The clearest measure of what the food-safety cuts did is not the staffing number. It is whether the government can still find the source of an outbreak once people start getting sick.
In 2024, the FDA investigated 26 foodborne outbreaks and identified the source in 20 of them, about 77 percent. In 2025 it closed 11 investigations and pinned down the source in four, about 36 percent. Finding the source is what allows a recall to be targeted and an outbreak to be stopped rather than waited out.
The cuts behind that: on March 24, 2025, HHS announced it would remove 3,500 people from the FDA, a roughly 20 percent reduction, including more than 170 staff from the Office of Inspections and Investigations. OPM figures show the FDA lost 3,859 employees during 2025 and another 473 in 2026. The CDC lost about 25 percent of its staff.
Surveillance was narrowed as well. FoodNet, the CDC network that tracks foodborne illness, cut the number of microbes and parasites it monitors from eight to two.
ProPublica reported that American inspections of foreign food facilities, which supply a large share of what Americans eat, fell to historic lows.
One caution belongs on this entry. A lower share of solved investigations across a smaller number of investigations is a real and troubling signal, but the 2025 figure rests on 11 closed cases, which is a small sample. The staffing reductions, the FoodNet narrowing and the foreign-inspection decline are separately documented and do not depend on that ratio.