USDA cut back on listeria testing nationwide, ahead of deadly Boar's Head outbreak

In the year leading up to a deadly listeria outbreak now traced back to recalled Boar's Head deli meats, U.S. Department of Agriculture records show that Biden administration officials quietly made significant cuts to planned testing for germs across America's food supply. 

The department says the cuts did not translate to significantly fewer tests at the now-shuttered Boar's Head plant in Jarratt, Virginia, that's been blamed for the outbreak. 

Other Boar's Head plants are also now under law enforcement investigation, CBS News reported Thursday, and federal food safety officials have pledged a "top-to-bottom review" of what went wrong leading up to the outbreak linked to at least 59 hospitalizations and 10 deaths.

The Biden administration has not provided an explanation for the decision to make the changes. And questions are now being raised about why the Boar's Head plant's years of violations didn't spur regulators to reverse course, do more testing and step up federal scrutiny.

"The threat of the agency coming in and taking samples and finding a positive and shutting everything down keeps them honest and sets the standard," said Thomas Gremillion, head of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America.

The Consumer Federation of America helms a coalition of nonprofit groups that advocates for food safety and meets monthly with Biden administration officials on these issues, including in recent weeks following the Boar's Head outbreak.

The federal Food Safety and Inspection Service has limited resources from Congress relative to the scale of testing done by the private sectors. The agency has also faced "continuing difficulty" with recruitment and retention for its food safety inspectors, as it competes with the private sector for personnel.

Federal oversight is one important way to push producers — and the retailers they serve — to test more aggressively between inspections, Gremillion said.

"You want to test in a way so that, when the agency comes in and tests, that they're going to get the same results, a negative," he said.

Cutting random sampling by 50%

After years of running more than 200,000 tests annually, planning documents in 2023 show the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service made changes that amounted to at least 54,000 fewer lab tests for the coming fiscal year.

Those cuts spanned a wide range of products overseen by the inspection service, which is tasked with ensuring food safety at slaughterhouses, processing facilities and importers nationwide. The list of changes included fewer tests of poultry for Campylobacter bacteria to ending testing of pork products for "forever chemicals."

For ready-to-eat foods, the category that includes deli meats, inspectors would run 7,392 fewer tests. A large share of that decrease came from a decision to cut random sampling by 50% for the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes and salmonella, common culprits of food poisoning outbreaks. 

At the time, the agency said it would still maintain product sampling levels at "higher risk establishments" during the fiscal year.

A spokesperson acknowledged in an email that the agency reduced random product sampling in the last year, but said "routine, risk-based sampling remained the same. This had no bearing on testing done at the Boar's Head facility in Jarratt."

At the Boar's Head plant in Jarratt, Virginia, FSIS records show testing, at a cadence of around once per month, remained mostly unchanged. Instead, a larger share of recent tests look to have been simply coded instead as risk-based tests instead of random tests.

"A real head-scratcher"

Deli meats like liverwurst have long been known to pose a higher risk of food poisoning. Boar's Head announced earlier this month it had decided to discontinue selling the liver sausages, after its investigation blamed the root cause of the outbreak on a "specific production process" used at Jarratt for liverwurst.

"It's a high-risk food for a reason. There is the raw side and the ready-to-eat side. And there's more risk of cross-contamination than with, you know, a granola bar factory. But in a way, that means there should be greater scrutiny of the liverwurst, if they're the ones causing all the listeria," said Gremillion.

Federal inspectors also had the option to have done more "intensified" testing at the plant, he said, though an analysis of federal records CBS News shared with Gremillion suggest that was not done at the Boar's Head facility in Jarratt. 

"If not this plant with the black mold and pig's blood, then who is getting the extra sampling? That is just a real head-scratcher," he said.

CBS News first reported in August that inspectors had flagged dozens of violations at the plant leading up to the outbreak. Those "noncompliance" records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, showed inspectors had written up the plant multiple times over concerns about problems including like live insects and mold that were found throughout the facility.

Records later released by the agency from earlier years suggest frontline inspectors had concerns about the plant dating back to at least 2022, when they conducted a food safety assessment of the facility.

Short of deciding to suspend inspection at the facility, making it illegal for the plant to continue operating, inspectors can seek these kinds of ramped-up inspections over an "increased public health risk."

"They've got this one big punishment of pulling the inspector. And then otherwise, they just wag their fingers a lot. And with a food safety assessment, that's, we've been wagging our fingers, now we're going to have a bunch of people come down and wag our fingers even harder at you," Gremillion said.

Rethinking the regulatory structure

Outside of the assessment, routine oversight of the Boar's Head plant — carried out largely by state inspectors in Virginia, through a decades-old outsourcing arrangement drawn up for rural facilities — also appears to have gone on as normal.

A spokesperson for Virginia's Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services said its inspectors had carried out 2,127 "tasks" assigned to them by the USDA's public health system in the year leading up to the plant's closure.

A Food Safety and Inspection Service spokesperson confirmed that, over the past decade, inspectors have "completed a relatively consistent number of routine inspection tasks assigned" to the plant each year.

A Boar's Head spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In previous statements, the company has defended its response to violations raised by inspectors at its Jarratt plant, saying they always promptly addressed concerns after they were flagged.

Gremillion said it was "one of the most disturbing things about this outbreak," that Virginia inspectors were there for the USDA inside the plant daily, documenting the growing issues.

"It makes you wonder if the whole regulatory structure needs some rethinking. There's a reluctance to close down a plant, and there's not enough that FSIS can do shy of that," he said.