry list of plans that would make things worse — including giant tariffs and deporting a lot of the construction workforce.
• Chuck Lane looks at the gap between what the Democratic base wants on climate change and the electoral priorities of other voters, and examines how Kamala Harris’s campaign faltered in that breach.

It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.

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Purge the government?

No need for a bike commute

Or bike lane, either

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Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!