The Trump administration delivered a long-sought breakthrough in food safety yesterday with an agreement between the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture to work more closely together in combating contaminations.
The deal, a formal pact, calls for two of the nation’s three top food safety watchdogs to stop working in silos. FDA and USDA said the first areas of collaboration under their deepened partnership would be produce safety, a particular concern of restaurants, and the use of biotechnology as a safeguard.
The agreement was signed by FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue, both of whom were appointed by President Trump.
“Over the last several months, the secretary and I have worked closely and identified several areas where we can strengthen our collaboration to make our processes more efficient, predictable and potentially lower-cost to industry, while also strengthening our efforts to ensure food safety,” Gottlieb said in a statement.
Restaurants and other businesses reliant on federal food safety monitoring have lamented the decentralization of oversight. USDA is responsible for the safety of meat, poultry, catfish and some egg products. The FDA regulates produce, dairy, seafood and packaged foods.
The third watchdog is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which monitors imported goods.
Critics of the setup cite a pepperoni pizza as an illustration of the situation’s unnecessary complexity. The safety of the cheese and tomato sauce used on the pie is the responsibility of the FDA, while the pepperoni is part of USDA’s domain. If imported oregano is part of the recipe, that component is safeguarded by ICE.
The Obama administration had called for consolidating the trio's food oversight functions into a single food safety agency, but the idea never got traction.
FDA, USDA and ICE typically work together in combating food contaminations or tracing the cause of an outbreak, but seldom to the degree that’s mandated by the pact signed yesterday.
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