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Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany Voted for a Budget That Locks In the Loss of Food Inspectors. Food Safety Complaints Had Just Jumped 40%.

The FDA has lost nearly 4,300 employees and USDA's meat inspection service about 900 since the start of 2025. On June 4, both Wisconsin Republicans voted for a bill cutting the agriculture and FDA budget another 1.4% — one that, in the Appropriations Committee's own words, reduces salaries and expenses 'to account for staffing reductions.'

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 29, 2026

Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany Voted for a Budget That Locks In the Loss of Food Inspectors. Food Safety Complaints Had Just Jumped 40%.

In fiscal 2025, consumer complaints to the federal government about meat, poultry and egg products jumped by nearly 40% — from 1,443 to 2,016 — according to the USDA's own Food Safety and Inspection Service.

On June 4, 2026, Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany voted for a spending bill that leaves the agencies responsible for catching that food with the staffing losses they have already taken — and writes those losses into the budget.

The vote

The bill was H.R. 8646, the agriculture and Food and Drug Administration spending bill for 2027. It passed the House 213 to 210 — Republicans 208 to 5, Democrats 4 to 205.

Van Orden voted yes. Tiffany voted yes. Only five House Republicans in the entire chamber voted no.

Be precise about what the bill does, because Republicans dispute the word "cut." By the Appropriations Committee's own account, the bill provides a total discretionary allocation of $26.27 billion — $380 million, or 1.4%, below what was enacted for 2026. It gives the FDA $7.1 billion, and the committee says it increases money for the Food Safety and Inspection Service to fund frontline meat and poultry inspectors.

Then there is this line, in the committee's own list of what the bill does:

"Reducing salaries and expenses where appropriate to account for staffing reductions and shrinking grant programs that housed canceled grants."

That is the part that matters. Congress is not restoring the people who were fired. It is adjusting the budget downward to match the fact that they're gone.

The people who do the inspecting are already gone

This is the part that makes a 1.4% cut land differently than it would have in 2024.

Since the beginning of 2025, according to the federal government's own workforce data:

The FDA has lost nearly 4,300 employees.
The Food Safety and Inspection Service — the branch that puts inspectors physically inside slaughterhouses and processing plants — has lost roughly 900 positions, out of a workforce that now stands at about 7,500.

Those losses trace back to the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting operation President Trump ordered at the start of his term. We've covered what the same push did elsewhere in the department: the USDA told more than 2,500 Washington-area employees to move across the country or find another job, and lost more than 20,000 workers along the way.

The FDA's own head of the food division, Jim Jones, quit over it on February 17, 2025. His resignation letter named the number: "The indiscriminate firing of 89 staff in the Human Foods Program is beyond short sighted." He wrote that continuing in the job would be "fruitless" given the administration's "disdain for the very people necessary to implement" its own agenda, and that the people fired "represent the future of the agency."

He was reacting in part to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had said in a November 2024 MSNBC interview, months before his confirmation, that FDA's nutrition staff should be cleared out entirely: "Their entire departments, like the nutrition department in the FDA … have to go." Jones answered Kennedy's charge that the agency is corrupt, writing that his "comments impugning the integrity of the food staff, asserting they are corrupt based on falsities is a disservice to everyone" — and noting that the food program is more than 99% funded by Congress, not by industry fees.

Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, called Jones's departure "a huge step backward for the FDA and the safety of our food."

The FDA also stopped checking the labs that test milk

On April 21, 2025, the FDA's Division of Dairy Safety suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade A raw milk and finished dairy products, according to an internal agency email obtained by Reuters. The reason the email gave was that the agency's Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory "is no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis." It was the same staffing problem.

Be precise about this one too, because it was widely misreported as the FDA halting milk testing. It wasn't. The suspended program is a check on laboratories, not a test of milk: the FDA spikes milk samples with microbes, animal drugs and chemical contaminants, sends them to the labs that test Grade A milk, and scores whether their answers match its own. Grade A milk kept being tested. What stopped was the federal government's annual check that the labs doing the testing are getting it right.

What each of them has been telling voters

Both men represent rural districts where agriculture is the economy.

Van Orden's 3rd District runs along the Mississippi and includes some of the state's densest dairy country. He is facing Rebecca Cooke again in November.

Tiffany, who represents the northern 7th District, is running for governor. His campaign is built on affordability — on August 27 he unveiled an eight-point affordability plan whose fourth point is returning the entire state surplus to taxpayers. He has also spent the summer attacking data center subsidies while collecting money from the industry's registered lobbyist.

Neither has explained why the answer to a 40% jump in food safety complaints is a budget written around the inspectors who are already gone.

The bill now goes to the Senate, which will decide whether the FDA and FSIS staffing and funding levels in it survive into a final agreement.

What the record shows

Consumer complaints about meat, poultry and egg products rose nearly 40% in fiscal 2025, to 2,016. The FDA has lost nearly 4,300 employees and the federal meat inspection service about 900 since the start of 2025. On June 4, 2026, Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany both voted for a spending bill that comes in $380 million below last year and, in the Appropriations Committee's own words, reduces salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" — joining 206 other Republicans, while five voted no. The FDA has also suspended the annual program that checks whether the laboratories testing Grade A milk are getting the right answers.