U.S. food safety relies on the piecemeal work of 16 federal agencies, four Democratic senators said in asking President Trump for White House leadership in writing a national strategy on food safety and assuring agencies follow it. The request was not as sweeping as past proposals for a single food-safety agency but it faces many obstacles.
The springboard for the senators’ letter to Trump was a Government Accountability Report describing the “highly complex” web of food safety regulations “stemming from at least 30 federal laws that are administered by 16 federal agencies,” supplemented by 3,000 state, local and tribal entities. “For more than four decades, we have reported on the fragmented federal food safety oversight system,” said GAO. It’s a system in which FDA has primary responsibility over frozen cheese pizza, USDA oversees meat pizzas “and multiple federal agencies play roles regulating the components of either type of pizza.”
Two years ago, President Obama proposed consolidation of USDA and FDA food-safety work into a new agency that would be part of the Health and Human Services Department. The proposal died quietly, doomed by legislative inertia and turf battles, as have other suggestions over the decades to re-organize federal agencies, to coordinate the work of food safety agencies or to centralize leadership, and responsibility, in the executive branch for assuring food safety.
“Over the years, many proposals have been made … but no action to date has been taken,” said Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Richard Durbin of Illinois, Dianne Feinstein of California and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut in a letter to Trump. “Today’s GAO report reinforces the urgent need to improve the food safety inspection system and opportunities to enact meaningful steps toward regulatory reform.”
In the letter, the four Democrats asked Trump to immediately establish a national strategy to overcome the shortcomings in oversight of food safety and write a government-wide performance plan. The GAO says leadership “should reside at the highest level of administration and needs to have authority to implement the national strategy and be accountable for its progress.”
The senators who requested the GAO report were sponsors of a bill in 2015 for an independent Food Safety Administration to take over the work scattered among federal agencies.
Federal health officials say roughly one in six Americans contract a foodborne illness each year, with 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. Most people recover without lasting effects but a small portion have long-lasting effects such as kidney failure, arthritis or nerve damage, says GAO.