A string of food recalls this summer has unsettled American consumers, and public health professionals are warning that cuts to key food safety personnel could mean more food-related illness is on the way.

In July, Taylor Farms de Mexico recalled all iceberg lettuce sourced in Mexico across 27 states following a cyclospora outbreak that has sickened 18,445 people since the beginning of May. Cyclospora is a microscopic parasite that spreads when food or water is contaminated with fecal matter, and fresh produce that is eaten raw—like lettuce, basil, and berries—has repeatedly been implicated in past U.S. outbreaks. That came on top of Taylor Farms recalling fresh jalapenos in 26 states over salmonella concerns. A Food and Drug Administration report in July revealed that Dairy Queen locations in five states pulled 74 cases of ice cream after metal shavings were found in the product. And more than 75,000 packages of tofu were recalled for possibly containing ink.

The apparent surge in food-related recalls has coincided with sweeping cuts carried out last year by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), including at the FDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The stakes are broad: the CDC estimates that foodborne pathogens sicken roughly 48 million Americans each year, hospitalizing 128,000 and killing 3,000, which is why surveillance capacity—not just recall responses—matters for public health.

The U.S. government has grappled with staffing challenges and limited resources around food safety for decades. But following the DOGE cuts, the job of these critical agencies to prevent the spread of food-related illnesses will only get harder, according to experts.

"None of it's good for food safety," Don Schaffner, chair of the department of Food Science at Rutgers University, told Fortune. "I really worry more that we're going to lose visibility into what's going on. We already know that a significant number of illnesses go unreported, a significant number of outbreaks go undetected. This is only going to make that worse."

He added: "None of this is efficiency. This is all whatever the opposite of efficiency is."

DOGE's Cuts Across Food Safety

According to Office of Personnel Management data, the USDA has more than 1,100 fewer Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) roles than it did in 2024.

"Food Safety remains a top priority," a USDA spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. "Inspectors and frontline personnel provide mandatory inspection coverage at every federally regulated establishment every day and that will not change. No FSIS-regulated products can enter commerce without inspection."

Within the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA shifted its focus to preventing, rather than responding to, food safety crises after the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011. That law, passed after a string of high-profile contamination events, gave the FDA new authority to mandate recalls and set preventive standards for produce and processed foods—an authority whose impact depends heavily on agency staffing and inspection capacity.

More recently, however, DOGE reduced surveillance and tracing capabilities. In addition to slashing its own workforce, the FDA is carrying out fewer inspections of imported food, which makes up 20% of the U.S. food supply. According to a Fortune analysis of agency data on foreign human food inspections, the FDA carried out 805 inspections in fiscal 2024, 723 in fiscal 2025, and just 214 in the first two quarters of fiscal 2026—a further downward trend.

The reduction correlates with the elimination of FDA support staff roles, the personnel who booked travel and carried out food testing for contamination, creating an administrative slowdown in executing key safety and inspection protocols.

In August 2025, Health and Human Services also scaled down the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, known as FoodNet, which tracks food poisoning cases, cutting mandatory surveillance of six major germs, including cyclospora.

The FDA told Fortune that the Trump administration is working closely with health departments across all 50 states to respond to outbreaks, and that no FDA investigators were impacted by staffing changes or reductions in force.

The FDA's 2027 proposed budget is $7.2 billion, a 3.3% increase from the 2026 budget, and the agency is prioritizing expanding its inspection capabilities.

The agency also noted in a recent social media post that food recalls have actually decreased over the past few years, with 2,182 in fiscal 2024 and 2,160 in fiscal 2025, compared with 1,836 so far in fiscal 2026, which ends on Sept. 30.

Pre-Existing Food Safety Problems

Even before the DOGE cuts, U.S. food inspections were lagging behind what was recommended. A 2025 Government Accountability Office report found that the "FDA has not met its domestic and foreign inspection targets since fiscal year 2018," failing to inspect 7% of high-risk domestic facilities due for inspection in fiscal 2019—a figure that rose dramatically to 40% in 2020 and 49% in 2021.

The agency, responsible for 80% of the country's food supply—with the USDA's FSIS handling the rest, mainly meat, poultry, and egg products—cited workforce shortages as the main reason for its inspection shortcomings.

The GAO released a similar analysis in 2009 identifying food safety as a major focal point of the FDA's deficiencies, mirroring a Science Board report released two years earlier that called out staffing shortages even decades prior.

"They were stuck having to do more and more with less and less," Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, told Fortune.

She attributed the persistent staffing problem in part to how congressional appropriations committees fund the FDA, saying money earmarked for rural development and agricultural efforts leaves food and drug regulatory funding by the wayside.

What DOGE Made Worse

Nestle warned that while the U.S. government has always been strapped for inspection resources, fewer inspections following the DOGE cuts changed the psychology behind how companies enforce food safety. She cited a trend of people being less afraid of familiar risks such as food contamination.

"If the companies aren't being inspected, if nobody's minding the store, if nobody's holding them accountable, they're going to get sloppy," she said.

Food safety ultimately rests in the hands of industry, not the government, Schaffner said. But DOGE has made it harder for researchers and academics to be proactive in studying germs that can endanger people's health.

For example, the USDA plans to shutter the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland and relocate its programs to different facilities. The research center contains two parasitology labs that research and coordinate research on cyclospora—work that analysts warn risks being set back.

Schaffner said it is unlikely that scientists will uproot their lives to move to a different research facility, particularly in times of uncertainty, and that further disruptions could set research back for years to come.

"This is probably a time that we might want to know more about cyclospora incidents in general, rather than less," he said. "And so, in retrospect, that looks like an absolutely boneheaded decision."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.