FDA Mass Layoffs: Who Will Safeguard US Food Safety?
In his first six months in office, Trump has consistently trimmed public health and nutrition budgets, with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—the regulator overseeing US food and drug safety and production—bearing the brunt. In a nation already rife with food safety incidents, what guarantee remains for public health when the regulatory body itself is deprived of resources?
I. Adding Insult to Injury
The nephew of assassinated former President John F. Kennedy, he is a former lawyer who has long dedicated himself to public-interest causes, notably environmental protection. In recent years, however, he has become widely recognised for his anti-science, anti-vaccine positions and for disseminating misinformation and conspiracy theories. Despite the criticism, he retains a substantial following and is often characterised as the “Trump of public health.” Following his inauguration, Trump nominated him as Secretary of Health and Human Services, effectively placing him in direct command of the FDA, the regulator responsible for US food and drug safety. The move has provoked sharp backlash from the US medical and scientific establishments, with more than 75 Nobel laureates signing a joint statement against the nomination, arguing that Kennedy’s appointment would jeopardise public health.
Shortly after taking office, he launched the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ (MAHA) initiative, which has become the defining slogan and campaign for public health and food safety under the current Trump administration.
Over the past few years, Kennedy Jr has consistently targeted pharmaceutical manufacturers, food producers, and large agribusinesses, arguing that their profit-driven practices undermine public health and welfare. These stances have drawn significant support from communities focused on health and food safety. Since taking office, he has indeed moved to deliver on these pledges, introducing new regulations for food companies, including bans on certain artificial colours as additives.
Yet his most significant action has been the restructuring of the FDA itself, including the dismissal of 3,500 staff and a $400 million reduction in the budget. As a direct result of these sweeping financial and personnel cuts, the FDA’s quality assurance programme for spot-checking food safety in its testing laboratories has also been forced to stand down.
Long before Kennedy Jr assumed leadership of the FDA, its food regulatory division had already been severely strained by chronic underfunding, leading to repeated oversights. What the agency most urgently required was experienced expertise and increased investment to strengthen its regulatory capacity and guarantee food safety.
Indeed, as the primary regulatory body overseeing food production and safety, the FDA has faced persistent scrutiny from critics across the United States and worldwide for years. Slashing the budget, halting inspections, and eliminating key roles have undeniably compounded these challenges, placing both the agency and American food security in a far more precarious position.
In recent years, the United States has seen a recurring series of major food safety incidents. In 2022, a contamination scandal involving Abbott’s infant formula resulted in two baby fatalities. In 2024, a widespread listeria outbreak linked to deli meats produced at a Virginia processing plant claimed ten lives and left dozens hospitalised. From late last year through early this year, a nationwide avian influenza outbreak necessitated mass poultry culls, leaving US supermarkets grappling with severe egg shortages. Given that the FDA oversees poultry health, as well as the development and distribution of avian flu treatments and vaccines, the severity of the outbreak is widely attributed to the inadequate rollout and promotion of these medical countermeasures.
So how has the FDA—an agency that has operated for over a century and even served as a model for China (from 2003 to 2018, China implemented a similar integrated food and drug regulatory strategy, adopting the exact same English acronym for its own Food and Drug Administration)—ended up in such a precarious position today?
II. Why has food regulation consistently been overlooked?
In response, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act into law to tackle these issues. The legislation prohibited the adulteration of food and medicines with fillers or additives designed to mask spoilage or substandard quality. Oversight was initially handled by the Bureau of Chemistry within the US Department of Agriculture, which was officially renamed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1930. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 granted the FDA comprehensive legal authority to regulate food and pharmaceuticals across the nation. This mandate established a nationwide enforcement framework, a network of specialist laboratories, and judicial safeguards underpinned by seizure powers.
Although the legislation introduced in 1938 granted the FDA independent authority to regulate food safety, oversight responsibilities in the United States have long been scattered across multiple federal agencies rather than consolidated under a single authoritative body. For instance, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is responsible for the mandatory inspection of meat, poultry, and liquid egg products, while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) oversees the impact of pesticide residues on food safety. This disjointed management structure has left food safety governance in a prolonged state of disarray, devoid of unified direction.
When food safety incidents occur, this fragmented approach frequently leads to blame-shifting, poor information flow, and coordination difficulties, resulting in sluggish regulatory efficiency and hindering the development of a swift, effective response mechanism. This not only drains substantial administrative resources but also leaves consumers unsure where to turn for assistance when confronted with food safety concerns, further eroding public confidence in regulatory oversight. Meanwhile, food and agricultural enterprises exploit these gaps to minimise production costs, thereby embedding numerous latent risks within the food supply.
Currently, food regulation relies primarily on annual budget appropriations from the US Congress, which are frequently cut during periods of government austerity. According to fiscal year 2024 reports (October 2023 to September 2024), the total budget for food regulation stands at $1.182 billion, with almost the entirety of these funds coming from Congressional appropriations. This total amounts to barely half of the FDA’s drug regulation budget—$2.338 billion—which only requires 30.8% of its funding to be covered by Congressional appropriations.
