RFK's cuts to FDA are a threat to public health and safety

Deadly Listeria in shakes served at nursing homes. Disease-causing E. coli linked to onions served in McDonald's. Salmonella in cucumbers landed 155 people in the hospital. These are just a few of the disturbing pathogens identified in foods tied to high-profile outbreaks last year. 

Americans from across the political spectrum clearly care about food safety. This bipartisan interest led to the passage of the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act, which shifted our national approach from reacting to outbreaks to preventing them. 

Yet last week, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has vowed to “Make America Healthy Again,” in part by improving the American diet, announced he would be laying off 10,000 workers from federal health agencies, including 3,500 from the Food and Drug Administration. FDA staff began to learn on Tuesday of cuts across the agency, which are sweeping and threaten federal outbreak prevention and chemical safety efforts.  

As of the time I write, the administration has yet to announce full details on the cuts, but last week’s announcement appeared to disproportionately exempt the FDA’s drug, biologics, and device centers, where most premarket product reviewers work. These centers are doubly protected from cuts because they receive user fees from industry, which come with requirements to maintain congressional appropriations at predetermined levels.  

So what’s left to cut at the FDA? Disproportionately, it’s food. And within foods, non-inspection programs are most likely to be targeted, as the statement announcing the cuts indicated that inspection workers will be protected from the cuts.  

What do the staff at the FDA’s foods program do? For one thing, they write the policies RFK, Jr., has championed, like standards and testing for heavy metals in baby food, a project he hopes to complete with his “Operation Stork Speed.” (It’s worth noting that President Trump has also weakened rules preventing heavy metals from contaminating the environment, a key source of heavy metal contamination in foods.) 

Transparency, another stated Kennedy priority, also takes staffing. The Secretary recently celebrated a tool for centralizing information on chemical contaminants, yet that tool doubtless took work from information technology and communications specialists whose jobs are now in jeopardy. 

But much of the work for the human foods program aims to prevent outbreaks. FDA does this primarily by enforcing rules and translating lessons learned from past outbreaks into standards and guidance for industry. The workers who develop the science, seek stakeholder input, and publish, communicate, and enforce the standards that prevent outbreaks could all be subject to cuts under the latest announcement. 

And finally, while RFK, Jr.'s announcement purports to protect safety inspectors from job cuts, the obvious truth is that most FDA food safety inspections are not carried out by the FDA, but are conducted under state grants that have already been targeted for cuts. In March, many of the state programs that carry out 90 percent of our produce and 75 percent of our manufactured foods inspections quietly received word that they would face steep cuts in federal funding.  

The cuts were initially planned to remove 30 percent of program funding, but states have learned the cuts now will approach 60 percent. State governments are unlikely to make up for lost federal dollars because they face steep federal cuts on many fronts. That means food safety inspection as a whole will plummet in the coming year. 

Food safety prevention efforts have been affected before. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the FDA placed many inspections on hold, an infant formula facility in Sturgis, Michigan, went uninspected, as conditions developed that would soon lead to a deadly multistate outbreak of Cronobacter and a nationwide formula shortage. 

That outbreak made one thing clear: When the FDA is unable to inspect, people die. And often those people are young children, the very group RFK, Jr., has made the focus of his efforts to “Make America Healthy Again.” It is these kids, and other vulnerable U.S. consumers, who will suffer the most if his assault on the federal workforce moves forward.