Food safety complaints on meat, poultry, and egg products jumped nearly 40% last year, climbing from 1,443 to 2,016, according to a federal report by the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Over the summer, Wisconsin Reps. Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany voted to introduce budget cuts to the two agencies responsible for keeping contaminated meat, poultry, dairy, and produce off store shelves, both of which have already lost thousands of staff to layoffs.
The increase came in the wake of some of the deepest staffing cuts the US Department of Agriculture has made in years. The agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, the branch that places inspectors inside slaughterhouses and processing plants, already lost about 9% of its workforce in six months.
On June 4, Van Orden and Tiffany both voted yes on H.R. 8646, the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, which passed the House 213-210. Only five House Republicans voted against it.
The bill doesn’t completely cut food safety funding, but it does lock in a 1.4% cut to the overall agriculture and FDA budget, which are both already running lean. According to the US Department of Personnel Management Federal Workplace Data tool, the FDA has laid off nearly 4,300 employees and the FSIS has lost roughly 900 positions since the beginning of 2025. The layoffs trace back to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the cost-cutting effort President Trump ordered shortly after taking office. “We found… billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse,” Trump said in Oval Office remarks in February 2025.
Jim Jones, then FDA’s deputy commissioner for human foods, wrote in his February 2025 resignation letter of the cuts made in 2025 that the “indiscriminate firing” of federal food safety staff is “beyond short sighted.”
“I was looking forward to working to pursue the Department’s agenda of improving the health of Americans by reducing diet-related chronic disease and risks from chemicals in food. It has been increasingly clear that with the Trump Administration’s disdain for the very people necessary to implement your agenda, however, it would have been fruitless for me to continue in this role,” he said. “The Secretary’s comments impugning the integrity of the food staff, asserting they are corrupt based on falsities is a disservice to everyone.”
Jones was referring to Kennedy, the newly confirmed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, who had said months before his confirmation that FDA’s nutrition staff should be cleared out. “Their entire departments, like the nutrition department in the FDA … have to go,” Kennedy told MSNBC in a November 2024 interview, adding that the departments were “not doing their job.”
Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, called Jones’s resignation “a huge step backward for the FDA and the safety of our food,” in comments to The Hill.
The cuts reached Wisconsin’s dairy industry directly. FDA’s Division of Dairy Safety halted its national proficiency testing program for Grade A raw milk and finished dairy products this spring, according to an internal agency email, amid the same staffing losses cited in the numbers above.
An FDA spokesperson pushed back on the idea that this amounted to suspending routine safety inspections, saying the agency has been shifting food safety work to states for years. The state, which brands itself America’s Dairyland and is watching for bird flu in its herds, started its own mandatory monthly milk testing on every dairy farm to cover the testing the federal program used to provide.
The bill now heads to the Senate, where lawmakers will decide whether FDA and FSIS staffing and funding levels carry into a final agreement.
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