FDA halted FERN's Proficiency Testing Program, cutting pathogen-screening quality checks for 170 labs, citing staff cuts

On April 17, 2025, the FDA suspended the Proficiency Testing Program run under its Food Emergency Response Network (FERN), citing staffing shortages following earlier rounds of cuts to the agency's Human Foods Program. The program had provided quality-control testing used by roughly 170 laboratories nationwide -- both FDA's own labs and state and local partners -- to verify that pathogen and contaminant screening methods were producing reliable results, including for Cyclospora in spinach and glyphosate residue in barley.

The suspension came nine days after the FDA halted a separate program improving bird-flu testing reliability, also citing staffing shortages from the same rounds of cuts. Losing the proficiency-testing check does not stop labs from screening food for contamination, but it removes the independent verification that catches a lab's false positives or false negatives -- the mechanism that lets regulators and the public trust an individual lab's pathogen findings.