DOGE is coming after our food supply
Lots of the food on your grocery shelves is imported. It has to be inspected, both for safety and to prevent the importation of agricultural pests that could destroy domestically grown crops. Fire the inspectors and you put everyone’s food future at risk.
““It’s causing problems left and right,” says one current USDA worker, who like other federal employees in this story asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It’s basically a skeleton crew working now,” says another current USDA staffer, who noted that both they and most of their colleagues held advanced degrees and had many years of training to protect US food and agriculture supply chains from invasive pests. “It’s not something that is easily replaced by artificial intelligence.”
“These aren’t your average people,” says Mike Lahar, the regulatory affairs manager at US customs broker behemoth Deringer. “These were highly trained individuals—inspectors, entomologists, taxonomists.”
“Lahar and other supply chain experts warn that the losses could cause food to go rotten while waiting in ports and could lead to even higher grocery prices, in addition to increasing the chances of potentially devastating invasive species getting into the country. These dangers are especially acute at a moment when US grocery supply chains are already reeling from other business disruptions such as bird flu and President Trump’s new tariffs.
“If we're inspecting less food, the first basic thing that happens is some amount of that food we don't inspect is likely to go bad. We're going to end up losing resources,” says supply chain industry veteran and software CEO Joe Hudicka.”
This is a national security issue. These folks don’t carry guns and bombs, but by shutting down food inspections, they’re gonna kill people.
https://www.wired.com/story/usda-food-supply-chains/?utm_content=buffera537c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bluesky&utm_campaign=aud-dev
Comments
Post a Comment