Food Safety Was Slipping in the U.S. Then Came Mass Layoffs

Yahoo

08-04-2025

Boar's Head deli meats recall notice at a deli counter in a Queens, New York grocery store. Credit - Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Even before the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) eliminated 10,000 jobs on April 1, people who watched the agency closely were concerned about food safety.
Under a Biden-era reorganization, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cut millions of dollars for state-level food inspections, effective this year. Inspections of facilities were not keeping up with Congressional directives; the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in Jan. 2025 urging the FDA to 'strengthen inspection efforts to protect the U.S. food supply.' And advocates were concerned because major parts of the landmark 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act—including rules that farmers must monitor the water they spray on vegetables for manure—were being delayed or rolled back.
'We have always had a problem with having adequate funding and staffing for the level of complication that is food safety in the U.S.,' says Darin Detwiler, a food safety advocate whose toddler son died of E. coli poisoning in 1993 during an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants. This lack of funding has coincided with a number of food illness outbreaks in the U.S. in recent years—including, in 2024 alone, an E. coli outbreak linked to slivered onions at McDonald's that killed one person, an E. coli outbreak linked to organic carrots sold in grocery stores (which also caused a fatality), and a listeria outbreak linked to Boar's Head deli meat that resulted in 10 deaths.
Then came the job cuts. At the FDA, 2,500 people were laid off, including workers in the Human Foods Program, who are tasked with ensuring food safety, and scientists at a product safety lab in San Francisco that tests foods for bacteria. Also gutted were communications staff at both FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who helped coordinate response to outbreaks and informed both consumers and businesses about recalled food. And hundreds of workers at CDC's Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice lost their jobs; the organization coordinated government response to an outbreak of lead poisoning in 2023 linked to cinnamon applesauce pouches.
Read More: Are Artificial Food Dyes Safe to Eat?
In the month before the layoffs, the Trump Administration also cut two longstanding committees focused on food safety: the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods and the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection. The first was studying which babies might be at risk from the deadly bacteria found at an Abbott Nutrition infant formula plant; the second was looking at ways to use technology to improve food safety inspections.
Now, safety advocates say, there is little doubt that the already-strained protocols for food safety in the U.S. are going to lead to more sickness.
'People will get sick, or worse, because the people who are charged with keeping our food safe were fired,' says Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, a health advocacy group.
HHS did not respond to a request for comment for this story. In a recent press release, it said that the restructuring will save taxpayers $1.8 billion and will implement a new agency priority: 'ending America's epidemic of chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins.' Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said that no 'frontline jobs' like inspectors were impacted by the layoffs.
But advocates say that frontline workers aren't the only ones responsible for food safety. Inspectors are supported by teams of people working in labs and offices who assist them with data, coordination, and science, says Faber. That includes people who perform surveillance of outbreaks and respond to them, and who work with manufacturers, consumers, and retailers and tell them that their food is contaminated and should be thrown away.
'It's an early 20th-century notion that protecting inspectors from being fired is how we keep food safe,' he says. 'But your food is not safe because someone with a clipboard walked through a food-manufacturing facility.'
Even if, as the Administration argues, frontline workers are the linchpin to keeping food safe in the U.S., inspections of facilities have long fallen behind what is mandated by law. The last time FDA inspected the number of domestic food facilities mandated by the Food Safety Modernization Act, the landmark 2011 food safety law, was 2018, according to a 2025 GAO report. (The U.S. is supposed to hit this target every year.) In 2021, FDA did not inspect about 49% of high-risk facilities by the date it was supposed to; in 2019, that number was just 7%, according to the GAO.
This is partly because the FDA does not have enough trained staff to conduct these inspections, according to the GAO report. In July 2024, the FDA had 432 inspectors, but nearly one-quarter were eligible to retire. It takes two years to train a new investigator.
States perform a number of inspections in collaboration with the FDA. About 90% of inspections of produce facilities are done by states, and 50% of inspections of manufactured food facilities are done by states, according to Steven Mandernach, executive director of the Association of Food and Drug Officials, a nonprofit advocacy group. But funds for those inspections have been cut dramatically this year because of a Biden-era reorganization that went into effect this year, he says.
