The New Lede reported last week on a Farm Forward analysis of USDA sampling data that ought to end a long-running argument about how we measure progress on Salmonella in poultry. Between 2014 and 2025, three serotypes — Infantis, Enteritidis and Typhimurium — went from roughly 25 percent of the Salmonella found in the poultry industry to about 68 percent. Those are the three most commonly found to make people sick. Over the same period, the share of Salmonella-positive poultry resistant to at least one antibiotic important in human medicine rose from 48 percent to more than 73 percent.
USDA’s answer, as always, is that prevalence is down. Both things are true. The number of chicken samples testing positive fell by half between 2017 and 2021 and has held roughly steady since. We did not clean up chicken. We selected for the strains that hurt people, and we made them harder to treat. That is why the illness curve has not moved in twenty years while the prevalence curve has.
It is worth setting out where the fight over Salmonella as an adulterant has actually been, because the record is not what most people think it is.
What we asked for, and what happened
On January 19, 2020, we petitioned FSIS on behalf of Rick Schiller, Steven Romes, the Porter family, Food & Water Watch, the Consumer Federation of America and Consumer Reports. We asked the agency to declare 31 outbreak serotypes of Salmonella to be adulterants in meat and poultry under the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Poultry Products Inspection Act. We asked for it jointly or serotype by serotype, whichever the agency preferred.
This was not a novel request. FSIS declared E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant in ground beef in 1994 through exactly this mechanism, and a federal court upheld it. FSIS extended adulterant status to the six non-O157 STEC strains in 2012 after a petition from our firm. Both times the industry predicted ruin. Both times the outbreaks stopped instead. Ninety percent of my firm’s caseload used to be E. coli in hamburger. Today it is almost none. That is the best thing that has happened in food safety in my lifetime, and it happened because a pathogen was called what it is.
FSIS denied the petition without prejudice on May 31, 2022. The stated ground was that there was not sufficient data to support what the agency called the sweeping action we requested. But the letter also said FSIS was reevaluating its approach to Salmonella in poultry, was reconsidering whether Salmonella should be an adulterant in any poultry product, and would apply the same factors it used for the STEC strains. In other words: not now, because we are working on it.
What FSIS did do — and then stopped doing
It then did something remarkable, and almost nobody outside this world noticed. On May 1, 2024, FSIS issued a final determination that not-ready-to-eat breaded stuffed chicken products containing Salmonella at 1 colony forming unit per gram or higher are adulterated under the PPIA. First time ever for a class of raw poultry. The agency grounded it in the added-substance reasoning of United States v. Anderson Seafoods — the same case it had brushed aside in our denial eleven months earlier — and in the point our petition made, that Salmonella is not ordinarily found in the muscle tissue of healthy birds. And it applied the standard regardless of serotype, which is broader than anything we asked for.
That determination is still on the books. It took effect May 1, 2025. It is binding law today.
What happened next is the part that matters. FSIS delayed verification sampling from May 2025 to November 2025. Then, on December 2, 2025, it delayed sampling indefinitely, with no new date, saying available test methods have accuracy limitations and produce false positives at low levels. In the 2024 final determination, the agency had said a validated method existed. Consumer Reports raised the contradiction at the January 2026 public meeting and asked FSIS in June to release the validation data behind both positions. As far as I know, that request has not been answered.
Separately, the broader Salmonella Framework for Raw Poultry Products, proposed in August 2024, was withdrawn in April 2025 after more than 7,000 comments. A USDA spokesperson told The New Lede that the framework was never a rule and therefore had no impact. That is technically correct and quietly damning. Strip it down and the agency’s position is: we won’t act on your petition because we’re working on a framework, we killed the framework, the framework never mattered anyway, and we’ll have something in a couple of years.
Nothing enforceable has changed since January 19, 2020.
What is still available
Plenty, and not all of it requires a rulemaking.
Enforce what is already law. FSIS does not need a new rule to begin verification sampling on breaded stuffed chicken. It needs to publish its testing data and start. If the method is sound, sample. If it is not, say so with evidence.
Extend the standard the agency already adopted. The 1 CFU/g adulteration finding rests on legal reasoning that does not stop at breaded stuffed products. Chicken parts and comminuted poultry carry more Salmonella than carcasses do, by FSIS’s own sampling. Consumer Reports, one of our co-petitioners, has already asked the agency to apply the same standard to other poultry products. The agency drew a product-specific line based on consumer handling. That line deserves to be tested against eleven years of data showing the organism itself has changed.
Use the government’s checkbook. USDA buys enormous volumes of poultry for school lunch and food assistance. Purchase specifications are not rulemaking. No notice and comment, no litigation, no form-letter campaigns. AMS could require serotype screening in its next solicitation. Farm Forward documented that AMS has supplied poultry from plants with repeated Salmonella failures to the National School Lunch Program and the Emergency Food Assistance Program. Buying chicken for schoolchildren from plants that fail federal standards month after month is not a defensible use of public money, and it does not require anyone to first accept the adulterant argument.
Buyer specifications. Large retailers and restaurant chains already impose supplier requirements stricter than USDA’s. Farm Forward’s look at a single Costco supplier shows what a serotype-level audit turns up. Three big buyers adopting a serotype-based rejection spec would change plant behavior nationally without a word from Washington.
Close the evidence gap. The denial rested on insufficient data. Farm Forward has now shown the shift on the product side. CDC holds the illness side. Nobody has published the study that connects them — resistant Infantis in FSIS product sampling mapped against human hospitalization and treatment failure over the same years. That paper would make insufficient data unavailable as an answer.
And refile the petition. The 2022 denial was without prejudice and expressly invited a revised filing. Its stated premise — that FSIS was reevaluating through its own initiative — no longer exists, and the agency has said so itself. A new petition built on the agency’s own STEC factors, on a record that includes the resistance data, forces FSIS either to act or to explain in writing why an eleven-year shift toward the exact serotypes that sicken Americans still isn’t enough.
The part that never changes
Gail Hansen made the point in The New Lede that federal agencies have largely told consumers this is their problem to cook their way out of. Thirty-plus years in, I can tell you where that argument ends. It ends with Rick Schiller drafting a will on his phone in an emergency room. It ends with Rose Porter watching her ten-year-old daughter airlifted to a hospital in Costa Rica, convinced she had poisoned her own child.
Nobody at FSIS has ever sat in a room with them. That is still the shortest path to a decision, and it is still the one nobody takes.