See No Evil

The Food and Drug Administration regulates roughly eighty percent of the American food supply¹ on about seventeen percent of its budget². The imbalance is structural, and it runs on a single fact: the drug side is paid for by the industry it polices. In 2022, industry user fees covered 66 percent of the FDA’s drug-regulation budget and about 1 percent of its foods budget³. Prescription-drug review has a dedicated, renewable stream of company money; food safety has an annual appropriation and nothing beneath it. When the appropriation is cut, the drug side has a floor. The food side has the ground.

In 2025 the cutting began. On February 17, the FDA’s first deputy commissioner for human foods resigned⁴, calling the job “fruitless” after the administration fired 89 people from his program — among them, he said, about ten of the scientists who review the safety of chemicals added to food⁵. Six weeks later, on March 27, a Health and Human Services reorganization eliminated roughly 3,500 more FDA positions⁶, part of a purge of about 10,000 across the department. Officials said no front-line scientists were touched.

They were. The cuts reached toxicologists, microbiologists and veterinarians, and swept up the FDA division that studies how food is processed and kept safe⁷. In late April the agency began quietly reinstating some of the fired food-safety scientists⁸, blaming “inaccurate” personnel records — but by then the terminations had already suspended sampling programs and stalled inspections abroad.

The inspections were failing before anyone was fired. In a report released on January 8, 2025, the Government Accountability Office found the FDA had missed its food-inspection targets every year since 2018⁹. The share of high-risk domestic plants inspected on schedule fell from 93 percent in 2019 to 51 percent in 2021¹⁰. Abroad, the law envisions 19,200 foreign inspections a year; the agency’s best year managed 1,727¹¹ and it averaged about 900 — a target the FDA itself calls “unrealistic.” The reason was people: as of mid-2024 it had 432 investigators¹² to cover every domestic and foreign facility on earth that ships food to America.

The plan is to inspect less, and to say so. States already run about 90 percent of produce inspections and three-quarters of manufactured-food inspections¹³ under federal contract, and those contracts were told to expect cuts. The budget the administration sent for 2027 makes the shift official, setting aside money to move routine domestic food inspection off the federal books and onto the states¹⁴.

It is also a plan to watch less. On July 1, 2025, the country’s only active network for tracking foodborne illness across multiple germs narrowed from eight pathogens to two¹⁵. It keeps counting Salmonella and one strain of E. coli; Listeria, Campylobacter, Vibrio and three others become optional. The Centers for Disease Control, which runs it, said its “funding has not kept pace.” Epidemiologists noted the quieter cost: with the surveillance changed, the trend lines that show whether the food is getting safer or more dangerous can no longer be read against the past¹⁶.

The testing thinned at the same time. In April 2025 the FDA suspended the program that checks whether food-testing laboratories are getting the right answers¹⁷ — the quality control on the milk supply — after the lab that ran it lost its staff. Two of the agency’s seven food-testing labs briefly went dark¹⁸. A spending freeze in March¹⁹ had already left food-safety staff unable to buy the samples and equipment an outbreak investigation runs on.

The drug side was better insulated by design. Its user-fee law runs through September 2027²⁰, and in 2025 it drew about $3.3 billion in dedicated fees²¹ that arrive regardless of how the appropriations fight ends — the difference between a program that meets its commitments and a food program that has not met its inspection mandate in seven years. The cuts reached drug reviewers too; the point is not that the drug side was spared, but that it had a floor the food side never had.

No one can yet point to an outbreak and trace it cleanly to a firing; that data arrives late, and the visible figures still describe the system as it stood before the cuts. What can be counted is the watching. A year ago the government’s foodborne-illness network tracked eight pathogens. It now tracks two²² — and the budget for next year proposes to hand routine inspection to the states. The capacity being cut is the capacity to see. What that leaves unexamined is the subject of the next chapter.