FDA Set a Target of 19,200 Foreign Food Inspections a Year. It Averages 917.

The FDA polices nearly 80% of the U.S. food supply — produce, dairy, seafood, packaged goods, everything except meat, poultry, and a handful of egg and catfish products USDA covers instead.▸ The law that's supposed to make that policing systematic, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), set hard numeric targets in 2011: inspect every domestic high-risk facility at least once every three years, every foreign facility that supplies the U.S. at a combined rate of 19,200 a year. Fifteen years later, the Government Accountability Office has the receipts on how that's gone, and the USDA's Economic Research Service has the receipts on what it costs when it doesn't go well.

FSMA's foreign-inspection number was never a guess about FDA's capacity — it was a formula written into law, phased up to 19,200 facilities a year by 2016 and left there since.▸ GAO's analysis of FDA's own data found the agency has never come close. From fiscal year 2018 through 2023 — the most recent year with complete data — FDA averaged 917 foreign inspections a year, about 5% of target. Its best year in that stretch, FY2019, reached 1,727 facilities, 9% of target. Its worst, FY2021, produced 64 completed foreign inspections in the entire fiscal year.

FDA officials told GAO investigators, on the record, that 19,200 is "not a realistic target given FDA's existing workforce and resources."▸ That's a defensible position — roughly 125,000 foreign facilities are subject to FDA inspection, each visit costs about $38,700 and takes two to five days to arrange and conduct, and a target set once in 2011 was never revisited against the money or people actually appropriated to hit it. What isn't defensible, per GAO, is what FDA did next: nothing. The agency has not proposed an alternative target, and has not told Congress the one on the books is unachievable. The number simply sits in statute, missed by 95% on average, year after year, uncorrected.

Domestic inspections tell a version of the same story, just with a starting point closer to compliance.▸ FDA nearly hit its FSMA targets for both high-risk and non-high-risk domestic facilities in fiscal years 2018 and 2019. Then the 35-day government shutdown spanning late 2018 into 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the share of high-risk domestic facilities FDA failed to even attempt to inspect by their legally required date rose fast — and stayed up.

Because FDA carries forward every facility it misses, GAO reports the backlog compounded in every fiscal year through 2023, the most recent year with complete data — it just doesn't publish an exact percentage past FY2021.▸ The investigator corps supposed to work that backlog down isn't growing to meet it: FDA had 432 investigators on board in July 2024, 90% of its authorized staffing level for both domestic and foreign work combined, according to agency officials cited by GAO. Nearly a quarter of them were already eligible to retire, more become eligible within a year, and FDA itself estimates it takes about two years to fully train a replacement.

None of this is abstract.▸ The USDA Economic Research Service's Cost Estimates of Foodborne Illnesses data product, last updated in June 2026, puts the annual U.S. economic burden of foodborne illness at $74.7 billion in 2023 dollars — medical treatment, lost work, and the value of avoided deaths, combined. Illness from the 31 individually tracked pathogens accounts for $44.7 billion of that; the remaining $29.9 billion comes from foodborne gastroenteritis cases with no pathogen identified. Nontyphoidal Salmonella alone runs $17 billion a year — the single costliest pathogen ERS tracks. That $74.7 billion is a 2026 price tag computed on top of an incidence count — how many Americans actually get sick — that the CDC last fully updated in 2011; the government re-priced the damage before it re-measured it.

FDA isn't the only agency between that $74.7 billion and the country's dinner table — CDC counts the sick, USDA covers meat and poultry, states run about a third of routine domestic inspections under contract.▸ But FDA is the agency Congress gave a specific, numeric inspection mandate to in 2011, and the one whose own data now shows it meeting that mandate on foreign soil about one time in twenty.

The $74.7 billion figure and the GAO inspection findings come from two independent organizations measuring different things — one the economic cost of illness, the other the government's inspection performance — and are not additive or derived from each other; they are presented together because they describe the same system from its two ends.