As a follow-up to a plan to replace laid-off workers with contracted workers, the FDA has been rumored to plan to suspend its routine food safety checks to state and local authorities. As reported by CBS, this plan has not necessarily been finalized yet nor officially approved. Given other moves made by the administration, this seems like it would not be far off.

I should note that an official spokesman of the FDA has indicated that these are only rumors. Given the administrations propensity for a lack of clarity, I doubt that this is the case. However, assuming that this is the case, what would such a plan look like?

It is not entirely clear just how many people have been fired and what all the positions of these people were. For starters, the commissioner of the FDA, Marty Makary, has falsely claimed that no scientists or food safety inspectors have not been laid off. Given that this is the official line of the FDA, getting data from them would be difficult.

What I can conclude is that the sudden shift in responsibilities would be catastrophic. The FDA has the resources (or had the resources; with the sudden brain drain, it’s hard to say) to conduct safety tests on a large-scale, larger than any individual state. The systems currently in place, assuming that they are there, are not designed to account for such sudden pressures. For example, do you think that West Virginia and it’s 23 field inspectors for meat and poultry could handle any significant increase for the entire state? Of course, you may argue that city or county authorities could pick up the slack, but they would certainly have even less resources and personnel available to address the problem.

The end result is that, should such a plan go through, it would probably result in a significant increase in outbreaks of the following foodborne illnesses: e. coli, salmonella, listeria, hepatitis a, vibriosis, and many more. Additionally, due to the increase in illnesses of bacterial origin, there is also a good chance that the incidence of antibiotic resistant illnesses increasing. In other words, antibiotics will become relatively weaker, and you will be more likely to die from the next infection that you have to fight off.