FDA Mass Layoffs: Who Will Oversee US Food Safety?
In the six months since taking office, Trump has been slashing public health and nutrition budgets. The FDA, the regulator overseeing the safety of food and drugs produced in the United States, has borne the brunt of these cuts. In a country already plagued by food safety problems, what remains of public health protection once the very agencies meant to safeguard it are starved of resources?
I. A Blow to the Already Blighted
The nephew of assassinated former US President John F. Kennedy, he was once a lawyer who devoted his career to environmental causes and public service. In recent years, however, he has become best known for his anti-science and anti-vaccine rhetoric, his spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories — and, paradoxically, for commanding a devoted following. He has been described as the “Trump of public health”. After taking office, Trump nominated him as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, placing him in direct charge of the FDA, which regulates food and drug safety in the United States. The nomination stirred fierce opposition across the American medical and scientific community: more than 75 Nobel laureates signed an open letter opposing his appointment, warning that RFK Jr.’s confirmation would endanger public health.
Shortly after taking office, he launched the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) initiative — the slogan and campaign Trump adopted for public health and food safety in this term.
Over the past few years, RFK Jr. has relentlessly taken on pharmaceutical companies, food manufacturers and agribusiness giants, accusing them of putting profits ahead of the public’s health. These stances have won him a broad following among those concerned about health and food safety. Once in office, he did make good on some promises, imposing new requirements on the food industry — for instance, banning certain artificial colourings as food additives.
But his more sweeping moves came inside the FDA itself: he axed 3,500 staff and slashed its budget by $400 million. The resulting across-the-board cuts in funding and personnel forced the FDA’s food-testing laboratories to suspend their quality-control sampling programme for food safety.
Long before RFK Jr. became the FDA’s boss, the agency’s food-safety division had already been teetering on the edge for want of adequate funding, repeatedly stumbling into failure. What it needed most was experienced expertise and greater funding to strengthen its oversight and keep food safe.
In truth, as the body responsible for food and drug production and safety, the FDA has been riddled with problems for years, drawing criticism not only across the United States but around the world. Cutting its budget, halting inspections and eliminating key posts have only piled further misery onto the FDA — and onto food safety in America.
In recent years, large-scale food safety crises have struck the United States with alarming frequency: in 2022, contaminated Abbott infant formula was linked to the deaths of two babies; in 2024, a major Listeria outbreak linked to ready-to-eat meat from a processing plant in Virginia killed 10 people and hospitalised dozens more. From late last year into early this year, a nationwide avian influenza wave led to the mass culling of poultry flocks, and supermarket shelves across the country saw “an egg impossible to find”. The FDA is responsible for overseeing poultry health and the drugs and vaccines used against avian influenza, so the outbreak was widely attributed to the inadequate deployment of vaccines and treatments.
So how did the FDA, an institution that has been around for well over a century — one even China has copied in its own regulatory model (from 2003 to 2018, China adopted the same combined oversight of food and pharmaceuticals under a single agency, even borrowing the English abbreviation “FDA” for its Food and Drug Administration) — fall so far from grace?
II. Why Has Food Safety Oversight Been Constantly Overlooked?
To tackle these problems, then-US President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act into law. The Act prohibited the adulteration of food and drugs with fillers or additives intended to conceal damage or spoilage, and placed the inspection of food and drugs in the hands of the Bureau of Chemistry under the US Department of Agriculture — the division that was formally renamed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1930. Subsequently, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, passed in 1938, granted the FDA legal authority to regulate food and drugs nationwide, including countrywide enforcement powers, a professional laboratory network and a judicial framework underpinned by seizure authority.
Although the 1938 Act granted the FDA independent authority to regulate food safety, oversight of food safety in the United States has long been scattered across multiple federal agencies rather than consolidated under a single, unified authority. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), for instance, is responsible for mandatory inspections of meat, poultry and liquid-egg products, while the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates the impact of pesticide residues on food safety. This fragmented, multi-agency approach has left food safety governance in a chronic state of disorganisation, with no single body in command.
When a food safety incident strikes, this patchwork of responsibilities often breeds buck-passing, poor information flow and coordination difficulties, undermining the efficiency of oversight and making it hard to mount a swift, effective response. The result drains administrative resources and leaves consumers facing food safety problems unsure of where to turn for help, further eroding public trust in regulation. Meanwhile, food and agriculture companies exploit the gaps, cutting production costs to the bone and sowing the seeds of countless food safety hazards.
Today, food safety oversight relies mainly on annual budget appropriations from Congress, which are routinely trimmed whenever government finances tighten. According to fiscal year 2024 reporting (October 2023 to September 2024), the total food-safety oversight budget stood at $1.182 billion, nearly all of it funded by Congressional appropriations. That sum amounts to barely half the FDA’s total drug-oversight budget of $2.338 billion — and only 30.8 per cent of the drug budget depends on Congressional appropriations.
This structural funding gap has left the FDA’s food-safety system under-resourced and sluggish on multiple fronts. On staffing, the number of inspectors and technical reviewers falls well short of what is needed to oversee high-risk facilities across the country. On expertise, declining salaries and eroding career appeal have fuelled a persistent talent drain in key areas such as food science, epidemiological modelling and data tracking. On operational efficiency, the development of traceability systems, electronic reporting mechanisms and preventive risk models has been repeatedly delayed by budget shortfalls.
