The agency founded to guard Americans from quack cures has quietly mothballed its decades‑old milk testing program, leaving state labs scrambling just as bird flu sweeps U.S. dairies. Inside the FDA, thousands of scientists have been pink‑slipped under a cost‑cutting order overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmental lawyer whose anti‑vaccine activism already shadows a nationwide measles surge. Historians see a grim symmetry: an agency born of the 1906 snake‑oil scandals now curbed by a champion of raw milk and “natural immunity.” Industry experts warn that without federal proficiency checks, pathogens from Listeria to H5N1 could slip into grocery coolers, forcing consumers to trust a watchdog with the teeth pulled.