Orrin Hatch was an attorney whose 42 years in the U.S. Senate from 1977 to 2019 made him the longest-serving Republican U.S. senator ever. In the Senate, he was:
\n\u2022 President pro tempore in 2015
\n\u2022 Chairman Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions from 1981 to 1987
\n\u2022 Chairman Judiciary Committee from 1995-2001 and 2003-2005
\n\u2022 Chairman Finance Committee from 2015 to 2019<\/p>\n
He retired from the Senate in 2019 and died at age 88 on April 23, 2022, one week after suffering a stroke.<\/p>\n
Perhaps his most destructive legislative achievement was the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) that he introduced with Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. The DSHEA substantially eliminated all government regulation of the dietary and herbal supplements industry. It allowed manufacturers to make health claims without prior approval from the Food and Drug Administration unless that product was proven to harm people\u2019s health. This act has fostered the appearance on the market of many unproven vitamin and mineral supplements, botanicals, amino acids, oils, hormonal extracts, probiotics and more. That is why so many dietary supplements have disclaimers like: “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”<\/p>\n
In 2014, at a dietary supplement industry conference marking DSHEA\u2019s 20th anniversary, Hatch claimed that, \u201cDSHEA established a rational framework for the regulation of dietary supplements.\u201d Of course this statement is unbelievable and the supplement industry has grown from $9 billion in 1994 to more than $75 billion today and close to half of the North American population takes dietary supplements.<\/p>\n
Early Life and Education<\/strong>
\nHatch was born near Pittsburgh, in poverty during the great depression, to a father who was a metal lather. He had eight brothers and sisters. He was the first in his family to attend college, and received his B.A. from Brigham Young University and law degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He said that during law school, he lived in a refurbished chicken coop behind his parents’ house.
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