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The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, chaired by Representative James Clyburn, released findings from an investigation spanning over 151,000 pages of internal documents from meatpacking companies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The investigation revealed that major meatpacking corporations — Tyson Foods, JBS USA, Smithfield Foods, and Cargill — had directly drafted language for President Trump's April 2020 executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to keep slaughterhouses open during the pandemic. The companies crafted the DPA order not to address a genuine supply emergency but to shield themselves from liability and override state and local public health authorities that were attempting to shut down plants experiencing massive COVID-19 outbreaks.
Internal communications showed that political appointees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture systematically overrode career officials and public health experts who warned that keeping plants open without adequate safety measures would cause widespread infection and death. The documents revealed that industry lobbyists had direct access to senior USDA officials and that the department functioned as a conduit for corporate demands rather than as an independent regulator protecting worker safety. Career scientists and food safety inspectors raised alarms about dangerous conditions inside the plants, but their concerns were suppressed or ignored in favor of industry production targets.
The human toll was staggering: at least 59,000 meatpacking workers contracted COVID-19 and 269 died during the first year of the pandemic alone, with the actual numbers likely far higher due to underreporting. The investigation demonstrated a textbook case of regulatory capture, in which the regulated industry effectively wrote the government order governing its own operations during a public health emergency. The meatpacking giants had collectively reported record profits during the pandemic period, even as their workers — disproportionately immigrants and people of color — fell ill and died in crowded processing plants. The Clyburn subcommittee's findings showed how the Defense Production Act, originally designed to mobilize industry for national defense, had been weaponized to prioritize corporate profits over worker lives.