FDA budget cut proposal puts states in charge of routine food inspections

A draft document outlining cuts to the Health and Human Services Department includes language eliminating FDA’s “direct role” in routine assessments of farms and food facilities.

Published April 21, 2025

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A draft budget document shows the Trump administration’s plan to slash funding to the Department of Health and Human Services includes substantial cuts to the Food and Drug Administration that would, among other things, move the responsibility of routine food inspections to states. 

The preliminary budget sets a total of $2.9 billion in requested congressional appropriations for the FDA, according to Steven Grossman, the former executive director of Alliance for a Stronger FDA, and a copy of the document viewed by MedTech Dive. That would be a roughly 18.6% decrease from $3.6 billion in budget authority the FDA received in its 2024 fiscal year. 

The proposed budget would also eliminate FDA’s “direct role” in routine inspections of food facilities, moving the responsibility to states. The FDA, which is responsible for ensuring safety of close to 80% of the food supply, conducts more than 8,300 inspections of facilities and farms on average each year to monitor food companies’ compliance with safety requirements and prevent foodborne illness outbreaks, according to the Government Accountability Office.  

The proposed budget document says the FDA intends to expand state contracts to cover “100% of all costs” related to inspections, which is typically $14,900 on average for a non-high-risk facility, according to GAO. States conducted about one-third of routine surveillance food safety inspections on behalf of FDA between fiscal years 2018 and 2023, GAO said. 

FDA has struggled to keep up with food safety inspections in recent years after the pandemic hampered the ability for in-person assessments and created significant backlogs. Non-high-risk facilities are supposed to have routine inspections once every five years under federal law, but around 74% of facilities up for inspection in fiscal 2021 were not assessed by their required dates, according to GAO.

The food industry in the past has pushed the FDA to rely more on states for routine inspections in order to address federal workforce and budget constraints. Groups including the Consumer Brands Association say states “provide additional inspection capacity and often can do inspections at a lower cost.”

But the viability of moving all routine inspections to states depends on whether states have the financial support and infrastructure “to go it alone,” according to Grossman.  

The fiscal 2026 budget must be passed by Congress and could look different from the current proposal. 

The draft document, which was dated April 10 and labeled “pre-decisional,” appears to come from the Office of Management and Budget. Known in budgetary parlance as a passback, it outlines the Trump administration’s priorities for the agency. The Washington Post first reported on the document’s existence. 

RBC Capital Markets analyst Brian Abrahams described the impact of the proposed budget cuts as “manageable,” adding that user fees, which are collected by the FDA from drug and medical device manufacturers, could help bridge the majority of the funding gap for the non-food industries it regulates. In 2022, user fees made up 66% of the $2.1 billion budget for regulating drugs compared to only 1% of the foods program budget, according to an analysis from the journal Health Affairs. 

Grossman disagreed, however, writing in an email that the loss in congressional appropriated funding would be a “direct loss, not offset by the modest, pre-specified increase in user fees.” 

The document also proposes no funding for FDA buildings or facilities, or for pay increases, Grossman wrote in an FDA Matters blog post. The FDA would need to absorb any costs for the activities at the proposed budget levels.

Slashing NIH budget

The cuts to the FDA are just one piece of the budget proposal, which looks to slash the HHS’ discretionary spending by one-third. Other proposed cuts across the HHS include plans to reduce the National Institutes of Health’s budget by 40%, as reported by the Post. 

Abrahams said the proposed NIH cuts could affect early-stage science and grant funding, while plans to shrink or eliminate other programs could reduce patient awareness around nutrition, mental health conditions, sickle cell disease, cardiovascular and infectious diseases. A senior NIH investigator studying the effects of ultra-processed foods left his post last week, saying his team was hobbled by an inability to purchase supplies and faced censorship in reporting the results of his research. 

“The future of our studies seems bleak given the inability to replace outgoing trainees who are the workhorses of our research,” he wrote, per CNN.

The budget cuts follow HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s orders to cut the department’s workforce by about 10,000 people in early April. While no official accounting of the layoffs has yet emerged, the reduction-in-force has dismantled entire offices and left others with drastically reduced staff, raising questions about agency functions.

Ultimately, analysts said Congress may provide more funding to the HHS than what is laid out in the president’s budget proposal. The budget requires 60 votes to pass, meaning seven Democratic votes would be needed, TD Cowen analyst Daniel Brennan said in a research note Thursday.

Historically, “NIH has had strong support from both sides of the aisle,” Brennan added, making a 40% cut to the agency seem “extremely unlikely.”