type: timeline_event
On April 28, 2020, President Trump signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to classify meatpacking plants as critical infrastructure and order them to remain open, even as COVID-19 tore through facilities at catastrophic rates. What made this order extraordinary was not just its content but its authorship: subsequent investigations by ProPublica and the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis revealed that the executive order had been substantially drafted by lawyers and lobbyists for the meatpacking industry itself, including representatives of Tyson Foods, JBS USA, Smithfield Foods, and Cargill. The industry had lobbied the White House and the U.S. Department of Agriculture aggressively, framing plant closures as a threat to the national food supply while simultaneously fighting to avoid mandatory safety protocols that would have slowed production lines.
By the time the order was signed, at least 20 meatpacking workers had already died from COVID-19 and more than 5,000 had been infected across dozens of facilities. The order effectively overrode state and local health authorities who had been closing plants or imposing safety requirements, stripping governors and county health officials of the power to protect workers in their jurisdictions. The USDA, which was tasked with implementing the order, issued guidance that deferred almost entirely to industry on safety measures, refusing to mandate social distancing, protective equipment, or reduced line speeds. Internal communications later revealed that meatpacking executives had explicitly sought the executive order as a shield against liability lawsuits from workers and their families, and the order's language was crafted to provide exactly that legal protection.
The consequences were devastating and predictable. Over the course of the pandemic, more than 59,000 meatpacking workers contracted COVID-19 and at least 269 died, according to the House Select Subcommittee's final report. The workforce was disproportionately composed of immigrants, refugees, and people of color, many of whom feared retaliation or deportation if they refused to work or reported unsafe conditions. The meatpacking DPA order represented perhaps the most brazen example of regulatory capture during the entire pandemic: an emergency law designed to mobilize industry in service of the public interest was instead used by industry to override public health protections, immunize corporations from liability, and force vulnerable workers into life-threatening conditions. The order's drafting process, in which corporate lawyers literally wrote the presidential directive that governed their own regulation, became a definitive case study in how the Defense Production Act could be weaponized against the very people it was ostensibly meant to protect.