Will they lead to a food safety reckoning?
Popsicles potentially contaminated with glass. Granola marketed toward breastfeeding mothers, recalled due to salmonella risk. And of course, shredded iceberg lettuce that causes explosive diarrhea. The summer of recalls has touched every culinary category—even dog food and baby formula.
It’s difficult to lay the outbreaks at the feet of any one agency or presidency. But what surely isn’t helping: the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to the regulatory bodies meant to safeguard Americans.
Last year, amid DOGE’s cost-cutting fervor, the administration cut about 20 percent of FDA staff, and 25 percent of the CDC’s. Food safety checks were suspended for months, including lab testing for Cyclospora, the parasite that one year later is fueling what is now the third-largest outbreak of foodborne illness in American history, with close to 10,000 confirmed cases.
But though few administrations have been quite as indifferent to the nation’s health and welfare as the current one, the problems with America’s food supply span decades—thanks in part to vigorous lobbying by the deep-pocketed food industry.
Between 1998 and 2020, the ultraprocessed-food industry spent over a billion dollars on lobbying—more than the gambling, tobacco, and alcohol industries. The agribusiness lobby, meanwhile, dropped over $500 million between 2019 and 2023 alone.
Over the years, the industry’s efforts have prevailed across presidential administrations. When first lady Michelle Obama embarked on a campaign against childhood obesity in the early 2010s, Big Food unleashed a torrent of lobbying dollars. The White House backed away from efforts to get healthier food marketed to kids.
During those years, Congress did manage to pass the Food Safety and Modernization Act (FSMA), which includes a traceability rule requiring more detailed record keeping for some of the most common culprits in foodborne outbreaks—like eggs, greens, and soft cheeses. It’s a measure that might have helped stall the cyclosporiasis outbreak.
However, thanks to industry lobbying, implementation of the rule has been delayed, and delayed, and delayed. The rule is now scheduled to go into effect in 2028, 17 years after the original law passed. Assuming the industry doesn’t win another extension.
In the meantime, per the Government Accountability Office—which you have to imagine has its work cut out for it these days—the FDA has come nowhere close to meeting its FSMA-mandated targets for foreign safety inspections since 2018. The FSMA calls for 19,200 such inspections each year; in 2025, they conducted 995, or about 5 percent of that target.
So the challenges facing food safety regulations are nothing new. Yet the severity of this year’s recalls seems pronounced. Per the US PIRG Education Fund, while the total number of recalls is not unusually high, there has been “a huge increase in the number of illnesses caused by contaminated food.”
In other words, the outbreaks we have seen are higher-profile, more severe, and more likely to trigger anxieties about food safety. But that also means they are provoking more awareness, backlash—and potentially, action.
No doubt Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as head of HHS has been undermined by his conspiratorial anti-vaccine positions and advocacy for raw milk consumption. Yet in naming Kennedy to his cabinet, Trump elevated a longtime foe of Big Food—and crystallized such opposition as a mainstream conservative position.
Sure enough, even as Trump’s approval rating sinks as low as 30 percent, 41 percent of Americans still identify with the “MAHA movement.” And supermajorities of US adults agree that we need more regulation of chemical additives and pesticides. Even Trump himself, remarkably, has at least paid lip service to the movement by publicly condemning the “industrial food complex.”
Journalist and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser put it best: “If a politician who drinks 12 Diet Cokes a day, serves McDonald’s food at the White House, stages campaign events at McDonald’s restaurants—and routinely orders a meal of two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and a chocolate shake just for himself—now feels the need to criticize industrial food, a seismic shift has occurred in US popular opinion.”
