The FDA was already in bad shape as far as inspections go. In 'The Secret Life of Groceries' (published in 2020) I believe the statistic was that the people responsible for keeping our food system safe only have the capacity to inspect around 5% of domestic agricultural and food processing operations nation-wide. That speaks more to the amount and size of agri-business in the United States than the FDA's capacity, but it also doesn't mean great things for the federal government's ability to preemptively intervene in most cases.

DOGE cuts to FDA, HHS, FSIC, FTC, EPA, and more have inevitably made this problem much worse.

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BeetleB 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> I believe the statistic was that the people responsible for keeping our food system safe only have the capacity to inspect around 5% of domestic agricultural and food processing operations nation-wide.

Over what time period? If they can inspect 5% in a year, that's not too bad.

Keep in mind that if they inspect without notice and do it randomly, companies have a decent incentive to keep things working in order. If serious issues are found, a given plant can be shut down for months, which if you're small enough, means you go out of business.

I don't know what a "good" number is - that would involve statistics. I'd imagine it should be more than 5%, but not something like 35% - that's quite high.

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mypetlion 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Each facility expecting to be inspected, on average, once every 20 years is really not great.

	▲	BeetleB 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you're a company that has 20 facilities, all run in more or less the same way, it means you expect to be checked every year. As I said: 5% may be too low. But perhaps 20% would be good/great.