A Single Food Agency: Trump Administration Proposes Merging FDA with FSIS

(Only days after release of the OMB’s proposed reorganization, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, posted an update about E. coli in romaine lettuce, which concluded: “Our food safety program at the FDA has never been stronger, and we seek to strengthen it further still…Our agency has a long history of focusing on public health protection through our food safety efforts. Food safety is part of a culture of public health that’s integral to our agency.”)

The OMB report says USDA is “well-poised” to house the new Federal Food Safety Agency. The agency is a “strong leader in food safety, having a thorough understanding of food safety risks and issues all along the farm to fork continuum.” The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) spends about $112 million annually on in-house food safety research, and ARS scientists work with both FSIS and FDA to help develop research priorities and food safety practices.

USDA also has established relationships between state departments of agriculture, local farms, and processing facilities, “and is thus keenly aware of food safety issues at all levels,” the report adds.

The proposed consolidation would merge approximately 5,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees and $1.3 billion from FDA with about 9,200 FTEs and $1 billion in resources in USDA. “In the long term, the administration expects this proposal would result in improvements in food safety outcomes, policy and program consistency, and more efficient use of taxpayer resources,” the report says.

History of Reform Proposals

In 2007, GAO added federal oversight of food safety to its list of government areas “at high risk for fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or most in need of transformation.” In addition to GAO’s recommendations, consolidation proposals have been raised over the years through reports by the National Academy of Sciences and other organizations.

These groups “have recommended that the core federal food safety responsibilities should reside in a single entity or agency, with a unified administrative structure, clear mandate, a dedicated budget, and full responsibility for the oversight of the entire U.S. food supply,” the OMB report says.

Not mentioned in the OMB report is the Obama administration’s proposal in 2015 to remove food safety-related components from both FDA and FSIS and consolidate them into a single new agency that would remain within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which also houses FDA, CDC, and other public health agencies. (USDA is an independent agency and not part of HHS.) At that time, the proposed agency would have had primary responsibility for food safety inspections, enforcement, applied research, and outbreak response and mitigation.

Nor does the OMB report mention congressional legislation that would have created a single food safety agency. These, like other similar proposals, have gone nowhere. While the single agency concept makes theoretical sense, there has been a notable reluctance on the part of federal officials and others to do much about it.

There are at least three reasons for this, says Timothy D. Lytton, PhD, a law professor at Georgia State University. First, he says, there are many Congressional committees that currently oversee federal agencies that regulate food safety, and they are unlikely to support any reorganization that would reduce their power. Second, industry associations are unlikely to support reorganization because “consolidation threatens to reduce their access and influence over agency decisions.” Third, meaningful consolidation “would require a complete overhaul of federal food safety laws and regulations, a task of extraordinary legal and political complexity,” Dr. Lytton said in a recent analysis.

Perhaps recognizing such challenges, the most recent GAO recommendations focus on developing a national strategy for food safety oversight, which in turn, could lead to a consensus on how to proceed.