The Food and Drug Administration is drawing up plans that would end most of its routine food safety inspections work, multiple federal health officials tell CBS News, and effectively outsource this oversight to state and local authorities.
The plans have not been finalized and might need congressional action to fully fund, said the officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
"The claim that the FDA is suspending routine food safety inspections is false. FDA is actively working to ensure continuity of operations during the reorganization period and remains committed to ensuring critical programs and inspections continue," an FDA spokesperson said in a statement.
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.
"There's so much work to go around. And us duplicating their work just doesn't make sense," one former FDA official, who worked on the plans before leaving the agency and spoke on the condition of anonymity, told CBS News.
