President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office have been a gift to a sector of the economy that gets little attention but has enormous social and economic consequences: the US meat industry.

While Congress and both Republican and Democratic administrations tend to do what meat companies want — in part because those companies tend to give a lot of money to politicians and intensively lobby them — Trump has been even friendlier than most.

The one striking exception, of course, are the tariffs, which farm groups have opposed and are already feeling the sting from. The ensuing trade war has reduced two of US agriculture’s most important exports to China: pork and soybeans.f

In most other respects, though, the Trump administration has behaved like traditional anti-regulation conservatives. It’s quickly taken a number of actions that directly benefit the meat industry, at the expense of the environment, animals, slaughterhouse workers, and the American consumer.

Here are the six most consequential ones.

1. Speeding up slaughter lines at meat processing plants

Pig slaughter lines are already allowed to process as many as 1,106 hogs per hour, or roughly one pig every 3.2 seconds, while poultry operations are allowed to slaughter up to 140 birds per minute. Yet in March, the US Department of Agriculture announced that it was drafting a rule to allow pig and poultry slaughterhouses to operate even faster.

Labor advocates say the new regulations will further endanger slaughterhouse workers, who already work one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, suffering high rates of injury from the repetitive cuts they must make to animal carcasses for hours on end.

“Increased line speeds will hurt workers — it’s not a maybe, it’s a definite,” the president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, which represents over 15,000 poultry workers, said in a press release.

Animal advocates also worry about how this will impact the billions of animals that move through US slaughterhouses every year. “With fewer protections and higher pressure, animals will endure even more suffering on the already cruel live-shackle slaughter line,” Michael Windsor of the animal protection group the Humane League told me in an email.

The USDA didn’t respond to an interview request for this story.

2. Rolling back food safety measures

Toward the end of President Joe Biden’s term, his USDA proposed — but didn’t finalize — a rule that would require poultry companies to limit salmonella levels in their products and test raw chicken........

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