Happy Friday, and welcome to Food Fix. Hope your 2025 is off to a great start. With the death of former President Jimmy Carter, I’ve been delving back into some of the food/ag history of his presidency. In 1979, the tractorcade protests in Washington (farmers were furious about low prices) were really something. At one point, goats were let loose near the Capitol and on the White House grounds! Apparently, Washingtonians were absolutely furious about the traffic, but public opinion turned after the tractors (and the farmers) proved helpful in a blizzard.
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Alright, let’s get to it –
Helena
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Government watchdog calls out FDA (again) for too few food inspections
The FDA is not conducting enough food safety inspections both domestically and internationally, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The GAO, an agency tasked with helping Congress oversee the federal government, found that FDA is falling far short of the inspection mandates Congress set for the agency back in 2011 under the Food Safety Modernization Act — known as FSMA — a sweeping update to food safety law that came after a slew of particularly bad outbreaks, from E. coli in spinach to salmonella in peanut butter.
Back then, Congress quite clearly directed FDA to do far more food safety inspections. The law said that domestic food facilities deemed “high-risk” (more likely to have an issue) should be inspected at least once every three years, while other domestic food facilities should be inspected at least once every five years. (Yes, this isn’t often. There are some 75,000 food facilities in the U.S., so regularly inspecting them is not a small task.)
Fast forward to today: FDA has not met FSMA’s mandate for domestic food facility inspections since fiscal year 2018, according to GAO. The agency has never come anywhere close to meeting FSMA’s mandate for international inspections (19,000 each year since 2016). Between fiscal years 2018 and 2023, GAO found FDA conducted an average of 917 foreign food safety inspections each year — about 5 percent of what Congress asked the agency to do annually.
Outbreak city: The GAO’s findings come amid a string of headline-grabbing foodborne illness outbreaks in the U.S., from listeria to E. coli and salmonella. Whether it’s carrots or lettuce or eggs, these incidents just keep happening — and every time it’s costly not only to public health but also to the economy.
FDA’s POV: The FDA, for its part, contends it doesn’t have the resources to meet these inspection mandates. The agency also got behind on inspections during the pandemic, creating a significant backlog.
FDA officials have long maintained that the foreign inspection mandate, in particular, is “unrealistic and unachievable,” as GAO noted in its report, but the government watchdog takes issue with the fact that FDA “has not identified an alternative annual target or communicated with Congress regarding this issue.” GAO acknowledged the agency has “taken steps to address significant and long-standing workforce capacity challenges but has not determined the appropriate size or workload of its foreign investigator cadre.” In other words, FDA has never said how many inspectors are needed to ensure that food imported into the U.S. from all over the world is safe.
FDA generally agreed with the report’s recommendations.
We’ve been here before many times: Reading this report, I felt a bit like I was in the movie “Groundhog Day.” I have read so. many. GAO reports like this over the past 15 years covering food policy. Back in 2009, I wrote my college thesis on FDA and food safety politics during the Bush administration — that thesis is how I accidentally fell into journalism, a story for another day — anyway, even back then, GAO was cranking out similar reports calling out FDA’s shortcomings with food safety oversight.
I remember I had a stack of GAO reports that were basically saying the same thing: not enough inspections, inadequate recall policies, not enough coordination between agencies and so on — essentially flagging serious cracks in the system. Indeed, GAO has had “improving federal oversight of food safety” on its High Risk List since 2007, so nearly two decades. The GAO must feel like a broken record at this point.
By the numbers: While many of the themes were familiar, GAO did dig up some interesting (and new) numbers in this report. For one, it’s the first time in a long time I’ve seen an estimate of how many food safety inspectors FDA actually has (this has been weirdly hard to pin down). As of last summer, FDA had a total of 432 investigators for conducting both domestic and foreign inspections, per GAO. That’s a tiny workforce compared to the scale of the food system. There are roughly 75,000 domestic food facilities and 125,000 foreign food facilities. Making the situation even more precarious: GAO noted that almost one quarter of investigators are eligible to retire or will be very soon. FDA contracts with state agencies to conduct roughly half of all domestic food safety inspections, so there’s capacity beyond the feds, but it’s still a relatively small number.
State woes: Speaking of the states, FDA is about to reduce the amount of funding that’s going to state agencies to support food safety work — and state officials are super frustrated about it.
State agencies are quick to point out that they can conduct food safety inspections for much less than FDA can. The FDA inspections are quite expensive, per GAO. The average cost of a routine “high-risk” domestic inspection, which typically lasts between one to four days, is $28,600. Inspecting a non-high-risk facility is about $14,900, on average. A foreign inspection, which might run two to five days, averages $38,700.
