The Real Threat to Food Safety Isn’t Dyes or Additives

A Look at What’s Happening to the FDA, Food Safety, and the Movement Distracting Us From It

Photo via Civil Eats, credit: industryview / www.industrieblick.net

Last week, multiple news outlets revealed that the Trump administration is preparing to suspend routine food safety inspections by the FDA. This comes in the wake of sweeping staff reductions, including thousands at the FDA and 20,000 total staff cuts within the Department of Health and Human Services. As well as several other actions to weaken food safety oversight, including the disbanding of two critical food safety advisory committees at the USDA.

If you're part of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and expecting the Trump administration to improve the safety of our food supply, this may seem confusing. But if you've been following policy for the past couple of decades, it’s not surprising at all. In fact, it’s entirely consistent with the deregulatory agenda Trump has pursued since his first term to shrink the federal government’s oversight role, cut public health infrastructure, and transfer regulatory power from federal agencies to corporations.

This isn’t an unfortunate side effect. It’s the strategy.

The political forces driving this, including Project 2025 and much of the Republican Party, frame federal oversight as “bureaucratic red tape” and an obstacle to corporate profit. Their solution is to weaken federal authority and replace it with voluntary compliance, third-party audits, and self-regulation. They call it “efficiency.” But in reality, it’s the dismantling of public protections.

Why FDA Oversight Matters

Before the FDA existed, food safety was left to industry. And it failed.

Milk was commonly adulterated with chalk, plaster, or even formaldehyde to mask spoilage or thicken watered-down batches. Infant deaths from contaminated formula were not rare. Meatpacking plants, famously exposed in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, were filled with filth, rot, and disease. Food fraud was rampant, and consumers had no meaningful protections.

That’s why the FDA was created in the first place to serve as an independent federal authority with the power to inspect, enforce, and, when necessary, recall contaminated food from the market.

Today, the need for that oversight hasn’t diminished. The CDC estimates that 48 million Americans get sick from foodborne illness each year, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die. These numbers would certainly be higher with less regulation.

Some like to argue that third-party inspections are enough and FDA inspections are ‘redundant.’ But that’s not true at all. FDA inspections are legally enforceable. They result in recalls, facility shutdowns, and penalties when violations are discovered. By contrast, third-party audits, while helpful, are paid for by the companies themselves. They are not standardized. They are not enforceable. And they do not carry the same authority or transparency.

Without federal oversight, food companies police themselves. And history tells us exactly how that ends.

This should also raise questions for those aligned with the MAHA movement. MAHA claims to oppose corporate self-regulation and fight for a safer, cleaner food supply. So why support policies that weaken the very agencies designed to hold corporations accountable?

If that sounds contradictory, that’s because it is.

To understand why the Trump administration would be taking actions to undermine food safety, we can look to recent historical context. Examining the priorities and policy shifts across the Obama, Trump 1, Biden, and current Trump administrations offers a clear picture of how political ideology and regulatory philosophy have shaped our food safety system.

A Policy Timeline: What Each Administration Has Done

Obama: The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA)

In response to growing public health concerns and major foodborne illness outbreaks in the 2000s, President Obama, who championed science-based policy and supported FDA modernization, signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) into law in 2011. It was the most comprehensive update to U.S. food safety law in over 70 years.

Key goals of FSMA:

• Shift focus from reactive to preventive food safety

• Require food companies to develop and implement hazard prevention plans

• Mandate risk-based inspections of domestic and foreign facilities

• Give FDA the authority to issue mandatory recalls

• Improve traceability and response to outbreaks

It passed with bipartisan support and transformed the FDA’s role from reactionary to preventive, and while implementation was slow and complex, especially for small businesses, it’s widely seen as the most important food safety law in generations.

Trump 1: Deregulation

When Trump took office in 2017, FSMA was still in the early stages of full implementation. Instead of advancing its goals, his administration actively slowed them down. Across the board, Trump’s first administration was focused on deregulation, especially where federal rules were perceived to burden businesses, interfere with industry operations, or expand the role of science-based agencies like FDA or EPA.

Some of the administration’ s key goals included cutting two existing regulations for every new one enacted, reducing what the administration called “regulatory overreach,” and prioritizing industry-friendly policies, often at the expense of environmental or public health safeguards.

The only arguably positive move from a food safety perspective came in 2020 with the launch of the Blueprint for the New Era of Smarter Food Safety, which was a strategic vision that aimed to modernize food traceability and outbreak response using technology and digital tools. However, it was largely a planning document rather than a regulatory overhaul, and it gained more traction under the Biden administration, which began actually implementing many of its principles.

