Federal Advisory Committee Act

I know.

Um, there, there is something called the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and so if you're gonna set up a committee to decide anything for the government, um, to who to contract with to buy military aircraft, for example, or, or what the dietary guidelines should be, any government policy, the Federal Advisory Committee Act says you gotta select the panel openly and transparently.

People have to be able to weigh in who's on that committee.

They should nominate the people who are most qualified.

Hmm.

So I wanna, I wanna understand a little bit better.

So you're suing the federal, um-- you're, you're suing under the Federal Advisory Committee Act rather than on a, like, nutritional scientific ground.

Right.

He continued, quote, they put money in the industry's pocket and cholesterol in Americans' arteries.

PCRM is ultimately asking that the court withdraw the current dietary guidelines and issue new ones that follow a process that's compliant with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, which they say the most recent guidelines violated.

Well, how are the guidelines supposed to be made?

The dietary guidelines are usually based on the work of the Volunteer Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, or DGAC.

I can't say that I have.

[laughs] Well, the Federal Advisory Committee Act basically says that if you're gonna be in, you know, getting input from the same group of people over and over again, that, um, you need to, to host these meetings in a formal public way.

And that advisory policy board is just so incredible how it engages law enforcement at all levels of the United States and sort of brings them along to help advise on what the changes to standards should be.

It's, it's this really incredible, credible democratic decision-making process, and it's slow, but once the changes happen, you know, they're official and people are bought into them.