While the administration’s cuts were ostensibly ordered to maximize efficiency and productivity, they have had an opposite effect, several former and current FDA employees said, reversing years of progress.
“The goal is to accomplish as much and more with less resources,” said a former high-level FDA investigations official. “Less inspections translate to less regulatory oversight, and that, from a public health perspective, never benefits the public.”
Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the nonprofit advocacy organization Environmental Working Group, said the fallout is simple:
“When you take a wrecking ball to the federal government, you are going to wind up undermining important government functions that keep all of us safe, especially our food,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before people die.”
How we calculated foreign food inspections
To understand how inspections of foreign food facilities have changed, we used a publicly available dashboard where the FDA publishes the results of those inspections. This database also includes inspections for manufacturers of drugs, medical devices, cosmetics, tobacco, biologics, and veterinary products.
Beginning in May, we downloaded the entire database weekly and tracked the number of newly added foreign food facility inspections.
The dashboard is continually updated, with data added after inspections are finalized. That typically occurs 45 to 90 days after the close of an inspection, though some reports may not be posted until the agency takes a final enforcement action. Through an analysis, we determined that few reports are added more than 90 days after an inspection date.
Our story therefore only includes inspections through July. In an accompanying chart, we show the more provisional data through September. We asked HHS for recent figures, but the department refused to share them.
We considered the possibility that the downtrend in foreign food inspections was solely due to a lag in inspections being added to the dashboard. To check this, we performed the same analysis on domestic inspections. This analysis showed that while the rate of foreign inspections had significantly decreased, domestic inspections have continued almost uninterrupted.
This story originally appeared on ProPublica.
