Ask any small business owner what keeps them up at night, and somewhere on that list is a permit, a form, or an inspector nobody can quite make sense of. That frustration is real. The reason behind much of that regulation has become murky, covered up by decades of carve-outs for special interests or influence by politicians without any expertise in the original problem. But that’s only half the story.
A hundred and twenty years ago, there was no FDA, no meat inspection requirement, and no legal standard for what could be sold to American families as food. Manufacturers added borax, formaldehyde, and sawdust to products without disclosure, because nothing stopped them.
Meatpacking plants in Chicago ground up diseased and rotten meat alongside rat droppings and sold it under a label that told consumers nothing true about what was inside. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle exposed those conditions to the public, and the outcry it produced pushed Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act within the same year. Those laws didn’t appear because government wanted more power. They appeared because companies, left unregulated, chose profit over the people buying their products.
That history tells a valuable lesson. Regulation is important when it answers a real and demonstrated risk to health or safety. It loses that legitimacy the moment it becomes a permanent bureaucratic reflex, applied without regard for whether it still does any good.
The Nuclear Power Example
Nuclear power shows what happens when regulation crosses that line. Between 1954 and 1978, the United States authorized the construction of 133 reactors. Since 1978, only two additional facilities have entered commercial operation, and those two took more than fourteen years and billions of dollars in avoidable cost overruns to complete. The culprit was not a lack of demand or a shortage of engineering talent. It was in large part due to a licensing process at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that grew more complex without becoming demonstrably safer.
France offers the counter-example. Working under a more streamlined and predictable regulatory framework, French engineers built fifty-five of the country’s fifty-seven reactors in just fifteen years, using standardized designs and consistent safety procedures. France’s nuclear safety record over that period stands up against anyone’s. The lesson isn’t that safety rules don’t matter. It’s that rules built around clear, stable, outcome-focused standards can protect the public without freezing an entire industry in place for half a century.
Now consider what happens when the pendulum swings the other way, and oversight gets stripped out with no plan for what fills the gap, and little regard for why the oversight existed in the first place.
DOGE
Shortly after Donald Trump took office in eary 2025, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts to the USDA and FDA workforce removed thousands of food safety inspectors, lab technicians, and veterinarians, many with fifteen or more years of specialized experience that can’t be rebuilt on short notice.
Today, the FDA remains understaffed by roughly twenty percent across the board. Milk quality testing was suspended entirely for a period. A laboratory in Puerto Rico closed as part of a plan to cut the FDA’s testing labs from thirteen down to six. Around the same time, a listeria outbreak tied to prepared chicken Alfredo sold at major grocery chains killed three people and hospitalized dozens more, and food safety experts pointed directly to reduced inspection and testing capacity as a factor slowing the response.
Separately, cuts of nearly a quarter of the staff at the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service left the agency thinner just as a New World screwworm outbreak resurfaced in Texas, a parasite capable of doing over a billion dollars in damage to the state’s cattle industry alone.
None of that makes a case for regulation as an end in itself. It makes a case for holding deregulation to the same standard as regulation: a tool that has to be justified by results, not applied on faith. Cutting agencies to score a political win produces the same failure mode as expanding them to score one. Either way, the question that actually matters, whether the cut or the rule does what it claims, tends to get asked only after the fact if at all.
The standard that should apply isn’t complicated, even if applying it consistently is hard. Regulation belongs where the risk to public health or safety is real, provable, and unlikely to be caught by letting the market decide to do it on its own. The history of American food safety, the same history that produced the FDA in the first place, is the clearest evidence of that.
Regulation has no business existing purely to say something is regulated. Meeting that standard means eliminating rules that survive on inertia alone, protecting the ones with a meat inspector’s job to justify them, and never mistaking a smaller government workforce for a safer one. Getting that balance right will do more for American families and American businesses than any argument over which direction the pendulum should swing next.
Robert "Bob" Caldwell is a retired journeyman electrician and small business owner.
SOURCES
- USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, “Our History” (fsis.usda.gov)
- The National Interest, “Streamlining Nuclear Licensing: Faster Approvals Without Sacrificing Safety”
- Clean Air Task Force, “Actions to Address Executive Order 14300: Reforming the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”
- FoodNavigator-USA, “FDA and USDA staff cuts under Trump raise food safety risks”
- Marketplace, “How have DOGE cuts impacted food safety?”
- Moneywise, “DOGE cut thousands of the USDA’s animal health workforce before screwworm resurfaced in Texas”