It’s just one example of the Trump administration’s larger embrace of AI that has implications for the country’s food system. Trump signed an executive order to boost AI in January, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been using his AI program, Grok, to analyze federal data. Last week’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission report included a recommendation to use AI to analyze nutrition data “for early detection of harmful exposures and childhood chronic disease trends.”

But the news that the FDA will expand its use of AI within its food-safety procedures comes at a moment of heightened concerns about the agency’s oversight of the food supply. In February, the FDA failed to share the findings of its investigation into an E.coli outbreak that sickened nearly 90 people last fall with the public, according to the Washington Post.

Makary has maintained that no “scientists” have been cut amid the agency’s downsizing, and criticized the Post for using a “misleading headline,” but other reporting has found individuals working on food safety have been fired (and sometimes reinstated). Makary also told the Senate last week that the FDA reduced its communications staff from 380 to 160 positions. “That covers a lot of the communication work,” he said.

At the USDA, which oversees meat and poultry processing, the agency threw out a new rule experts said would have changed the game for reducing salmonella in chicken and eliminated two food-safety advisory committees. However, just today, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a $14.5 million increase in funding for states’ oversight of meat and poultry inspections.

Jaydee Hanson, policy director at the food safety watchdog organization the Center for Food Safety, told Civil Eats he’s not surprised the FDA wants to use AI and that he could see the technology being especially useful for tasks like sequencing pathogens. For example, “faster sequencing of salmonella to learn which mutations promote more lethal strains would be helpful,” he said.

But while Makary emphasized in his testimony that “we also have a human being revising the information” and the FDA spokesperson said “Commissioner Makary has emphasized AI is a tool to support—not replace—human expertise,” Hanson and others still expressed concerns about staffing and how AI would fit into an agency undergoing steep cuts.

“As long as AI is used as a tool, it has uses,” Hanson said. “It would be unwise for FDA to try to use it as an excuse to lay off more food inspectors. FDA is woefully understaffed. AI won’t fix that problem.” (Link to this story.)