The Food and Drug Administration is reportedly planning to end most of its routine food safety inspections.
That’s a move that raises questions about the future of food safety across the U.S. and under the Trump administration and following a worrying E. coli outbreak tied to McDonald’s onions that killed one person and sickened more than 100 others. Each year, federal health officials estimate 48 million people get sick and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases.
The plans have not been finalized, CBS News reported Friday, citing multiple unnamed federal health officials. However, the Department of Health and Human Services says the claim is false.
A spokesperson told The Independent that the FDA is actively working to ensure continuity of operations during the reorganization period and remains committed to ensuring critical programs and inspections continue.
One former official told CBS News that FDA employees have been working on a possible shift of the agency’s food efforts to states for years, which could give the department the room to focus on higher priority and foreign inspections and help tackle case backloads.
"There's so much work to go around. And us duplicating their work just doesn't make sense," one former FDA official, who worked on the plans before leaving the agency and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said.
Notably, some inspections are already outsourced. The FDA says it may conduct inspections using state partnering agencies and that they also can be conducted by “foreign countries with whom we have Memoranda of Understanding or similar agreements.’’
State inspectors who conduct inspections are trained by the FDA to ensure consistency across state and federal efforts. State partners and the FDA share findings from their inspections.
“The FDA prioritizes inspections using a risk-based approach that takes into account today’s global food supply and markets and focuses on issues of food safety that may affect public health,” it says.
It remains unclear what would happen in states that don’t have contracts with the FDA to conduct inspections.
Recent layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services are also a factor. The department initially let go some 10,000 across agencies. With fewer staff members, come fewer inspections that can be done. CBS News previously reported that the FDA is planning to hire contractors in an attempt to fill that gap.
A report released by the Government Accountability Office earlier this year found that the FDA had not met its domestic and foreign inspection targets since 2018 — although the Covid pandemic was a big hurdle.
The office said the FDA had conducted an average of 8,353 domestic inspections per year and an average of 917 foreign inspections between 2018 and 2023.
The report said FDA officials had already cited limited workforce capacity as the FDA’s “primary challenge to meeting inspection targets,” and that the agency had not identified and implemented additional procedures for minimizing incidences where investigators attempt but are unable to complete an inspection.
"In theory, relying on states to do more routine food inspection work could lead to better food safety," Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, told CBS News.
"So far, this administration has acted with reckless disregard for how its policies will affect the detection and prevention of foodborne illness, and any plans to replace federal food inspectors with some other workforce deserve suspicion," he said.
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