The following opinion piece by Bill Marler first appeared on Marler Blog and is reposted here with the author’s permission.

The people who find foodborne outbreaks are being fired, defunded, and disbanded — and the bugs do not care.

For more than thirty years I have represented the families on the other end of a foodborne outbreak — the parents of children on dialysis with hemolytic uremic syndrome, the survivors of a contaminated hamburger or a bag of spinach, the people left planning funerals. I built a career holding companies accountable when the food safety system failed. I never imagined the federal government itself would become one of the things that fails. Over the past year and a half, it has.

The cuts this administration has made to the FDA, the CDC, and the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service are not abstract budget lines. They are going to get people sick, and some of them are going to die. The cruelest part is that it is all being done under a banner that reads “Make America Healthy Again.”

Consider the FDA, which polices roughly 80 percent of our food. It lost nearly 3,900 employees in 2025 alone, part of an HHS purge of some 20,000 jobs. It began in February with what the agency’s own deputy commissioner for human foods called the “indiscriminate” firing of 89 people from the food program — after which he resigned, saying it was “fruitless” to continue. The administration fired so blindly that it had to scramble to rehire the official in charge of infant formula safety.

By March, HHS planned to cut a fifth of the FDA’s workforce, including more than 170 people from inspections and investigations. Understand what that means. In 2024 the FDA had all of 443 inspectors to cover more than 36,000 food facilities at home and abroad — against the roughly 1,500 it says it actually needs. We were already running on fumes. ProPublica found that foreign food inspections fell by nearly half in early 2025. We are importing more food than ever and looking at less of it.

Then there is the surveillance — the quiet, unglamorous detective work that is the entire ballgame in my world. By the time a family calls me, public health investigators have usually already connected a sick child in Ohio to a sick adult in Oregon and traced both to a single contaminated lot. On July 1, the CDC gutted that capacity, scaling its FoodNet surveillance network back from eight pathogens to two. It stopped actively tracking Campylobacter, Listeria, and four others. Listeria — the same pathogen that, in the Boar’s Head outbreak just last year, caused the deadliest listeriosis outbreak in over a decade. We are turning off the smoke detectors and telling ourselves the house won’t burn.

The USDA has done its part. Its inspection service shed hundreds of positions while line speeds at some slaughterhouses climb and inspectors step back — fewer people asked to catch more contamination moving faster. And in a move that should alarm anyone who believes in evidence, the department disbanded the two scientific advisory committees that had guided federal food safety policy for decades, one of them since 1971. Their combined cost was about $300,000 a year. One was, at the moment it was dissolved, reviewing how to keep Listeria out of deli meat. That work simply stopped. For good measure, FSIS withdrew its proposed rule to limit Salmonella in raw poultry — a pathogen that sickens more than a million Americans a year — after years of work.

I want to be fair. No one in Washington woke up wanting to poison a child, and the food safety system was underfunded long before this administration; I have said so under presidents of both parties. But you cannot fire the inspectors, blind the surveillance, suspend the lab testing, dismiss the scientists, and abandon the rule making all at once and still claim that food safety is a priority. Actions are what count, and these all point one direction.

Here is what three decades have taught me. Outbreaks do not announce themselves. They are found by people — inspectors who walk the plants, epidemiologists who connect the dots, technicians who confirm the strain. Take those people away and the outbreaks still come. We just find them later, after more children are on dialysis and more families are planning funerals instead of birthday parties. The bacteria do not care about budget cuts. They never have.

I have spent my life suing companies that put profit ahead of safety. If these cuts stand, I expect to be busier than ever. That is the worst thing I could possibly tell you.

Interested in learning more about food safety and the history of foodborne disease outbreaks and investigations?

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