FDA Mass Layoffs: Who’s Overseeing US Food Safety?
In the first six months of his term, Trump has been consistently cutting budgets for public health and nutrition, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—the agency responsible for the production and safety of food and drugs in the US—has borne the brunt of these cuts. In a country already plagued by frequent food safety issues, if the regulatory bodies are stripped of their resources, can public health still be guaranteed?
I. Making a Bad Situation Worse
The nephew of the assassinated former president John F. Kennedy, RFK Jr. was once a lawyer and an activist in public sectors such as environmental protection. In recent years, however, he has become widely known for his anti-science and anti-vaccine stances, as well as for spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories. Yet, he maintains a large following, effectively becoming the “Trump” of the public health world. Upon taking office, Trump nominated him as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, giving him direct leadership over the FDA. This move sparked outrage within the American medical and scientific communities, with over 75 Nobel laureates signing a joint letter opposing the nomination, arguing that Kennedy’s appointment would jeopardise public health.
Shortly after taking office, he introduced the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) plan, which has become the slogan and movement for public health and food safety during Trump’s current term.
For years, RFK Jr. has targeted pharmaceutical companies, food corporations, and big agribusiness, arguing that these entities prioritise profit over public health and interest. These claims have attracted significant attention from those concerned with health and food safety. Since taking office, he has indeed attempted to deliver on his promises, imposing new requirements on food companies, such as banning certain artificial dyes as food additives.
More drastic, however, were his adjustments to the FDA, which included laying off 3,500 employees and cutting the fiscal budget by $400 million. Due to these comprehensive budget and personnel cuts, the FDA’s food safety quality control programme for random sampling in laboratories has been forced to suspend operations.
Even before RFK Jr. became the FDA’s superior, the agency’s food regulation department had already been on the brink of collapse due to insufficient funding, suffering from repeated failures. What it needed most were experienced experts and increased funding to enhance its regulatory capacity and ensure food safety.
In reality, as the agency responsible for food production and safety, the FDA has been riddled with problems for years, drawing criticism across the US and worldwide. Reducing the budget, halting testing, and cutting key positions undoubtedly make a bad situation worse for the FDA and US food safety.
In recent years, the US has frequently experienced large-scale food safety incidents: in 2022, contaminated Abbott baby formula led to the deaths of two infants; in 2024, a large-scale Listeria outbreak in deli meats produced by a plant in Virginia resulted in 10 deaths and dozens of hospitalisations. Between late last year and early this year, an avian flu wave sweeping the US led to the mass culling of poultry, resulting in severe egg shortages in supermarkets. Because the FDA is responsible for managing poultry health as well as avian flu medications and vaccines, the outbreak is widely seen as a result of insufficient promotion of these vaccines and drugs.
How did the FDA—which has existed for over a century and was even used as a model for China (between 2003 and 2018, China also adopted a strategy of regulating food and drugs under a single department, and the English abbreviation for the China Food and Drug Administration followed the US version)—sink to its current state?
II. Why Has Food Regulation Been Ignored?
To address these issues, then-President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act into law. This act prohibited the use of fillers and additives in food and drugs to conceal damage or decay, and tasked the Bureau of Chemistry within the US Department of Agriculture with inspecting food and drugs—this department was officially renamed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1930. Subsequently, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 granted the FDA legal authority to regulate food and drugs nationwide, providing national enforcement powers, a professional network of laboratories, and a judicial safeguard system based on the power of seizure.
Although the 1938 Act granted the FDA the authority to independently oversee food safety, regulatory responsibilities remained fragmented across several federal agencies rather than being concentrated within a single, unified authority. For instance, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is responsible for the mandatory inspection of meat, poultry, and liquid egg products, while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates the impact of pesticide residues on food safety. This fragmented landscape has left food safety governance in a state of uncoordinated chaos for years.
When food safety incidents occur, this fragmented management often results in the shirking of responsibility, communication breakdowns, and coordination difficulties, leading to inefficient regulation and a failure to establish rapid, effective response mechanisms. This not only drains vast administrative resources but also leaves consumers struggling to find clear channels for help, further undermining public trust in regulation. Meanwhile, food and agricultural companies exploit these loopholes to drive down production costs, creating numerous hidden risks for food safety.
Currently, food regulation relies primarily on annual budget appropriations from the US Congress and is frequently subjected to cuts during periods of government austerity. According to reports for the 2024 fiscal year (October 2023 – September 2024), the total budget for food regulation was $1.182 billion, with nearly all funding coming from Congressional appropriations. This total is barely half that of the FDA’s drug regulation budget, which stands at $2.338 billion—and of that, only 30.8% requires Congressional funding.
This structural funding gap has left the FDA’s food safety system under-resourced and lagging across multiple levels. In terms of manpower, the number of inspectors and technical reviewers is insufficient to meet the regulatory demands of high-risk facilities across the US. Professionally, the FDA has faced a long-term brain drain in critical roles such as food science, epidemiological modelling, and data tracking, as salaries and career incentives diminish. In terms of systemic efficiency, the development of traceability systems, electronic reporting mechanisms, and preventative risk models has slowed due to insufficient funding.