State 'rapid response' teams that were tasked with moving quickly during outbreaks saw their budgets cut by around 60%, he said. States saw budgets for produce inspections cut by about 40%. And funding for states' manufactured food programs infrastructure and training was cut by about 50%.
Read More: Why Some Food Additives Banned in Europe Are Still on U.S. Shelves
'I think the penalties for the food eaters is that we're going to have slower responses to food safety events, whether it be recalls, outbreaks, those sorts of things,' he says. 'We're going to have less monitoring of facilities. We're probably going to end up with less trained individuals out there doing the inspections. All of those things are bad overall for the system."
State food safety departments are now scrambling to redistribute funding, says Katherine Simon, director of the food and feed safety division at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. In Minnesota, her department will have to cut back on administrative staff, she says, which will eventually make inspectors less efficient; the amount of time inspectors spend at any one facility will likely decline.
People look to government jobs for stability, and one of Simon's biggest concerns is that the big funding swings make it difficult to commit to staffing year after year. The instability could motivate longtime experts to seek employment elsewhere, she says. Most of all, she says, amid these funding cuts, the food industry is changing at a rapid pace, making it difficult to keep up. 'It's really turning back the dial, and we are at a critical stage,' she says.
Simon is also worried about the cuts at the CDC office that helps respond to outbreaks and implement preventative food safety practices. When states figure out that there's a local outbreak that is sickening people, they often reach out to the CDC's Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice for assistance, she says. That's what happened in North Carolina after the local health department found elevated levels of lead in children's blood and discovered that all the children had eaten WanaBana apple cinnamon fruit puree pouches. It's what happened in Flint, Mich. after the local health department found that water was contaminated by lead.
But the Division of Environment Health Science and Practice was gutted by the April 1 layoffs, with only a few top leaders remaining, says Megan Weil Latshaw, a professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University. State health departments tend to be woefully underfunded, she says, so they call in the CDC to help. Now, they won't be able to anymore.
'We had a system in place that was there to monitor food safety and air quality and lead poisoning, and now that system is being decimated,' she says. Around 144 employees, almost the entire division, were laid off, according to a tally by former workers.
Read More: They Hated Health Insurance. So They Started Paying For Each Other's Care
The Division of Environmental Health didn't just coordinate after outbreaks. It also performed key research that led to food safety improvements, says Hal King, managing partner at the consulting firm Active Food Safety. The department researched best practices for food safety in restaurants; one of its successes was discovering that having a manager in charge of food safety improved conditions. Restaurants are now required to have a manager in charge of food safety. It evaluated the success of having letter grades for restaurants. It also researched ways to improve food worker behavior, such as persuading people to wear gloves when handling food or washing their hands after going to the bathroom.
Most recently, it had conducted research in eight states about how to keep sick workers from transmitting illnesses to customers. The research had come up with some promising interventions, says a former CDC employee, but the fate of that research is now unknown because the employees coordinating it were laid off. (The employee did not want to give their name because they say they hope to get their job back.)
Food safety advocates celebrated Congress passing the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2011, the first major change to laws policing food supply chains since 1938. It created mandates for how often facilities should be inspected, and also required facilities to be able to better trace the sources of contaminations in food. But many of the provisions of the law that food safety experts lauded have been delayed or rolled back.
The food traceability rule, for example, was designed to ensure better recordkeeping, and was set to go into effect in Jan. 2026. But on March 20, 2025, the FDA announced that it was postponing the compliance date by 30 months after heavy lobbying by the grocery industry.
'The faster we can identify the source of an outbreak, the more lives are saved,' says EWG's Faber, but the postponement will make it harder to identify the source of food outbreaks.
And a rule that farmers test their irrigation systems for pathogens, checking to see if the water they use to grow crops has traces of manure in it, for example, was switched to an 'honor system' test in May 2024, says Faber.
What's most concerning about many of these cuts, food safety advocates say, is that the repercussions may not be apparent on paper. It may look like the country has fewer foodborne illnesses, or that fewer facilities are failing food inspections. But that doesn't mean the U.S. is healthier. It might just mean, they worry, that sicknesses caused by food safety are going unseen and undetected.
Contact us at [e-mail].