On the menu today: Another day, another U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announcement of a recalled food product; this time, it’s Danone USA, “issuing a voluntary recall of So Delicious Dairy Free® Salted Caramel Cluster Non-Dairy Frozen Dessert pints with best-by dates on and before April 3, 2028 due to the potential presence of foreign materials, such as small stones and other hard objects, within the cashew inclusions.”
This summer, the nation experienced a Cyclospora outbreak in iceberg lettuce, a situation that launched a thousand social media jokes about Taco Bell.
There’s a ready-made narrative that Democrats and media would like to tell: Americans could once eat their food with confidence, but then Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the secretary of Health and Human Services, and he announced plans to cut 3,500 positions from the FDA, and now foodborne bacteria and other illnesses are running rampant across Americans’ digestive tracts. The facts are a little more complicated, as you might expect. Read on.
Is It Safe to Eat That?
The first problem with the “Kennedy made our food unsafe” narrative is that the increase in the number of reported food recalls predates Trump’s second term.
Back in late 2024, before Trump’s second term began, Axios reported, “Food and cosmetic recalls, which the Food and Drug Administration categorizes together, nearly doubled from 2012 to 2024.” One factor is eating trends; Americans and the rest of the world are eating more ready-to-eat food, which doesn’t get cooked; cooking usually kills off bacteria. Several listeria outbreaks were traced back to deli sliced meats and cheeses.
That Axios article also quoted an expert observing, “We’re having increased globalization of food production, which not only creates more opportunities for contamination at multiple points in the supply chain, but it creates more scenarios where there’s blind spots.”
The other problem is that the FDA’s goals for inspections and its capacity to perform those inspections have been far apart, for a long while, well before Kennedy was running HHS. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), in a report published January 8, 2025:
FDA has not met its domestic and foreign inspection targets since fiscal year 2018. The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) directs FDA to inspect each high-risk domestic food facility at least once every 3 years and each non-high-risk facility at least once every 5 years. GAO’s analysis of FDA data shows that FDA nearly met its mandated targets for both high-risk and non-high-risk domestic facilities in fiscal years 2018 and 2019, but faced significant challenges in meeting mandated targets beginning in fiscal year 2020 — largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, according to FDA data, FDA did not inspect about 7 percent of high-risk domestic facilities due for inspection during fiscal year 2019. In contrast, the data show that in fiscal years 2020 and 2021, the percentage increased to 40 percent and 49 percent, respectively.
For foreign facility inspections, FDA conducted far fewer than the annual target of 19,200 inspections identified by FSMA, according to FDA data. For example, the highest annual number FDA completed was in fiscal year 2019 when FDA inspected 1,727 foreign facilities — about 9 percent of the annual target. FDA considers the existing target to be unrealistic and unachievable. . . .
FDA officials identified limited workforce capacity as FDA’s primary challenge to meeting inspection targets. FDA’s investigator cadre has remained understaffed for years. For example, in July 2024, FDA had a total of 432 investigators — 90 percent of the full-time equivalent ceiling — for conducting both domestic and foreign inspections, according to FDA officials.
You might be thinking, “Well then, we need to increase the FDA budget.” Except we have, considerably, year by year: “Between FY2021 and FY2026, FDA’s enacted annual total program level (excluding amounts enacted in supplemental appropriations measures or in the American Rescue Plan Act) increased from $6.050 billion to $7.069 billion. Over that time period, congressionally appropriated funding increased by 7 percent, while user fee revenue increased by more than 39 percent.” The funding for the agency went up considerably, while the number of inspectors did not.
The second problem with the anti-Kennedy narrative is that the data of total food recalls doesn’t follow a clear change aligning with the change in administrations.
The data at RecallBench, compiling all recalls per year by agency, severity, and hazard — computed from the full official databases — tells a more complicated story.
So far in 2026, the FDA has 352 food events reported; that puts it on a pace for about 495 events this calendar year. Without any context, that sounds like a lot, but that would represent a significant drop from the 575 food events reported last year.
Last year’s 575 food events was indeed a jump in food events reported from the previous year, but the 2020s were fairly consistent: 420 in 2020, 448 in 2021, 438 in 2022, 490 in 2023, and 461 in 2024.
A partisan might look at that data and conclude that things were manageable in the range of 400 to 500 reported food events in the Biden years, and everything went to hell once Kennedy took over, jumping to 575 in the first year of Trump’s second term.
