The government lacks an over-arching performance plan for food safety nor do USDA and FDA engage in broad-based collaboration of their overlapping food safety programs, said the Government Accountability Office. In a report, it says the Food Safety Working Group (FSWG), created in March 2009 to coordinate work by food regulators, “is no longer meeting.”
Experts on food safety suggested that a centralized collaborative mechanism on food safety – like the FSWG – could provide sustained leadership across food safety agencies over time if it were formalized in statute. Without such formalization, centralized collaborative mechanisms for food safety may continue to be short-lived,” said GAO. It recommended FDA and USDA “build upon their efforts…to address cross-cutting food safety efforts” and that Congress should consider a direction to the White House to develop a government-wide performance plan for food safety” and “formalizing the FSWG through statute to help ensure sustained leadership across food safety agencies over time.