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the 1906 law. The inspectors’ motivation is best expressed by the mission statement given on the union’s Web site: “The-Inspector.com has been established in support of the thousands of dedicated Food & Consumer Safety Inspectors, working on the front lines of the meat, poultry & egg products industries, usually under miserable conditions, safeguarding the American food supply.” At the time (it has since been sold), the Community Nutrition Institute published Nutrition Week, a newsletter that tracked current events in food and nutrition. Both were run by Rodney Leonard, long an outspoken advocate of improved food safety. Mr. Leonard’s otherwise inexplicable role as a plaintiff in this anti-HACCP lawsuit reflected his view that the meat industry could not be trusted to conduct its own inspections or testing and that this responsibility properly belonged to government. A U.S. appeals court agreed. It chided the USDA for attempting to reinterpret the Meat Inspection Act.

The government does not deny that in the ninety or so years since passage of the [1906 Act] . . . “inspection” has been taken to mean an organoleptic examination of the carcass, an inspection, that is, using the senses. Now the government has discovered another meaning. A “federal employee has performed an inspection of a carcass,” the government tells us, “when he has watched a plant employee conduct the kind of examination, organoleptic or otherwise, that is necessary to determine whether the carcass is fit for human consumption.” . . . In other words, the government believes that federal employees fulfill their statutory duty to inspect by watching others perform the task. One might as well say that umpires are pitchers because they carefully watch others throw baseballs.61

The decision against USDA left the future of HACCP uncertain. Nutrition Week called it “a great victory for consumers. . . . USDA is no longer allowed to abdicate its responsibility for food safety,” and quoted a representative of the inspectors’ union: “The court found what we have maintained for years—allowing industry to inspect itself is a violation of the law.”62 USDA responded by modifying the pilot system so that inspectors would continue to monitor carcasses. In January 2001, a federal court permitted the USDA to implement the proposed revisions, but the plaintiffs said they would appeal that decision. They argued that USDA’s changes were insufficient and that the true purpose of the new system was to deregulate the meat industry.63

While the court case was in progress, Congress asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to evaluate the effectiveness of the model inspection system. After a nine-month investigation that involved close examination of records from II model inspection projects in chicken plants, interviews with numerous participants, a survey of more than 200 inspectors, and visits to similar projects in Canada and Australia, the GAO produced a lengthy report of its findings in December 2001. Its conclusion: “a risk-based inspection system—such as the one that USDA is pilot-testing at chicken plants and is starting at hog plants—has merit in concept and is consistent with the existing risk-based framework for HACCP.” GAO investigators, however, thought that the design of the projects was so flawed that it was impossible to determine whether the new system performed as well as the one it was supposed to replace. In particular, they noted that the results of Salmonella testing were worse at nearly half the plants using the modified inspection system. Nevertheless, they said,

This report reiterates our previous recommendation for legislative revisions aimed at reducing the potential for further legal challenges by providing USDA with a clear authority to modify its inspection system. . . . We continue to believe that . . . Congress should consider revising the Meat and Poultry Acts . . . to provide FSIS with the flexibility and discretion to target its inspection resources for the most serious food safety risks. Such revisions would eliminate the requirements that