Public alarm over adulterated food and fraudulently marketed medicines, sharpened by Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle and its depiction of unsanitary meatpacking practices, drove Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, the first federal law prohibiting interstate commerce in adulterated or misbranded food and drugs.
Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry, had campaigned for the law for years and was placed in charge of enforcing it, giving the Bureau an entirely new regulatory mission alongside its original research functions. The enforcement function was reorganized several times over the following decades, becoming the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration in 1927 as a distinct body within the Department of Agriculture, before an Agricultural Appropriations Act shortened its name to the Food and Drug Administration in 1930. The agency remained part of the Department of Agriculture until 1940, when it moved to the Federal Security Agency, and its authority expanded substantially over the twentieth century through further legislation covering cosmetics, medical devices and pharmaceutical safety testing, giving it broad jurisdiction over any product marketed with a therapeutic claim, a jurisdiction that would eventually bring it into direct conflict with Wilhelm Reich's orgone therapy.