Growers and Grocers

Last week the Government Accountability Office released their 2007 High Risk Update, which focuses on federal programs that are “high risk due to their greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” The 2007 update includes three new high risk areas: transportation financing and capacity, protection of technologies critical to U.S. national security, and food safety.

The food safety section of the report starts with this:

This nation enjoys a plentiful and varied food supply that is generally considered to be safe. However, the patchwork nature of the federal oversight of food safety calls into question whether the government can plan more strategically to inspect food production processes, identify and react more quickly to any outbreaks of contaminated food, and focus on achieving results to promote the safety and integrity of the nation’s food supply. This challenge is even more urgent since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, heightened awareness of agriculture’s vulnerabilities to terrorism, such as the deliberate contamination of food or the introduction of disease to livestock, poultry, and crops. Over several years, we have reported on issues that suggest that food safety could be designated as a high-risk area because of the need for transforming the federal oversight framework to reduce risks to public health as well as the economy.

Here are a few more excerpts from the full report (PDF):

In numerous previous reports, we have described the fragmented federal food safety system in which 15 agencies collectively administer at least 30 laws related to food safety. The two primary agencies are the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which is responsible for the safety of meat, poultry, and processed egg products and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for virtually all other foods.

[…]

The food safety system is further complicated by the subtle differences in food products that dictate which agency regulates a product as well as the frequency with which inspections occur. For example, how a packaged ham-and-cheese sandwich is regulated depends on how the sandwich is presented. USDA inspects manufacturers of packaged open-face meat or poultry sandwiches (e.g., those with one slice of bread), but FDA inspects manufacturers of packaged closed-face meat or poultry sandwiches (e.g., those with two slices of bread). Although there are no differences in the risks posed by these products, USDA inspects wholesale manufacturers of open-face sandwiches sold in interstate commerce daily, while FDA inspects closed-face sandwiches an average of once every 5 years.

[…]

We reported that in fiscal year 2003, four agencies—USDA, FDA, EPA, and the National Marine Fisheries Service—spent $1.7 billion on food safety-related activities. (footnote 28) USDA and FDA together were responsible for nearly 90 percent of federal expenditures for food safety. However, these expenditures were not based on the volume of foods regulated by the agencies or consumed by the public. The majority of federal expenditures for food safety inspection were directed toward USDA’s programs for ensuring the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products; however, USDA is responsible for regulating about 20 percent of the food supply. In contrast, FDA, which is responsible for regulating about 80 percent of the food supply, accounted for only about 24 percent of expenditures.

[…]

While many of the recommendations we made have been acted upon, a fundamental re-examination of the federal food safety system is warranted. Taken as a whole, our work indicates that Congress and the executive branch can and should create the environment needed to look across the activities of individual programs within specific agencies and toward the goals that the federal government is trying to achieve. To that end, we have recommended, among other things, that Congress enact comprehensive, uniform, and risk-based food safety legislation and commission the National Academy of Sciences or a blue ribbon panel to conduct a detailed analysis of alternative organizational food safety structures. (footnote 30) We have also recommended that the executive branch reconvene the President’s Council on Food Safety to facilitate interagency coordination on food safety regulation and programs.

It’s clear that the government’s food safety system is a mess: sometimes redundant, sometimes lacking, sometimes overbearing, and often in the pocket of those it is supposed to be regulating. So perhaps a unified agency that is solely devoted to food safety is a necessary step to take. If so, the errors made in creating another massive bureaucracy from existing government agencies — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — must not be repeated. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein recounted the negligence of Congress and the President in the creation of DHS:

The idea of creating such a department was a solid one; the magnitude and form of such a department was more debatable. But it was never debated. After vehemently resisting the idea of a department for almost nine months, the president turned around virtually overnight and embraced it, unveiling a plan much more sweeping than the original, and which had been hatched in secrecy by several key administration aides working in the situation room to ensure confidentiality. The normal debate and deliberative process that would have questioned the sweep of the reorganization plan and its breakneck pace was absent. Absent, too, was the notion of starting with a new Department of Border Security and moving in increments to something grander.

When the Department of Homeland Security bill came to Congress, it ended up facing one and only one serious area of controversy and deliberation: the question of sweeping civil service changes to eliminate many of the regular protections for the 70,000 DHS employees. That issue became a political tool–a major campaign point in the 2002 elections–even as the larger and important questions of what kind of department, and how to fulfill all the real and serious government functions, was ignored.

Food safety is hardly the political football the national security was in 2002, but it’s easy to envision an even more dysfunctional food safety apparatus being created by the current anti-regulatory executive branch.