In July, Taylor Farms de Mexico recalled all iceberg lettuce sourced in Mexico from 27 states following a cyclospora outbreak that has sickened 18,445 people since the beginning of May. That’s on top of Taylor Farms recalling fresh jalapenos in 26 states over salmonella concerns. A Food and Drug Administration  report in July revealed Dairy Queen locations in five states pulled 74 cases of ice cream after metal shavings were found in the product. Don’t forget the more than 75,000 packages of tofu recalled for possibly containing ink.

The seeming surge of food-related recalls has coincided with massive cuts conducted by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) last year, including across the FDA, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The U.S. government has for decades grappled with staffing challenges and limited resources around food safety. But following the DOGE cuts, the jobs of these critical agencies to prevent the spread of food-related illnesses will just get harder, according to experts.

“None of it’s good for food safety,” Don Schaffner, chair of the department of Food Science at Rutgers University, told Fortune. “I really worry more that we’re going to lose visibility into what’s going on. We already know that a significant number of illnesses go unreported, a significant number of outbreaks go undetected. This is only going to make that worse.”

He added: “None of this is efficiency. This is all whatever the opposite of efficiency is.” 

DOGE’s cuts across food safety

According to Office of Personnel Management data, there are more than 1,100 fewer Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) roles in the USDA since 2024.

“Food Safety remains a top priority,” a USDA spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. “Inspectors and frontline personnel provide mandatory inspection coverage at every federally regulated establishment every day and that will not change. No FSIS-regulated products can enter commerce without inspection.”

In the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA shifted focus to preventing, rather than responding to, food safety crises after the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011.

But more recently, DOGE reduced surveillance and tracing capabilities. In addition to slashing its own workforce, the FDA is carrying out fewer inspections of imported food, which make up 20% of the U.S. food supply. According to a Fortune analysis of agency data on foreign human food inspections, compared to fiscal 2024, when the FDA carried out 805 inspections, fiscal 2025 saw 723 inspections, and fiscal 2026 showed a further downward trend, with 214 inspections in the first two quarters of the year.

The reduction correlates to the elimination of FDA support staff roles, or personnel who booked travel and carried out food testing for contamination, creating an administrative slowdown to efficiently carry out key safety and inspection protocol.

In August 2025, Health and Human Services also scaled down the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, known as FoodNet, which tracks food poisoning cases, slashing mandatory surveillance of six major germs, including cyclospora.

The FDA told Fortune the Trump administration is working closely with health departments across all 50 states to respond to outbreaks, and that no FDA investigators were impacted by staffing changes or reductions in force.

The FDA’s 2027 proposed budget is $7.2 billion, a 3.3% increase from the 2026 budget, and the agency is prioritizing growing its inspection capabilities.

The agency also noted in a recent social media post that food recalls have actually decreased over the past few years, with 2,182 in fiscal 2024 and 2,160 in fiscal 2025, compared to 1,836 in so far fiscal 2026, which ends on Sept. 30.

Pre-existing food safety problems

But even prior to DOGE cuts, U.S. food inspections were lagging behind what was recommended. A 2025 Government Accountability Office report found the “FDA has not met its domestic and foreign inspection targets since fiscal year 2018,” failing to inspect 7% of high-risk domestic facilities due for inspection in fiscal 2019, a figure that rose dramatically to 40% in 2020 and 49% in 2021.

The agency, responsible for 80% of the country’s food supply, cited workforce shortages as the main reason for inspection shortcomings.

The GAO released a similar analysis in 2009 identifying food safety as a major focal point of the FDA’s deficiencies, mirroring a Science Board report released two years early that called out staffing shortages even decades prior.

“They were stuck having to do more and more with less and less,” Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, told Fortune.

She attributed the persistent staffing problem in part to how congressional appropriations committees fund the FDA, saying money earmarked for rural development and agricultural efforts leaves food and drug regulatory funding by the wayside.   

What DOGE made worse

Nestle warned that while the U.S. government has always been strapped for inspection resources, fewer inspections following DOGE cuts changed the psychology behind how companies enforce food safety and cited a trend in people being less afraid of familiar risks like food contaminations.

“If the companies aren’t being inspected, if nobody’s minding the store, if nobody’s holding them accountable, they’re going to get sloppy,” she said.

Food safety ultimately rests in the hands of industry, not the government, Schaffner said. But DOGE has made it harder for researchers and academics to be proactive in studying germs that can endanger people’s health.

For example, the USDA plans to shutter the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland, and relocate its programs to different facilities. The research center contains two parasitology labs that research and coordinate research on cyclospora.

Schaffner said it’s unlikely for scientists to uproot their lives to move to a different research facility, particularly in times of uncertainty, and further disruptions could set back research for years to come.

“This is probably a time that we might want to know more about cyclospora incidents in general, rather than less,” he said. “And so, in retrospect, that looks like an absolutely boneheaded decision.”