The federal government became involved in agricultural sciences in the mid-1800s to make our farming and food sector more productive and secure. But today, federal researchers also examine how agriculture and the environment influence each other, for example, how pesticide use affects bees. Employees from the Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture also work together to inspect food, with the goal of ensuring agricultural imports do not introduce plant diseases or pests, including citrus greening disease and the spotted lanternfly.
By the numbers
From fiscal 2019 through fiscal 2023, USDA gave financial assistance to an average of about 1 million agricultural producers each year, supplementing farmers impacted by agricultural losses or disasters and supporting conservation efforts.
After a 24,000-person workforce reduction, state-level USDA offices have been left with no or heavily reduced staff to administer farm aid and rural development programs.
USDA proposed the closure of a research facility that is key to determining the causes of recent, record-setting honeybee die-offs.
Concerns have grown that staff cuts at FDA are leaving the country more vulnerable to foodborne illness due to fewer inspections of foreign and domestic food facilities.
Profile · On the Ground
Avon, Indiana
In late 2024, lettuce contaminated with E. coli sickened more than 80 people in 15 states, including a 10-year-old Indiana boy named Colton George, who became seriously ill and needed dialysis. Colton’s family faced hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, according to Bill Marler, an attorney representing the family.
“I think the public has a right to know who the hell poisoned all these people,” said Marler.
But in early 2025, the Food and Drug Administration closed its investigation of the outbreak without naming the producer of the tainted produce, a highly unusual decision that many experts decried.
The number of federal employees engaged in food inspection roles has declined by 54.3% between September 2024 and February 2026, raising concerns that workforce cutbacks have placed the health and safety of the public at risk.
“The thing that I worry about is that we won’t even realize there’s an outbreak. …People get sick all the time, and we don’t know from what,” said Don Schaffner, chair of the food science department at Rutgers University. “There’s going to be more of those situations because we now don’t have the investigative powers to find the problems.”
The FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service are the primary federal food inspection agencies, with some duties handled by the states. It is a complex task of intertwined roles and responses. Inspectors ensure compliance, epidemiologists trace outbreaks, and the administration crafts rules and policy to prevent further damage.
Recent reports have cited a reduction in the number of federal epidemiologists, microbiologists and environmental health specialists at the CDC, while some USDA inspectors are now overseeing more facilities on a daily basis than in the past. FDA inspections of foreign food facilities have declined, while the cutbacks in some cases have forced a shift from some preventive inspections to “for-cause” investigations that kick in only after illnesses occur.
In addition, the USDA has withdrawn a proposed rule aimed at reducing salmonella in poultry and cut two food safety advisory committees as part of a broader effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy. The cuts targeted committees providing expert scientific advice on foodborne illnesses and meat inspection. A partnership between federal agencies and 10 state health departments also saw significant funding cuts, severely limiting its ability to continue tracking eight key foodborne pathogens that it has monitored for nearly 30 years.
Former USDA Deputy Undersecretary for Food Safety Sandra Eskin said the outcome of the cutbacks remains to be seen but added that fewer food inspectors could mean a riskier food supply.
“I always use the analogy of Jenga: If you take out two of those blocks, everything falls,” said Eskin. “Outbreaks happen for lots of reasons. But the reason we don’t want an outbreak to happen is because the federal government isn’t doing its job to protect us.”