Except the highest year in the past decade was 2016, when the FDA reported 782 food events. If the number of reported food events reflects how safe Americans’ food is, then the most dangerous year for Americans’ stomachs in the past decade or so was Barack Obama’s last year in office. In the first year of Donald Trump’s first term, that figure dropped to 699, which is still significantly higher than the current “bad” years, dropping to 578 in 2018.
Do you recall a lot of media coverage of unsafe food in Obama’s last year and Trump’s first year? The number of food events reported were significantly worse then than now, but I suspect Sylvia Burwell, Tom Price, and Alex Azar were just much less interesting to the media than Kennedy is.
In November, ProPublica reported that food inspections were at “historic lows,” and that “two dozen current and former Food and Drug Administration officials blame the pullback on deep staffing cuts under the Trump administration.”
Those deep cuts are 3,859 employees departing in 2025, and 473 in 2026, through February. But there’s a caveat; FDA is in the process of hiring 2,000 new employees, although those hires are slowed by bureaucratic delays.
Inspections began to decline early in the administration, after 65 percent of the staff in the FDA divisions responsible for coordinating travel and budgets left or were fired in the name of government efficiency.
Investigators suddenly had to book their own flights and hotels, obtain diplomatic passports and visas, and coordinate with foreign authorities, former and current FDA staffers told ProPublica. After workers tasked with processing expenses were laid off, investigators waited as a backlog of unfulfilled reimbursements climbed to more than $1 million, a former staffer said. (Investigators are responsible for paying off their own credit cards.) Senior investigators close to retirement also took the opportunity to get out.
Played out on a large scale, this combination of firings and voluntary departures has left the agency scrambling to make up for the loss of 1 out of every 5 of its workers responsible for ensuring the safety of America’s food and drugs.
But it’s not clear how many food inspectors actually left the FDA. In April 2025, decrying the cuts, Democrats on Capitol Hill warned, “In 2024, FDA employed only 443 food safety inspectors to inspect every food processing facility in its jurisdiction.” On September 9, the Partnership for Public Service (PPS) wrote that as of February 2026, the FDA had 473 federal food inspectors.
Now, I’m not the greatest at math, but I’m pretty sure 473 is higher than 443. Meanwhile, the ProPublica report says that “as of last year, the agency had about 430 employees conducting both foreign and domestic food inspections.” That article was published in 2025, suggesting that “last year” would be 2024, before the Trump administration took office.
Perhaps one of these sources is measuring the number of inspectors differently; the PPS contends that in September 2024, the FDA had 1,035 federal food inspectors, more than twice the figure that Democrats cited as evidence of how undermanned and underfunded the agency was. (Recall that Democrats controlled the presidency, U.S. House, and U.S. Seante and had considerable control over the budget in 2021 and 2022.)
Complicating things even further, the FDA isn’t the only federal agency that inspects food production facilities to make sure the products are safe. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service says its “inspection personnel are in more than 7,000 meat, poultry and egg establishments nation-wide” and that its reorganization this year “does not affect frontline personnel or food safety activities, which will continue without interruption. There is no reduction in force and all FSIS employees will retain positions within the agency.” That agency “employs approximately 9,000 federal employees across the United States.”
Folks, you know I’m always up for some good old-fashioned Kennedy bashing.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a lunatic, with an attraction to other lunatics, who’s content to leave AI-generated hallucinations in his official reports and who spent the past few decades spreading just about every possible conspiracy theory about the dangers of vaccines. Hopefully, nearly two years into the job, he’s learned which one is Medicaid and which one is Medicare. He denies saying things that he’s been recorded saying. He accused DARPA of creating sinister chemtrails. I’d say he’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but I’m sure he’s worried about food dyes in that cereal.
But on this issue, he’s getting blamed for a trend that started long before he was in his position, and he’s getting blamed for “deep cuts” that look pretty minor if they were cuts at all.
Either way, cook your meat properly.
ADDENDUM: Hasan Piker, the GOP’s gift that keeps on giving:
AXIOS: “Do you think America is worse than Al-Qaeda?”
PIKER: “Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes. We have caused tremendous terror all around the world.”
You know how we know al-Qaeda is a non-factor in Americans’ lives?
One, not a single 9/11 anniversary ceremony or event was disrupted by a terrorist attack.
Two, nobody’s around to argue with Piker that they still deserve the crown.