The berries in your refrigerator probably came from Mexico. The seafood you’re planning for dinner likely came from Vietnam or Thailand. The spices in your pantry? India, maybe China.
Here’s what changed while you were busy with everything else: foreign food facility inspections have fallen to historic lows because the support system that makes overseas inspections possible has been dismantled. The inspectors are still there. The travel, visas, coordination with foreign authorities, and reimbursements that get them on site are not.
What Changed
In March 2025, foreign food safety inspections by the FDA fell by nearly 50% from the monthly average. By July, they remained 30% below normal. The United States is now on track for the fewest foreign food inspections on record since the Food Safety Modernization Act passed in 2011, except during the COVID pandemic, when travel stopped entirely.
This isn’t about cutting red tape or streamlining bureaucracy. This is about what happens when 65% of the support staff who book travel, process visas, coordinate with foreign authorities, and reimburse inspector expenses simply disappear.
FDA food inspectors weren’t targeted by federal cuts. But the people who made it possible for them to actually conduct inspections were. It’s like having a working car but no key, no gas, and no map. The car still exists. You’re just not going anywhere.
Why It Matters
About 15% of the U.S. food supply comes from other countries. For seafood, it’s closer to 80%. For fruits and vegetables during the winter months, it’s the majority of what you eat.
When FDA inspectors visit a foreign food facility, they’re checking whether it meets the same safety standards as domestic producers. They’re looking at sanitation, water quality, pest control, and employee hygiene practices. They’re making sure the place that makes your food isn’t using gray, dirty water that leaks into the growing area. These inspectors confirm there are functioning toilets with hand-washing stations.
These aren’t theoretical concerns. At a Mexican berry farm that exports to the United States, FDA investigators found significant violations: sanitation facilities with water that was dirty, gray, and leaking throughout the growing area. One toilet had no handwashing facilities. The FDA cited 11 violations of American food safety regulations.
According to public records, the agency did not reinspect the farm to verify that corrections were made. The farm’s products continued to enter the United States.
What’s Happening
First came mass layoffs in February 2025, 89 “indiscriminate” firings within the FDA’s Human Foods Program, enough to trigger the resignation of the Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods. Then came budget freezes in March, requiring every travel expense to go through “an opaque, multistep process” that created delays measured in weeks and months.
But the real operational collapse came when 65% of the divisions responsible for coordinating travel and budgets lost their staff. Suddenly, food safety inspectors, people trained to evaluate food production facilities, were spending their time trying to book their own international travel, obtain diplomatic passports, arrange visas, coordinate with foreign governments, and navigate reimbursement systems they’d never been trained to use.
It didn’t work. Foreign inspections collapsed.
The FDA had been working on initiatives to increase inspector pay, improve training, and expand the foreign inspection program. A January 2025 Government Accountability Office report specifically urged the agency to do exactly that.
Then the second Trump administration began. All those plans stopped. The people left.
How It Works
The mechanism is simple: you don’t need to eliminate a function to destroy it. You just remove the support structure that makes it possible.
Food safety experts call this the “Jenga effect”, pull out the pieces at the bottom, and the whole tower collapses. The inspectors at the top of the tower are still there. They’re just standing on nothing.
If your family gets sick from contaminated imported food, you won’t know it was because the facility stopped being inspected two years ago. You’ll just know you’re sick.
The Pattern
This is the same pattern we see in disaster permitting, NATO coordination, and FEMA operations. The headline says one thing: “efficiency,” “streamlining,” “America First.” The operational reality is the destruction of capacity through administrative attrition.
Remove the people who make the system work. Don’t announce it. Don’t debate it. Just stop backfilling positions. Stop processing travel. Stop reimbursing expenses. Wait for people to leave.
It works because it’s invisible until it fails. And by the time it fails, the people who knew how to fix it are gone.
What This Enables
Foreign food facility inspections were already below target before 2025. The Food Safety Modernization Act mandated 19,200 foreign inspections annually. In 2019, the best year on record, the FDA completed 1,727. That’s 9% of the mandated target.
Now, with inspections down 30 to 50% from even that inadequate baseline, American food safety depends almost entirely on:
Foreign governments are self-regulating their export facilities
Importers meeting legal supplier verification requirements with less federal oversight behind them
Contamination being caught after it makes people sick rather than before
The first one doesn’t work if foreign governments prioritize export revenue over safety standards. The second breaks down when cost pressures rise, and oversight weakens. The third means your family becomes the early warning system.
What to Watch
If inspection numbers don’t recover by spring 2026, this is the new normal, not a temporary problem.
If the administration permanently withdraws from imported food safety. States can inspect facilities within the United States, but they can’t inspect facilities in Mexico, Vietnam, or China.
If foodborne illness outbreaks from imported foods increase in 2026-2027, it will prove that the early warning system is gone.
What You’re Not Being Told
This briefing is free because everyone needs to know when the safety systems protecting their food supply stop working. But there’s more happening that connects to this pattern, and understanding how these pieces fit together is how you see what’s coming before it arrives.
Paid subscribers get:
The full threat map showing how food safety collapse connects to disaster response preemption, NATO coordination cuts, and FEMA restructuring
The specific watch triggers that tell you when this pattern is expanding to other safety systems
The 15-minute counter-moves that reduce your family’s exposure before the system fails completely
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