Staff cuts made in early April suspended an effort to improve the agency’s testing for bird flu in milk, cheese, and pet food, and more. Now, the agency wants to push food checks to states.
The US Food and Drug Administration is supposedly suspending a quality control program for its food testing laboratories as a result of staff cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.
The proficiency testing program of the FDA’s Food Emergency Response Network is designed to ensure consistency and accuracy across the agency’s network of about 170 labs that test food for pathogens and contaminants to prevent food-borne illness.
“Unfortunately, significant reductions in force, including a key quality assurance officer, an analytical chemist, and two microbiologists at FDA’s Human Food Program Moffett Center have an immediate and significant impact on the Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) Proficiency Testing (PT) Program,” said the email sent on Tuesday from FERN’s National Program Office and seen by Reuters.
The program will be suspended at least through September 30 and means the agency will be unable to do planned quality control work around lab testing for the parasite Cyclospora in spinach or the pesticide glyphosate in barley, among other tests, the Reuters email added.
“The claim that the FDA is suspending routine food safety inspections is false,” an FDA spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson added that the agency is actively working to ensure continuity of operations during a reorganization period and remains committed to ensuring critical programs and inspections continue.
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Some FDA employees have been working on a possible shift of the agency’s routine food efforts to states for years, one current and one former official said, which could free up resources to focus on higher priority and foreign inspections. The FDA already outsources some routine food inspections through contracts with 43 states and Puerto Rico.
