For more than 30 years, I have represented families on the other side of foodborne epidemics: parents of children receiving dialysis for hemolytic uremic syndrome, people surviving a contaminated hamburger or bag of spinach, people leaving to plan a funeral. I have spent my career holding companies accountable when their food safety systems fail. I never imagined that the federal government itself would become one of those failed governments. It’s been like that for the past year and a half.
The cuts this administration has made to the FDA, CDC, and USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service are not budgetary abstractions. They will make people sick and some of them will die. The cruelest thing is that all of this is being done under the banner of “Making America Healthy Again.”
Consider the FDA, which monitors approximately 80% of our food. In 2025 alone, we lost approximately 3,900 employees. This is part of a process by which HHS will eliminate approximately 20,000 jobs. It started in February when the agency’s deputy director for human food said it had “indiscriminately” laid off 89 people from its food program. He subsequently resigned, saying it was “futile” to continue. The government blindly fired powdered milk safety officers to the point where they tried hard to reappoint them.
HHS plans to cut one-fifth of the FDA’s workforce by March, including more than 170 inspection and investigation staff. Understand what that means. By 2024, the FDA will have a total of 443 inspectors to cover more than 36,000 food facilities domestically and internationally. The actual number of people needed is approximately 1,500. We were already smoking. ProPublica found that foreign food inspections had fallen by nearly half by early 2025. We are importing more food than ever before and we are importing less.
Then there is surveillance. Quiet, unglamorous detective work is the whole ballpark in my world. By the time families call me, public health investigators have usually already connected a sick child in Ohio with a sick adult in Oregon and traced both to a single contaminated site. On July 1, CDC again expanded the FoodNet surveillance network from eight pathogens to two pathogens, reducing capacity. We stopped active tracking of Campylobacter, Listeria, and four other species. Listeria — the same pathogen that caused the deadliest listeriosis outbreak in a decade during last year’s boar’s head outbreak. We’re turning off the smoke detectors and telling ourselves that the house won’t burn down.
USDA has done its job. Inspection services have cut hundreds of positions while line speeds at some slaughterhouses have increased and inspectors have stepped back. Fewer people are calling for more pollutants to be captured faster. And in a move that should be a wake-up call to anyone who believes in the evidence, the department disbanded two scientific advisory committees that had guided federal food safety policy for decades. One of them was after 1971. Their total cost was approximately $300,000 per year. One was to examine ways to exclude listeria from deli meat at the time of dissolution. The work simply stopped. For good measure, after years of work, FSIS withdrew a proposed rule to limit salmonella (a pathogen that sickens more than 1 million Americans each year) in raw poultry.
I want to be fair. No one in Washington wanted to poison children, and our food safety system was underfunded long before this administration. I’ve said that before presidents of both parties. But you can’t fire inspectors, block surveillance, halt laboratory testing, fire scientists, and abandon rulemaking all at once and still claim that food safety is a top priority. Actions matter, and they all point in one direction.
This is what 30 years have taught me. Outbreaks do not announce themselves. People discover them: inspectors walking the plants, epidemiologists connecting the dots, technicians identifying strains. Even if you take those people away, the outbreak will still occur. We’ll only find them later, as more children are on dialysis and more families are planning funerals instead of birthday parties. Bacteria don’t care about budget cuts. They never did.
I have dedicated my life to suing companies that put profit over safety. If these cuts continue, I expect to be busier than ever. That’s the worst thing I can say to you.