“At the same time they’re not meeting the mandate, they have year over year reduced the number of contract inspections for states,” said Steven Mandernach, executive director of the Association of Food and Drug Officials (AFDO), in an interview. “From a taxpayer standpoint, I was shocked by the inspectional cost numbers.”
A state inspection might run $3,000 at the very high end, Mandernach said. Many cost more like $1,000 to $1,500. That of course does not factor in the overhead costs, but either way they’re not nearly as expensive as federal inspections. The money FDA is pulling back from the states does not reduce state inspections directly, but it reduces the money states get for inspector training, rapid response and other ancillary work that wraps around those inspections. This includes a lot of work states do directly with farmers to improve produce safety.
FDA has argued that the money it’s redirecting from the states was meant to be temporary and will now be re-allocated, in part to hire more FDA inspectors. In recent spending bills, lawmakers in both the House and Senate have directed FDA to maintain food safety funding to the states. A handful of Democratic senators also wrote to the agency last month expressing concern, but FDA has not backed away from its plans.
What’s next: We don’t know how the incoming Trump administration will approach food inspections, including the extent to which we rely on (and fund) the states to do this work. Frank Yiannas, former deputy commissioner of food policy and response at FDA, suggested on LinkedIn this week that this could be one area of interest for the Department of Government Efficiency, a cost-cutting effort led by Trump allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy
“Perhaps DOGE can take a closer look at the cost & overhead of the food safety regulatory process,” Yiannas wrote, adding: “We all want a strong FDA, but we also need to be more risk-based & fiscally responsible with the use of tax payer dollars.”
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What I’m reading
Where are the eggs? And why are they expensive? Here’s what to know about prices and supply (USA Today). “Have you recently entered your local grocery store on the hunt for eggs, only to find they’re noticeably more expensive − if you can find them at all?” Mary Walrath-Holdridge writes. “It’s not just your local shop. In fact, egg prices have increased nationwide by around 38% in the last year, bringing the average cost of one dozen up to $3.65 in November versus $3.37 in October and $2.14 in November 2023, according to the U.S.Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index. The major reasons both experts and consumers are pointing to? The ongoing bird flu outbreak, the rising cost of doing business, and, in some locales, changing laws. When will things start to cool down? That may be a little harder to pinpoint.”
Bird flu and household pets (eFoodAlert). “The influenza A H5N1 virus (the current prevalent variety of bird flu virus in circulation) has been found in a range of wildlife species in addition to wild birds. From deer mice to dolphins, from cougars to coyotes, no mammalian species is completely immune from infection. In recent weeks, it has become clear that household pets also are at risk,” Phyllis Entis writes. “Yet, even pets that are kept largely indoors and are under supervision while outside can become infected with the bird flu virus. eFoodAlert reached out to the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) and received the following statement from a CVM spokesperson: “The FDA is tracking cases of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in domestic and wild cats in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington State that appear to be linked to eating contaminated food products.”
Why is the American diet so deadly? (The New Yorker). “Until recently, Guillaume Raineri, a forty-two-year-old man with a bald head and a bushy goatee, worked as an HVAC technician in Gonesse, a small town about ten miles north of Paris,” writes Dhruv Khullar. “After Raineri’s wife got a job at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, they moved to the U.S. The transition was something of a shock. “The food here is different,” he said in a heavy French accent. He decided to enroll in a paid study at his wife’s new workplace. It was exploring why the American diet, compared with almost any other, causes people to gain weight and develop chronic diseases at such staggering rates.”
Public health can’t stop making the same nutrition mistake (The Atlantic). “In the world of nutrition, few words are more contentious than healthy,” Nicholas Florko writes. “But if identifying healthy food is not always straightforward, actually eating it is an even more monumental feat. The challenge of improving the country’s diet was put on stark display late last month, when the FDA released its new guidelines for which foods can be labeled as healthy. Yet the FDA estimates that zero to 0.4 percent of people trying to follow the government’s dietary guidelines will use the new definition ‘to make meaningful, long-lasting food purchasing decisions.’ These modest effects underscore that health concerns aren’t the only priority consumers are weighing when they decide whether to purchase foods. ‘When people are making food choices,’ Eric Finkelstein, a health economist at Duke University’s Global Health Institute, told me, ‘price and taste and convenience weigh much heavier than health.’ Changing those habits will require the government to tackle the underlying reasons Americans are so awful at keeping up with healthy eating.”
Here’s how RFK Jr.’s war to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ may play out (Star Tribune). “Whatever you think of the incoming administration — and putting my own opinion aside — it’s clear the food system needs a serious reset,” writes Fred Haberman in an opinion piece. “And with nominees Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Brooke Rollins set to take over the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture, respectively, we can expect nothing less than a crusade for change. Here are my thoughts and predictions for helping food companies and executives deal with the changes that may come over the next few years.”
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