This structural funding shortfall has resulted in resource shortages and operational delays across multiple facets of the FDA’s food safety system. In terms of staffing, the number of inspectors and technical reviewers is insufficient to meet the regulatory demands for high-risk facilities nationwide; regarding professional expertise, declining salaries and diminished career appeal have led to long-term attrition in critical roles such as food science, epidemiological modelling, and data tracing; and in terms of systemic efficiency, the rollout of traceability systems, electronic reporting mechanisms, and preventive risk models has been significantly slowed by budget constraints.
In late 2008, a massive salmonella contamination outbreak struck peanut products from a US company, hospitalising over 700 people and claiming nine lives. The incident sparked intense public outrage over the FDA’s failure to regulate food safety, prompting the newly elected President Obama to pledge a thorough overhaul of the food regulatory system.
Yet shortly after President Obama signed the Act into law, pressure from House Republicans compelled him to reshape the federal budget, resulting in the shelving and subsequent reduction of the very funding meant to bolster food regulation.
In the years that have followed, the pledges made upon the Act’s introduction have long since become a hollow promise.
Under Congress’s original blueprint, fully implementing the legislation required an additional $1.4 billion for the FDA’s food division over the 2011 to 2015 period. In reality, by 2015, the FDA had received less than half the funding deemed necessary to meet the Act’s mandates.
Furthermore, under the law, the FDA is required to conduct annual inspections of domestic food facilities in accordance with the Food Safety Modernisation Act. Yet according to a 2025 report by the US Government Accountability Office, the last round of inspections took place in 2018. In 2019, the proportion of high-risk food facilities the FDA failed to inspect by the statutory deadline stood at 7 per cent; by 2021, that figure had soared to 49 per cent.
Hampered by a lack of funding and adequate staffing, the FDA’s Office of Regulatory Affairs, which oversees inspections, has long been overwhelmed. Despite the Act stipulating a full-time staff of 2,000, the office operates with fewer than 800 employees responsible for inspecting over 220,000 food businesses registered in the US.
This acute staffing crisis not only hinders routine testing but also severely impedes crisis response. The 2022 Abbott infant formula contamination illustrates this starkly. Although the FDA became aware of a related case in September 2021, it took four months to dispatch inspectors due to manpower constraints. Upon uncovering critical flaws in Abbott’s production environment, another three weeks elapsed before a national recall was issued. By that point, two infants had already died.
III. Make America Healthy Again
Just days after Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s nomination was confirmed by Congress, James Jones, head of the FDA’s food regulatory division, announced his resignation in protest against the sweeping layoffs. In his resignation letter, he warned that the cuts would impair the agency’s capacity to protect public health. Jones felt that, given the Trump administration’s disregard for professional expertise and its commitment to budget cuts, continuing in his role was pointless. His departure further signals that the US government’s food oversight system is gradually falling under the control of MAHA.
Blending public health advocacy with populism, MAHA is described on the White House website as a comprehensive government initiative designed to reverse the United States’ chronic disease crisis by countering the “corporate grip on health and food policy”.
On the surface, the MAHA campaign appears to have heightened public awareness of food safety. Yet a closer look at the budget reductions under President Trump over the past six months in health and food safety suggests that the nation’s wellbeing may be deteriorating. These include drastic cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (SNAP), a $1 billion reduction in the Department of Agriculture’s spending on locally sourced food for school lunches and food banks, the defunding of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—a primary funder of global nutrition research—and a proposal to slash the National Institutes of Health (NIH) nutrition research budget by 40 per cent.
As the de facto executor of MAHA and the country’s top official for public health matters, Kennedy Jr oversaw a survey into the state of national health upon taking office, billing it as a “breakthrough in addressing America’s public health challenges”. However, following its publication, journalists at The Guardian discovered that the 73-page report cited studies that had never appeared in academic journals and included a substantial number of fabricated quotes. The revelation triggered a uproar on Capitol Hill and deepened scepticism surrounding both Kennedy Jr and the MAHA initiative.
Consequently, many Americans concerned about food safety place little trust in Kennedy Jr, who not only lacks 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 risks creating a more fragmented and ineffective regulatory framework.
Policies under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., such as suspending the FDA food testing laboratories’ random inspection and quality control programme for food safety, will directly exacerbate the fragmentation of America’s food safety regulatory system. Against a backdrop of already overlapping jurisdictions and muddled responsibilities, weakening the FDA’s core testing capabilities is effectively hamstringing the agency. This will only widen regulatory loopholes and further elevate food safety risks. A system lacking unified coordination and operating in silos will prove utterly inadequate when confronting complex food supply chains and an increasingly diverse array of food safety challenges.
Meanwhile, the FDA wields considerable influence in the global food safety sphere, with its standards and guidelines frequently serving as benchmarks for other nations. However, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s unprofessional and anti-scientific stance could severely undermine the development of US food safety standards, thereby casting a negative shadow over the global food safety governance framework.
Numerous public health experts, alongside the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in its internal oversight reports, are in broad agreement that the US requires a fully independent agency to govern food safety. This body would wield complete, unified control over food health and hygiene, with clearly defined powers and authority, and should employ industry specialists to carry out regulation.
While regulation serves as the final line of defence in food safety, and while the US food industry’s chronic ailments cannot be remedied by oversight alone, slashing the FDA’s budget at this juncture is certainly no solution to improving food safety. Will this spur the American public to finally awaken and take greater initiative in pursuing healthy, safe food?
Editor: Kerry