Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low in 2025

In an article published in ProPublica, journalists, Annie Waldman and Brandon Roberts researched FDA records and found that the U.S. is on track to have the fewest foreign food inspections since 2011 (excluding pandemic years).

Some of their key findings include in recent years, FDA investigators have uncovered numerous safety violations at foreign food facilities, including crawling insects, cracked conveyor belts and dripping pipes. About two dozen current and former FDA officials blamed the pullback of foreign food inspections on deep staffing cuts this year.

Inspections began to decline in early 2025, after 65% of the staff in the FDA divisions responsible for coordinating travel and budgets left or were fired in the name of government efficiency.

Because of staff reductions, 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.

“Basic regulatory oversight functions have been decimated,” said Brian Ronholm, the director of food policy at Consumer Reports. “There’s an enhanced risk of more outbreaks.”

ProPublica’s Research

To understand how inspections of foreign food facilities have changed, they used a publicly available dashboard where the FDA publishes the results of those inspections. This database also includes inspections for manufacturers of drugs, medical devices, cosmetics, tobacco, biologics and veterinary products.

Beginning in May, they downloaded the entire database weekly and tracked the number of newly added foreign food facility inspections.

The dashboard is continually updated, with data added after inspections are finalized. That typically occurs 45 to 90 days after the close of an inspection, though some reports may not be posted until the agency takes a final enforcement action. Through an analysis, ProPublica determined that few reports are added more than 90 days after an inspection date.

Their story only includes inspections through July. The journalists asked HHS for recent figures, but the department refused to share them.

They considered the possibility that the downtrend in foreign food inspections was solely due to a lag in inspections being added to the dashboard. To check this, we performed the same analysis on domestic inspections. This analysis showed that while the rate of foreign inspections had significantly decreased, domestic inspections have continued almost uninterrupted.