At Trump’s FDA, Anti-Regulatory Approach and Cost-Cutting Put Food Safety System at Risk

The Trump administration’s anti-regulatory approach and cost-cutting moves risk unraveling a critical system of checks and balances that helps ensure the safety of the U.S. food supply, industry experts told KFF Health News.

An E. coli outbreak that occurred late last year — for which the investigation was concluded in February — signals how, with the FDA changes, more people could get sick with foodborne illnesses as companies and growers face less regulatory oversight and fewer consequences for selling tainted food products, according to interviews with consumer advocates, researchers, and former employees at the FDA and U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In addition, the administration withdrew a proposed regulation to reduce the presence of salmonella in raw poultry, a plan that could have saved more than $13 million annually by preventing roughly 3,000 illnesses. It is also disbanding a Department of Justice unit that pursues civil and criminal actions against companies that sell contaminated food and is reassigning its attorneys, according to a former FDA official, a publicly posted memo from the head of the department’s criminal division, and a white paper by the law firm Gibson Dunn.

“It’s all about destruction and not about efficiency,” said Siobhan DeLancey, who worked in the agency’s Office of Foods and Veterinary Medicine for more than 20 years before being laid off in April. “We’re going to see the effects for years. It will cost lives.”

Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services did not comment on the record for this article but have maintained that food safety is a priority.

Staffing cuts mean delays in publicizing deadly outbreaks, said Susan Mayne, an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Public Health who retired from the FDA in 2023. DeLancey said new requirements from the Trump administration for reviewing agency announcements became so arduous that it took weeks to get approval for alerts that should have been going out much sooner.

The November 2024 outbreak caused by E. coli bacteria in lettuce sickened nearly 90 people and killed one person. But after the investigation was completed under the Trump administration, the FDA redacted any information identifying the grower or processor. The FDA said in its February internal summary that the grower wasn’t named because no product remained on the market.

The information is still important because it can prevent further cases, pressure growers to improve sanitation, and identify repeat offenders, said Bill Marler, a Seattle lawyer who specializes in food-safety litigation.

“The whole ‘Make America Healthy Again,’ the focus on taking food color dyes out of cereal?” said Chris George, of Avon, Indiana, whose son was hospitalized in the outbreak. “How about we take E. coli out of our lettuce, so it doesn’t kill our kids?”