Staffing Shortages and Federal Changes Put Residents at Risks of Foodborne Illnesses

Tuesday, September 9th, 2025 -- 9:01 AM

(Richelle Wilson, Wisconsin Public Radio) Staffing shortages and federal shakeups in the food safety system have led some experts to warn that the public could see more foodborne illnesses like the recent listeria outbreak linked to chicken fettuccine alfredo. 

According to Richelle Wilson with the Wisconsin Public Radio, Paula Soldner, chair of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that the political climate this year has exacerbated long-term staffing challenges.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, this month notified union leaders of the Food Safety and Inspection Service that it is planning to end contracts for thousands of employees.

This will have a “huge impact” for inspectors, who need to be able to raise concerns without fear of retaliation in order to do their job effectively, Soldner said. “People don’t want to come and work for the federal government, knowing the environment that we are working in right now,” said Soldner, who has worked as a food safety inspector in southern Wisconsin for more than 30 years and is set to retire later this month.

“In cases where they may find an unsafe product (or) improperly labeled product, the inspectors are getting very reluctant to raise their hand to contact their supervisors because there is no protection for that inspector to raise a problem up the chain of command,” she said.

The loss of contract protections could also mean that more inspectors will leave. Soldner said she knows of a district office that recently hired 10 inspectors. Within a week, five of them quit, and the remaining inspectors had to pick up the slack.

“Now they’re going to be (doing) double the work, so the workload measurement is now going to increase, so there is going to be less oversight” of food processing plants, Soldner said.

She said she has already heard of recent situations when inspectors raised a concern about food safety at a plant they were inspecting and were met with silence. Soldner also expressed concerns about the close ties of department administrators to the industry they are charged with regulating.

Justin Ransom, a former executive at Tyson Foods, was recently appointed to be administrator of the Food Safety and Inspection Service. “When I came in as an inspector in May of 1987, we regulated what the industry did.

Now, industry regulates what the inspectors do,” Soldner said.

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