In a concerning development, former employees of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have warned that sweeping cuts and the “politicization of science” within the agency have significantly increased the risk of food safety lapses across the country.
Less than a year after Donald Trump’s return to power, the administration has overseen the firing and resignation of thousands of FDA employees. This staff exodus has already had tangible consequences, with a recent listeria outbreak that killed six people and sickened 27 others across 18 states due to contaminated prepared pasta meals.
“Those kinds of things are going to keep coming,” said David Harbourt, a former veterinary safety manager at the FDA who was fired last year. He cautioned that the agency’s work “has been compromised for at a minimum, the short term, hopefully not the long term”, with aspects of American people’s lives that were once taken for granted now facing “very negative” impacts.
The scale of the job losses has been staggering, with around 19,700 employees working at the agency before the Trump administration’s waves of firings, voluntary retirements and resignation programs. Thousands subsequently left, although some workers were later rehired.
Sandra Eskin, CEO of the non-profit Stop Foodborne Illness and former deputy under secretary for food safety at the US Department of Agriculture, warned that the FDA “does not have a robust inspection program for the foods that it regulates”. She expressed grave concerns that with inspectors being cut back, “that is very concerning.”
Indeed, foreign food inspections by the FDA have dropped to the lowest on record since the agency began inspecting foreign food facilities in 2011, aside from during the Covid-19 pandemic. Domestic inspections have also steeply declined.
Furthermore, due to the budget cuts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which works with the FDA and other agencies to conduct surveillance for foodborne pathogens, has been forced to reduce the number of pathogens they monitor through their Foodnet surveillance program from eight to just two.
“Consumers in general, when they hear there are cuts to food-borne disease surveillance programs at the CDC, they should pay attention,” said Frank Yiannas, former FDA deputy commissioner for food policy and response. “It’s not a good idea if any food-borne illness remains invisible.”
As the FDA grapples with these cuts, former employees have also criticised the treatment of staff, the wastefulness of firing and rehiring, and dismissed claims by the Trump administration that the cuts have no impact on the agency’s ability to effectively execute its mission.
Harbourt, the fired safety manager, said his position’s responsibilities were simply replaced with two full-time employees, who were pulled away from their initial employment positions. “Turning the federal government into a temp employee agency is going to have negative effects for all Americans across a number of different aspects of their lives – some of which we’re already seeing,” he said.
The former FDA employees who spoke to The Update Desk on condition of anonymity were scathing in their assessment of the administration’s approach, with one describing the “politicization of science” and the destruction of “scientific integrity” under Secretary Kennedy and Secretary Makary.
“I believe that this decimation of the federal workforce will set us back as a country for decades,” said one former employee. “We are no longer a world leader in public health, and that’s a scary thing.”
While the Department of Health and Human Services has insisted that “FDA inspectors were not impacted, and this critical work will continue uninterrupted,” the former staff paint a far bleaker picture. As one anonymous ex-employee bluntly stated, it is “absurd” to claim that thousands of job cuts will have no impact. “What organization isn’t going to be impacted by the departure, not just of a lot of people, but entire offices?”