President Barack Obama is seeking broad reorganization authority in the fiscal 2016 budget to consolidate USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and the food safety components of the Food and Drug Administration into a single new agency within the Department of Health and Human Services.
FSIS already coordinates its policies with other USDA agencies and other federal agencies, including the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as foreign governments and international organizations. The White House sees its proposed single food safety agency as building on this coordination and ensuring an integrated farm-to-table approach to food safety.
The new agency would be charged with pursuing a modern, science-based food safety regulatory regime drawing on best practices of both agencies, with strong enforcement and recall mechanism, expertise in risk assessment, and enforcement and research efforts across all food types based on scientifically supportable assessments of threats to public health, according to a summary of the budget proposal documents.
The Safe Food Act of 2015, proposed by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) last week would create an independent food safety agency, rather than house it within HHS, as the White House is proposing.
“HHS is a massive organization. A new food safety agency would be lost among the other priorities of the department, and would likely not receive the recognition or resources necessary for it to be,” said Chris Waldrop, director of the Food Policy Institute at Consumer Federation of America, in a statement issued yesterday.
CFA supports the concept of an independent single food safety agency outside HHS, noting that FDA is currently engaged in a multi-year effort to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act. “Efforts to merge the food safety programs at FDA and FSIS would seriously undermine FDA’s implementation activities and hamper efforts to prevent consumers from becoming sick from contaminated food,” Waldrop said.