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Perhaps because the council listed the single agency as the last option, food industry groups praised its science-based approach and its lack of enthusiasm for erecting “a monolithic super bureaucracy that would do little to reduce the risk of foodborne diseases.”57 To food safety advocates, however, the plan was nothing but “platitudes”—federal agencies protecting themselves—because it provided no timelines, deadlines, or budgets. In defending the plan, an FDA official said that he understood why people might view the agency’s insistence on science-based approaches to regulation a “stall,” as the FDA would always need more data on which to base decisions. Nevertheless, he said, the FDA intended to make the plan “real.”58

The council’s strategic plan, released a year later, in January 2001, analyzed the various options and unsurprisingly concluded that improvements in coordination and consolidation were necessary but not sufficient to improve oversight. Although a stand-alone agency could eliminate perceptions of bias or competing missions, it “might create new problems and inefficiencies in the oversight of dietary supplements and other food-related issues not included in the new agency.” Thus, the council recommended “efforts to strengthen agency coordination . . . and the development of comprehensive, unifying legislation, followed by the development of a corresponding organizational reform plan by allowing risk-based allocation of resources and utilization of science-based regulation, enforcement, and education” (emphasis added).56 The strong emphasis on a science-based regulatory approach—always requiring more studies and more reports—provided little ground for optimism that reforms would come soon.

As soon as President George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he issued a number of antiregulatory executive orders, including one delaying the USDA’s imposition of performance standards for Salmonella and Listeria in meat and poultry. The American Meat Institute used the delay to argue for a complete review of the rules, while consumer groups urged the newly appointed USDA Secretary, Ann Veneman, to move them forward. One month later, the USDA released the rules, reportedly because Secretary Veneman convinced the White House to grant an exception to the executive order. Industry groups were not pleased and complained that the rules were unfair because they singled out meat and poultry for testing when other foods were equally contaminated.59 Nevertheless, weaknesses in the system remained evident. In March, newspapers reported frequent violations of safety procedures in meat-producing plants in New York and New Jersey; they also headlined flagrant lapses in retail meat inspection throughout the Northeast. These reports only added to concerns about meat safety, then driven by the highly publicized epidemics of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease among cattle in Great Britain and Europe. Together, the problems amounted to what the New York Daily News characterized as a “Meat Mess” worthy of front-page attention, as shown in figure 10.

FIGURE 10. New York City’s Daily News of March 24, 2001, summed up the complicated local, national, and international politics of meat safety in two words: “Meat Mess.” (© 2001 New York Daily News L.P. Reprinted with permission.)

Adding to this mess, the administrator of USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service announced that testing for Salmonella in beef served in the federal school lunch program (the cause of the problems with Supreme Beef discussed in the previous chapter) was no longer necessary and schools could now serve irradiated beef instead. This suggestion elicited surprised comments from Senator Richard Durbin (Dem-IL), who viewed it as another attempt by corporations to circumvent safety regulations under an administration so friendly to industry that it had already reduced standards for the levels of arsenic permitted in drinking water: “The school lunch program is a very sacred budget in our program, and a lot of