In the slaughterhouses where pigs are reduced to their constituent parts, the disassembly lines carry about 1,100 pigs per hour — a new carcass every three seconds. For decades, the federal government has sought to prevent food-borne illnesses by stationing inspectors along the slaughter lines to eyeball the passing pigs for signs of disease and decay.

The Trump administration plans to overhaul this system, slashing the number of inspectors who work the lines and shifting some responsibility for food safety to the slaughterhouses.

The shift toward self-regulation of slaughterhouses is part of a broader trend . The Trump administration also has proposed letting oil companies assume greater responsibility for the safety of offshore drilling platforms, and it is considering letting employees of nuclear power plants conduct some safety inspections in the place of federal regulators.

The system of slaughterhouse regulation is out of date. The industry has succeeded over time in sharply reducing the kinds of problems visible from the slaughterhouse floor — the government says its health inspectors increasingly are policing aesthetic issues — but the incidence of some illnesses caused by pork consumption has stopped falling.