FDA Guts Food Safety Testing in Latest Move to ‘Make America Healthy Again’

The Food and Drug Administration has suspended quality control tests for a vital food safety program and is planning to end virtually all routine food safety inspections, according to a pair of reports from Reuters and CBS News. On top of that, NBC News has learned the FDA refused to publicize a recent E. coli outbreak in lettuce that ripped through 15 states. And it’s all just the latest batch of bad news for essential government programs courtesy of President Donald Trump and his dipshit conspiracy theorist at the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

First up, the FDA is suspending quality control testing at the Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) Proficiency Testing Program, according to a report from Reuters. The program tests for parasites like Cyclospora in spinach and the pesticide glyphosate in barley, among other foods. The suspension was announced internally at the FDA on Tuesday, according to Reuters, which cites an email distributed about staff leaving. The program oversees testing at about 170 labs, which will no longer get quality control checks through at least Sept. 30.

The changes to FERN are a direct result of staffing cuts at the HHS, which oversees agencies like the FDA and CDC. Kennedy is overseeing a reduction in force at the agency that’s seeing about 20,000 people leave through layoffs and departures.

Second, and perhaps even more troubling, is a report from CBS News that the FDA is currently making plans to end most food safety inspections at the federal level. The theory, if you can call it that, is that food safety is something that should only be done at the local level, and you don’t want federal inspectors to just “duplicate” work already done by states.

The plan hasn’t been implemented yet, and CBS notes that it’s not clear whether the move would be lawful. The FDA already outsources some routine food inspections to dozens of states, and the assumption would be an attempt to do that at a much broader scale. CBS News quotes some former workers at FDA who say some “higher-risk” inspections, like baby formula, would probably still be overseen by the feds if Trump and Kennedy went through with the plan.

Third, the FDA closed an investigation into E. coli in romaine lettuce without notifying the public, according to NBC News. The outbreak sickened dozens of people across 15 states and caused some to suffer severe illness, including a 9-year-old boy in Indiana who went into kidney failure. But the FDA didn’t notify the public because it assessed that the threat had passed, according to the news outlet.

It’s unclear to what extent Trump and Kennedy know what’s going on at the FDA, given their ignorance of so many things happening under them right now. Kennedy recently suggested he didn’t even know what was being cut at the federal agency when asked about specifics on CBS News. Over $11 billion has been slashed, and Kennedy didn’t seem to have a firm grasp on any of it. Possibly because Elon Musk’s DOGE is rampaging through government agencies, making cuts without any adults in the room.

But this is where we’re at with guys like Trump and Kennedy in charge. They’re destroying the U.S. federal government and purging the federal workforce, all while making it much less safe to eat or drink anything in this country. And things are likely to get so much worse, as we slowly learn about new things that get cut, like the CDC’s system for tracking things like injuries from drugs and car accidents.

FDA didn’t respond to questions emailed on Thursday. Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back.