FDA's Foreign Food Inspections Hit Decade Low as Cyclosporiasis Outbreak Farm Went Unseen

In 2025, the Food and Drug Administration conducted just under 1,000 inspections of foreign food facilities. Federal law requires nearly 20,000 annually. The gap between mandate and reality has widened for over a decade, spanning administrations of both parties, and last year it grew worse: foreign inspections dropped 29 percent from 2024, marking the lowest count since 2011 when the requirement was enacted.

Taylor Farms de Mexico, the facility believed responsible for an ongoing cyclosporiasis outbreak in the United States, was not among those inspected. The FDA last visited the farm in 2019—seven years before the outbreak—and found no violations that year, though inspectors did document the facility recycling wash water for salad mix. A prior visit in 2013, following a different cyclosporiasis outbreak, also could not conclusively pinpoint the contamination source. The pattern reveals a system stretched so thin that even facilities with a history of problems slip through unmonitored for years.

The numbers tell a story of institutional strain. The FDA employs a risk-based model to prioritize inspections, but with only 432 inspectors in 2024 and just 20 dedicated to foreign facilities, the agency often pulls domestic inspectors away from their posts to cover international work. Congress directed the hiring of 5,000 food safety inspectors under the Food Safety Modernization Act, but the FDA says it has never received the budget to approach that number. Last year's mass government layoffs spared inspectors themselves but cut support staff, forcing front-line investigators to book their own flights and arrange their own translators. Early 2026 numbers suggest the agency is on track to inspect a similar number of facilities this year.

The FDA has long acknowledged the congressionally mandated target of 19,200 annual inspections as unrealistic. In 2015, the agency told federal watchdogs the number was unworkable and conducted an internal analysis suggesting 4,700 inspections would be necessary to adequately safeguard imports. That figure is still nearly five times higher than what was actually conducted last year. Yet the FDA has never formally asked Congress to revise the target downward. When the Government Accountability Office urged the agency to revisit the number again last January, the FDA created a workgroup to redo the analysis—a process still underway.

The scope of the challenge is staggering. About 47,000 foreign manufacturers accounted for 90 percent of non-meat food shipments into the United States last year. Since 2023, the FDA has inspected 4.5 percent of them. When inspectors do visit, they find violations roughly a third of the time—toilet paper and human feces in Mexican growing fields, air conditioning units dripping onto crawfish in China. But only about 2 percent of violations are significant enough to trigger enforcement action. The FDA also uses an algorithm to screen imports at ports of entry and can block shipments without inspection if a shipper appears problematic, but these tools are only as effective as the underlying data they rely on.

Congress has not increased the FDA's food safety budget to keep pace with inflation, and the agency's budget request for the coming year asks for only an additional $9 million to expand foreign inspector capacity—a modest sum against the estimated $743 million annually needed to meet the existing mandate. The FDA has also proposed requiring foreign food firms to pay registration fees to import to the United States, which could generate an estimated $71 million. The agency is "actively working to expand staffing at foreign posts," according to an HHS spokesperson, but the trajectory suggests incremental change rather than systemic overhaul.

Public health experts emphasize that inspections are only one tool in a larger system. Food companies bear primary responsibility for day-to-day safety, and many invest heavily in their own protocols and audits. Taylor Farms says it spends $200 million annually on food safety measures, including water quality monitoring and worker hygiene checks. Economic incentives reinforce self-policing: sales of prepackaged lettuce dropped nearly 20 percent in July during the cyclosporiasis outbreak, a sharp financial penalty that motivates compliance. Yet experts also stress that inspections remain irreplaceable. "FDA inspections really are the first line of defense," said Meridith Seife, lead author of a Health and Human Services Inspector General report on FDA inspections. "If FDA isn't routinely going out to food facilities, it's just completely blind."

The question now is whether the current trajectory can be sustained or whether the system will continue to deteriorate. With only a fraction of foreign manufacturers ever visited, with staffing constraints limiting the frequency of repeat inspections, and with congressional mandates disconnected from available resources, the FDA operates in a state of perpetual shortfall. The cyclosporiasis outbreak—sickening consumers from food grown in a facility that hadn't been inspected in seven years—is not an anomaly but a symptom of a regulatory apparatus that has lost the capacity to see what is actually happening in the fields and processing plants that feed the nation.