In late 2008, a US company’s peanut products triggered a massive Salmonella contamination outbreak, hospitalising more than 700 people and killing nine. The scandal ignited public fury over the FDA’s failure in food-safety oversight and prompted newly elected President Obama to pledge a fundamental overhaul of the food regulatory system.
Yet barely after Obama signed the Act into law, under pressure from House Republicans, he was forced to restructure the government budget, and the planned increase in food-safety funding was shelved and cut back.
As the years passed, the promises made when the Act was first introduced have since become empty words.
Under the original plan, full implementation of the Act would have required a budget increase of at least $1.4 billion for the FDA’s food division over the 2011–2015 period. In reality, by 2015, the FDA had received less than half the funding Congress had earmarked for the Act’s full implementation.
Furthermore, the law requires the FDA to inspect the stipulated number of domestic food facilities each year under the Food Safety Modernization Act. However, according to a 2025 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the last such inspection was carried out in 2018. In 2019, the FDA missed its mandated deadline for inspecting high-risk food facilities 7 per cent of the time; by 2021, that figure had soared to 49 per cent.
Plagued by a lack of funding and staffing, the FDA’s Office of Regulatory Affairs, responsible for inspections, has long been overstretched. Although the Food Safety Modernization Act mandates that the office be staffed with 2,000 full-time personnel, it actually employs fewer than 800, who are expected to inspect over 220,000 food businesses registered within the United States.
Staff shortages have not only made food testing difficult but have also made resolving problems an uphill battle. Take the 2022 contaminated Abbott infant formula case as an example: the FDA had actually become aware of a related case as early as September 2021, but due to a lack of personnel, it waited a full four months before sending inspectors to investigate. After discovering problems with Abbott’s production environment, another three weeks passed before a nationwide recall was initiated. By then, two babies had already died.
III. Make America Healthy Again
Just days after the Senate confirmed RFK Jr.’s nomination, James Jones, the overall head of the FDA’s food-safety division, announced his resignation in protest at the mass layoffs. In his resignation letter, he warned that the cuts would impair the agency’s ability to protect public health. In Jones’s view, with the Trump administration showing no respect for professionals while continuing to slash budgets, there was no point in him staying on. His departure also signalled that the US government’s food-management system was steadily falling into MAHA’s hands.
MAHA, which fuses a public health campaign with populism, is described on the White House website as a whole-of-government action aimed at reversing America’s chronic-disease crisis by challenging “corporate control of health and food policy”.
On the surface, the MAHA movement has heightened public attention to food safety in the United States, yet a look at the budget cuts in health and food safety over the six months since Trump took office suggests that Americans’ health may be in steady decline. For instance: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has faced deep budget cuts; $1 billion has been stripped from the US Department of Agriculture’s local food procurement for school lunches and food banks; the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the primary funder of global nutrition research, has been abolished; and a proposal has been put forward to cut the National Institutes of Health (NIH) nutrition research budget by 40 per cent.
As the de facto executor of MAHA and the top official overseeing US public health, RFK Jr. led a survey report on the state of health in America, which he called “a breakthrough on America’s public health crisis”. But after the report was published, journalists from The Guardian discovered that the 73-page document cited research never published in any academic journal and fabricated numerous nonexistent statements. The revelations sent shockwaves through Congress, further fuelling doubts about RFK Jr. and MAHA.
Consequently, many Americans concerned about food safety have little confidence in RFK Jr. — a figure who not only lacks any experience in public health and food-safety management but also champions vaccine scepticism. In their view, subordinating professional oversight to a political movement steeped in pseudoscience is likely to yield a yet more fragmented regulatory system.
RFK Jr.’s policies — such as suspending the FDA food-testing laboratories’ quality-control sampling programme for food safety — will directly exacerbate the fragmentation of the US food-safety oversight system. Against a backdrop of multi-agency management and unclear division of responsibilities, weakening the FDA’s core testing capabilities is tantamount to severing one’s own arm. This will widen regulatory gaps and further elevate food-safety risks. A regulatory system lacking unified coordination, where agencies operate independently, will find itself wholly inadequate in the face of complex food supply chains and increasingly diverse food-safety challenges.
Meanwhile, the FDA wields considerable influence in the global arena of food safety, with the standards and guidelines it sets often serving as reference points for other countries. However, RFK Jr.’s unprofessional and anti-science stance risks undermining the formulation of US food-safety standards, with knock-on effects on the global food-safety governance framework.
Numerous public health experts, including the Government Accountability Office, which provides internal oversight of the US government, have unanimously stated in their reports that the United States needs a fully independent agency dedicated to food safety — one that manages food health and hygiene, holds complete and unified authority over the food system, clearly delineates food-safety governance powers and responsibilities, and is staffed by food-safety specialists to carry out oversight.
Although regulation is merely the last line of defence in food safety, and America’s food industry is so deeply troubled that oversight alone cannot turn the tide, cutting the FDA’s budget at this juncture is certainly not the answer to improving food safety. Will the American people be roused to awaken fully to the problem and more proactively pursue healthy, safe food?
Editor: Kerry