In late 2008, a massive Salmonella contamination outbreak in peanut products from a US company led to over 700 hospitalisations and nine deaths. This event sparked public outrage over the failure of FDA food regulation and prompted the newly elected President Obama to promise a complete overhaul of the food regulatory system.
However, shortly after Obama signed the Act into law, he was forced to adjust the government budget due to pressure from Republicans in the House of Representatives. Consequently, the planned increase in the food regulation budget was shelved and reduced.
As time passed, the vows made upon the introduction of this Act became a dead letter.
According to the original Congressional plan, full implementation of the Act required an increase of at least $1.4 billion in the FDA’s food department budget between 2011 and 2015. In reality, by 2015, the funding the FDA had received was less than half of what Congress had determined was necessary to complete the mandate.
Furthermore, by law, the FDA should inspect domestic food facilities annually in accordance with the FSMA. However, according to a 2025 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), the last such inspection took place in 2018. In 2019, the probability of the FDA failing to inspect high-risk food facilities by the scheduled date was 7%; by 2021, this figure had soared to 49%.
Lacking both funding and personnel, the FDA’s Office of Regulatory Affairs, responsible for inspections, has long been stretched to breaking point. Although the FSMA stipulates that the office should be staffed by 2,000 full-time employees, there are actually fewer than 800 tasked with inspecting over 220,000 food companies registered in the US.
This shortage of personnel not only makes food testing difficult but also makes resolving issues an uphill struggle. Take the 2022 contamination of Abbott infant formula as an example: the FDA had actually become aware of a related case as early as September 2021, yet due to staffing shortages, it took four full months to dispatch an inspector. After discovering issues with Abbott’s production environment, it took another three weeks to initiate a nationwide recall. By then, two infants had already died.
III. Make America Healthy Again
Just days after RFK Jr.’s nomination was confirmed by Congress, James Jones, the head of the FDA’s food regulation department, announced his resignation in protest of the mass layoffs. In his resignation letter, he warned that the cuts would hinder the agency’s ability to protect public health. In Jones’s view, it was meaningless to remain in a position where the Trump administration neither respected professionals nor provided an adequate budget. His departure signals that the US government’s food management system is steadily falling into the hands of MAHA.
Merging public health activism with populism, MAHA is described on the White House website as a government-wide initiative aimed at reversing the US chronic disease crisis by tackling “corporate control over health and food policy”.
On the surface, the MAHA movement seems to have increased public attention toward food safety. However, a look at the budget cuts in health and food safety since Trump took office six months ago suggests that American health may actually be deteriorating. For instance, there have been drastic cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) budget, a $1 billion cut to the USDA’s local food procurement for school lunches and food banks, the abolition of the US Agency for International Development (USAID)—a primary funding body for global nutrition research—and a proposed 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) nutrition research budget.
As the primary executor of MAHA and the top official for US public health affairs, RFK Jr. spearheaded an investigation report on the state of American health upon taking office, describing it as a “breakthrough for US public health issues”. However, following the report’s release, a journalist from *The Guardian* discovered that the 73-page document cited research that had never been published in any academic journal and contained numerous fabricated quotes. The revelation caused a stir on Capitol Hill, further fueling scepticism regarding RFK Jr. and MAHA.
Consequently, many Americans concerned about food safety have no confidence in RFK Jr., a man who not only lacks experience in public health and food safety management but also promotes vaccine scepticism. In their eyes, placing a political movement steeped in pseudo-science above professional management is likely to result in an even more fragmented regulatory system.
Policies championed by RFK Jr., such as pausing the quality control programme for random food safety checks in FDA laboratories, will directly exacerbate the fragmentation of the US food safety regulatory system. Given a landscape already plagued by overlapping management and blurred responsibilities, weakening the FDA’s core testing capabilities is effectively sabotaging its own foundations. This will lead to more regulatory loopholes and further elevate food safety risks. A regulatory system that lacks unified coordination and operates in silos will find itself powerless when facing complex food supply chains and increasingly diverse food safety challenges.
At the same time, the FDA holds pivotal influence in the global food safety arena, with its standards and guidelines often serving as benchmarks for other nations. However, RFK Jr.’s lack of professional credentials and anti-science stance could seriously undermine the formulation of US food safety standards, thereby negatively impacting the global governance framework for food safety.
Numerous public health experts, including the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which provides internal oversight for the US government, have stated in unison that the US should have a completely independent agency responsible for food safety. Such an agency would manage food health and hygiene, possess total and unified control over the food system, clearly define the powers and authority of food safety governance, and employ industry specialists to conduct regulation.
While regulation is merely the last line of defence—and the deep-seated systemic issues within the US food industry cannot be resolved by regulation alone—cutting the FDA’s budget at this juncture is certainly not the solution for improving food safety. Will the American people wake up as a result and more independently pursue healthy and safe food?
Editor: Carrie