Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [83]
The congressional watchdog agency, the General Accounting Office (GAO), has urged creation of a single food agency for years, despite the evident political barriers. In 1992, for example, the GAO told Congress that in a food safety system as entrenched as this one, “reaching agreement on such a major structural change would be difficult, at best.”44 Nevertheless, it continued to press Congress on this point. In 1993, it said, “In our view, creating a single food safety agency is the most effective way for the federal government to resolve long-standing problems, deal with emerging food safety issues, and ensure the safety of our country’s food supply.”45 In 1999, the GAO again said:
During the past 25 years, we . . . made numerous recommendations for change. While many of these recommendations have been acted upon, improvement efforts have fallen short, largely because the separate agencies continue to operate under the different regulatory approaches implicit in their basic authorities. Consequently, it is unlikely that fundamental, lasting improvements in food safety will occur until systematic legislative and structural changes are made to the entire food safety system.46
Despite such urgings from impartial investigators, Congress has failed to follow this advice. Government agencies, rather than taking whatever steps they can to unify the system, tend to protect their own resources. In 1993, for example, FDA commissioner Dr. David Kessler agreed on the need for a comprehensive food safety policy but insisted that his agency take the lead in federal safety efforts and that any new initiatives should be designed to strengthen the FDA’s role in this area.47
As a result of political pressures, federal leadership on food safety appears unfocused. In 1997, President Clinton announced a budget of $43 million for early detection and prevention of foodborne microbial outbreaks; of that amount, more than half would go to the FDA for seafood inspection. Instead of a single agency, he created the Food Safety Initiative—a joint effort led by the chief administrators of USDA, DHHS (the FDA’s parent agency), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He asked these officials to work with industry and consumer groups to recommend improvements in food safety research, inspection, and education.48 As is customary in such situations, the group issued a report—this one designed to improve the separate programs of each agency. Its one concession to joint efforts: a proposal for a plan to “make the best use of each agency’s limited resources, with no mention of a single food agency.”49
Later that year, Senator Richard Durbin (Dem-IL) introduced legislation to replace the current system with an independent food safety and inspection agency, but his bill did not get very far. President Clinton asked Congress for a $101 million increase in spending for the Food Safety Initiative to bring the total federal expenditure for this purpose to $817 million. This, he said, would “take the agencies that deal with food inspection from the 19th century to the 21st century.”50 Relatively small as these amounts might be, Congress did not want to grant them. Agriculture committee members said that until the day federal agencies could define precisely how much it would cost to reduce foodborne illness, “they won’t get any more money. . . . Some of the Food and Drug Administration’s duties [should] be delegated to states and local governments.”51 GAO investigators continued to press two points: (1) the USDA wasted most of its food safety budget on archaic inspections of slaughtered carcasses, and (2) the Food Safety Initiative failed to address fundamental weaknesses in coordination. Such arguments proved irrelevant when Congress provided only limited funding that year.52
In 1998, the National Research Council (NRC) issued Ensuring Safe Food, a report commissioned by Congress at a reported cost of $420,000. The NRC committee must have been uneasy about how its