These days, sometimes it seems that all you ever hear or read about regulatory officials is that they are evil people who are knowingly conspiring together to ruin your life or your business, for what reason no one ever seems to specify. The theory is not merely that the effects of their actions burden you, but that that’s their specific goal.
This is, to use the formal legal term, crap. The regulators that I have encountered are generally people of good faith doing their best to implement the programs and instructions that Congress or state legislatures give them, sometimes under the duress of inadequate or uncertain budgets. They are often too slow to act, and sometimes act in ways that are irrational or needlessly burdensome to business. But they are no more or no less likely than people in private companies to be lazy, incompetent, or the least bit conspiratorial.
Among those who think about regulators with a more realistic perspective, one current topic is whether the job of food safety should be given to a single federal official leading a new federal agency.
As you may know, the job of overseeing food safety in the U.S. is, right now, divided between the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates about 80% of our food supply, including packaging in contact with foods, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates most of the rest via its oversight of meat and poultry businesses. Also, depending on how you count, there are a dozen or more other federal agencies with a hand in food safety, including for example the Environmental Protection Agency via its regulation of pesticides and water purity, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which investigates foodborne illness outbreaks.
Legislators regularly float suggested remedies to this odd dispersion of powers. Now there’s one prominent new proposal to take FDA’s food safety responsibilities and give them to a newly created agency, rather than, as has often been suggested in the past, combining multiple agencies’ powers into one. A common prediction is that the bill will fail, but there’s widespread support for revisiting FDA’s structure and priorities, so you can expect discussions like these to continue even if the bill doesn’t get too far.
The new bill’s target is FDA specifically, so to that extent, food safety regulation would appear to be intended to remain a divided affair (although the bill contains a cryptic catch-all provision that would let the President transfer “other offices, services, or agencies” to the new agency, so who knows?) The proposed Food Safety Administration Act of 2022 would make a new agency out of FDA’s current food safety powers and give it a new name—Food Safety Administration—and new head—Administrator of Food Safety—who would be chosen specifically for their expertise in food safety. The new bill proposes changing the current FDA’s name to the Federal Drug Administration and change its head’s name from Commissioner of Food and Drugs to Commissioner of Drugs.
