On Aug. 28, 2026, President Trump said he would give farmers and ranchers the right to process their own food, in a Truth Social post calling the four largest meat processors a monopoly. Here it is in full:

“Ranchers and Farmers have always been a number one priority for me. They work very hard, are smart, efficient, and immaculately CLEAN, but for years I have heard that they have had a tremendous problem with the Big Processors, who many say are a nasty Monopoly. There are, essentially, 4 of them, a very non competitive number, and they make life miserable for our wonderful Farmers and Ranchers, and I can’t let that happen, can I? So, in order to break this powerful monopoly, with much of its ownership based outside of the U.S., I am authorizing legal documents to be drawn in order to allow Farmers and Ranchers to be given the right to PROCESS THEIR OWN FOOD. This should move quickly. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

CNN reported where the idea came from: on Wednesday’s Glenn Beck program, Beck told the President that “the inspections are insane,” and Trump asked whether ranchers and farmers would do a good job of processing beef with less regulation, then said he would look at it that day. Whatever those legal documents turn out to say, they run straight at the reason I no longer make a living suing beef companies.

From 1993 to 2002, at least 95 percent of my firm’s revenue came from hamburger cases.

I started this work in January 1993, representing children sickened in the Jack in the Box outbreak. Hundreds were sick. Four children died. From that outbreak until the ConAgra recall in the summer of 2002, at least 95 percent of Marler Clark’s revenue came from E. coli cases linked to hamburger. I could count on a significant ground beef outbreak and recall arriving like clockwork every spring or summer. In 2002 I wrote an op-ed for the Denver Post asking the beef industry and USDA to put me out of business.

They largely did it. Ground beef E. coli is now close to zero as a share of what this firm does, and I have said so in print more than once. The millions the industry spent on interventions and the work of a generation of food safety professionals made the difference. It is the single best thing that has happened in food safety in my lifetime, and I do not say that grudgingly.

One sentence in a September 1994 speech did most of the work.

On September 28, 1994, FSIS Administrator Michael Taylor told the American Meat Institute that the agency considered raw ground beef contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 to be adulterated under the Federal Meat Inspection Act. The exact language is preserved in the Federal Register. The industry sued and lost. On October 17, 1994, FSIS began sampling raw ground beef for the organism, and in 1998 it raised the sample size from 25 grams to 325 grams because the smaller sample was missing low-level contamination. After the 2002 ConAgra recall in Greeley, the agency ordered every ground beef plant to reassess its controls.

On June 4, 2012, six more Shiga toxin-producing strains — O26, O45, O103, O111, O121 and O145 — became adulterants in raw non-intact beef, a change Marler Clark had petitioned for in 2009. In June 2020 FSIS extended that testing from beef manufacturing trimmings to ground beef, bench trim and other components.

None of that happened on a farm. Every piece of it happened inside a federally inspected establishment, with federal personnel standing there to take the sample, hold the lot and stop the shipment. Take the inspector out and the entire apparatus has nothing to attach to.

A President cannot write a new exemption into the Federal Meat Inspection Act.

The inspection requirement is statutory, and so are the exemptions. For livestock there is one meaningful exemption, custom slaughter under 21 U.S.C. § 623, and the product goes back to the animal’s owner marked not for sale. FSIS says plainly in its own guideline that inspection is required, unless exempted, for meat from cattle, sheep, swine and goats, and it lists every exemption there is: personal use, custom slaughter, retail stores, restaurants, and slaughter in an unrecognized Territory. Selling uninspected beef to the public is not among them. Changing that takes Congress.

FSIS says absorbing 2,000 more plants would compromise its food safety mission.

Set aside the law for a moment and look at the arithmetic, starting with what thinning this system already did. Juan Vassallo reported for Investigate Midwest in May that complaints about the safety of meat, poultry and egg products rose nearly 40 percent in a single year, from 1,443 to 2,016, in a year when USDA cut its workforce by 18 percent and FSIS lost about 9 percent of its staff. That is this system with an inspector still in every plant, only fewer of them. FSIS spends about $1.24 billion a year to cover roughly 7,100 federally inspected establishments. The agency’s own fiscal 2027 budget justification warns that state reimbursement rates are falling toward 38 percent, that states may pull out of their inspection programs, and that taking on an estimated 2,000 additional establishments could severely strain its resources and compromise its food safety mission.

Two thousand plants is described by the agency as an existential problem. There are roughly 1.9 million farms in this country. Nobody is sending an inspector to the ranch, and nobody is proposing to. The only way to give a farmer the right to process his own beef for sale is to delete the requirement that anyone inspect it.

An immaculately clean steer carries E. coli O157:H7 in its intestines.

The President’s post says ranchers are immaculately clean, and I have no doubt most of them are. That has never been the point, and the confusion between the two is the oldest one in this field. E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella and Campylobacter live in the intestinal tracts of healthy cattle on clean farms. The organism reaches the carcass off the hide and the gut during dressing, and grinding then takes what was on the surface and distributes it through the interior where cooking may not reach it. As few as ten organisms can make a child sick. None of it is visible.

Everything the industry built — hide-on interventions, carcass washes, trim testing, test and hold — exists because what you can see on an animal has almost nothing to do with the pathogen load you cannot. A rancher’s good character has never been a kill step.

Meat with no establishment number cannot be traced or recalled.

This is the part that worries me most, and it gets almost no attention. A grant of inspection carries an establishment number, production records and lot identity. That is what makes a traceback possible, and a traceback is what makes a recall possible. Product slaughtered on a farm and sold down the road has none of it.

Illnesses from that product would be sporadic and scattered, arriving one at a time in counties that never compare notes, the kind of cluster that never crosses the threshold to be recognized as an outbreak in the first place. Most of them would never be counted. When somebody’s child ends up on dialysis, the first thing the family loses is any ability to find out why — and the second is any way to keep it from happening to the next family.

The consolidation complaint is real, and custom slaughter is not the fix.

I want to be fair about what sits underneath the President’s post, because it is not made up. The administration’s own figures,

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