Key actions and patterns:

• FSMA rule enforcement was delayed or inconsistently implemented

• Foreign Supplier Verification Program (FSVP) oversight lagged

• FDA food inspections were deprioritized, with fewer resources allocated

• Budget proposals sought repeated cuts to FDA’s food division

• Major environmental protections related to agriculture (clean water rules, pesticide limits, PFAS regulation) were rolled back

• Transparency decreased, with some inspection data and enforcement records harder to access and overall repeated undermining of science-based policy making across agencies

Overall, the Trump administration framed food safety regulation as burdensome and unnecessary. The underlying belief was that industry could regulate itself through third-party audits and customer-driven standards, despite a long and well-documented history of failure when oversight is weakened.

Biden: Reinvestment, Rebuilding, and Reform

President Biden inherited an FDA weakened by staffing shortages and slowed FSMA enforcement. And his administration took steps to rebuild.

Overall, the Biden’s administration emphasized restoring science and public health leadership across all federal agencies, strengthening oversight weakened during the Trump years, and modernizing food safety systems through digital traceability and better data sharing. And while food safety didn’t dominate headlines during the Biden years, like COVID-19 or climate, it was folded into broader efforts around resilience, public health equity, and environmental safety.

Key efforts:

• Increased FDA food safety funding in budget proposals

• Reversed Trump-era rollbacks on key environmental and pesticide protections impacting food safety (e.g., banning chlorpyrifos)

• Resumed FSMA rule enforcement, especially for produce and imports

• Implemented the Food Traceability Final Rule (2022), targeting high-risk foods

• Responded to the Abbott infant formula crisis by restructuring FDA leadership and modernizing food program management by creating the Human Foods Program and appointing a Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods

• Reinforced scientific integrity in public health decision-making across FDA, USDA, and EPA

The broader takeaway from the Biden era is that food safety wasn’t treated as a political inconvenience. It was seen as a core part of protecting public health and supporting resilience across the food system. While not every effort landed perfectly, the administration’s actions reflected a belief that science, transparency, and accountability still matter, and that the health of the public should not be left to voluntary compliance.

Trump 2: Accelerated Deregulation

Now in his second term, Trump has wasted no time accelerating his deregulatory agenda. The FDA’s food division has been gutted by layoffs. An estimated one-third of the food safety workforce has been let go. The Food Emergency Response Network's proficiency testing program has been suspended. And as I mentioned at the start of this piece, routine federal food safety inspections are on the chopping block.

Key moves in Trump’s second term:

• Massive staff cuts at FDA, including food safety scientists and inspectors

• Suspension of routine quality control programs

• Elimination of USDA food safety advisory committees

• Executive orders mandating elimination of ten federal regulations for each new one introduced. Ten!

• Proposed permanent increases in meat processing line speeds, against labor and food safety expert warnings

• Plans to transfer routine food facility inspections to state agencies, raising concerns about consistency and weakened oversight

• Proposed rule changes to allow higher thresholds of PFAS in the environment, despite mounting health concerns about these "forever chemicals"

• Rollbacks of environmental protections tied to agriculture and industry, including expanded coal-burning operations that will increase mercury, arsenic, and lead contamination in soil, air, and water (and subsequently our food and water supply)

Also of note: Jim Jones, an expert in chemical safety, environmental protection, and regulatory science who spent over 30 years at the EPA before being appointed to lead the FDA’s newly created Human Foods Program under Biden, resigned in February. He stated that it was impossible to do the job effectively in light of the staff cuts and program suspensions. The job was protecting our food supply.

Of course, these moves are not random. They reflect the long-standing conservative push to reduce the scope of federal oversight, shift regulatory authority to states and industry, and frame all public health infrastructure as bloated and inefficient.

But gutting the FDA doesn’t make food safer. It makes it cheaper for corporations to take risks, and harder for the public to know when they do.

The MAHA Paradox

The MAHA movement built its platform around claims of corporate accountability, food system transparency, and cleaner, safer food. Yet it has aligned itself with a political party that is actively dismantling the very structures that ensure food safety.

And this is the core contradiction at the heart of the MAHA movement.

You can’t demand stricter food dye bans while cheering on an administration that eliminates the scientists responsible for enforcing pathogen testing. You can’t talk about protecting children from toxins while backing environmental rollbacks and increased coal production, which directly result in more heavy metal contamination and other pollutants that enter our food, air, and water. You can’t champion a safer food future while supporting policies that let corporations decide what’s safe on their own terms.

This is regulatory theater. Symbolic bans and buzzwords, while the core systems of accountability are destroyed.

Because the truth is, when you strip away federal oversight, you’re not making food ‘cleaner’ or ‘safer, you’re making it riskier. For Trump, MAHA was less about public health and more about mobilizing voters to quietly push through a pro-corporation, deregulatory agenda while the same people who voted for him to make America healthy are distracted by state-specific food dye and fluoride bans. And unfortunately, if we don’t help people recognize this strategy and demand accountability, it won’t just be the FDA that’s weakened. It’ll be the integrity of our entire food supply, and the health of the people who depend on it.

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