There’s plenty to worry about. The FDA’s shifting the responsibility for some food inspections to the states isn’t one of them.
If you’re in the market for fear, there are plenty of things to worry about. And yet informed apprehension, of the sort that requires some baseline subject matter knowledge, struggles to achieve critical mass. The stuff that really generates engagement and begets saturation coverage are the events that observers don’t need any background knowledge to comprehend. They are the stories readers can emote their way through.
That’s probably why you’ve likely encountered at least a handful of terrifying headlines over the last week zeroing in on the Trump administration’s plan to “end routine food safety inspections.”
“The Trump administration’s approach to food safety keeps getting worse,” an MSNBC headline blared. “Reckless disregard,” the left-wing outlet AlterNet exclaimed: “Trump’s FDA to end routine food inspections.” The Revolving Door Project went the sardonic route: “President Trump Would Like You To Say Goodbye to Our Food Inspectors.” And so on. For the most part, mainstream media outlets have mirrored the anxiety in the explicitly left-leaning press, warning that the administration’s approach “raises questions about the future of food safety across the U.S.”
Not every major American media venue has defaulted to apocalypticism. One unlikely outfit, CBS News, put the administration’s plan in valuable perspective.
The Food and Drug Administration is reportedly investigating a proposal to end the federal inspection of many food products, but it is not seeking to put an end to inspections overall. Rather, the FDA plans to shift some inspection obligations to the states. “Some FDA employees have been working on a possible shift of the agency’s routine food efforts to states for years,” the CBS report read, noting that the executive agency began investigating the potential to outsource food inspection back in 2010.
Presently, about one-third “of routine food safety inspections were done by states over recent years, a Government Accountability Office report said earlier this year,” the report added. Inspections for many products, including milk, have already been largely overseen by states working within a standardized regulatory framework.
The FDA will not be relinquishing its responsibility for inspecting higher-risk foodstuffs, like infant formula or products produced in foreign food facilities. Nor will meats be affected by this decision, since they are already outside the FDA’s purview (the Agriculture Department handles those inspections). As one FDA commissioner told CBS, when it comes to devolving food inspection authority to the states, domestically grown produce is just one success story. “The FDA has agreements with most states to pay for routine inspections conducted by local agriculture departments, where they often handle inspections and enforcement themselves,” the CBS dispatch concluded.
There are valid concerns about how this transition is managed, and equally valid reservations about this administration’s ability to manage this complicated transition with the caution and prudence it requires. Perhaps most concerning is that accomplishing this feat while simultaneously cutting FDA staff and budgets can result in unforeseen gaps in the existing inspection regime.
According to an internal email acquired by Reuters and analyzed by Food Safety Magazine, the “FDA said that it will suspend its quality control program for food testing laboratories as a result of the recent, significant reduction in force across” the Department of Health and Human Services. “The email also explains that suspension of the [Proficiency Testing] Program means that the agency will not be able to carry out planned quality control work regarding Cyclospora in spinach or the glyphosate in barley, among other tests.”
See? There’s plenty to worry about. The devolution of routine federal food inspections to state-level inspectors operating within the national guidelines established by the FDA isn’t one of them. The shift may even be salutary, as CBS News confessed: “Ending the FDA’s work to do its own routine food safety inspections might also help alleviate an issue elsewhere at the agency: a backlog of inspections overseas, as well as in other markets like medical products.”
Compelling states to assume more of the federal government’s responsibilities forever promises to be a disaster in the making, but the disasters only ever seem to result from executive agencies’ failing to meet their expectations. Getting Washington out of the way rarely lives down to the expectations of federalism’s skeptics.