Unexpected Consequences
these trends were nationwide cases found to involve egregious crimi-
nal fraud leading to a half-billion eggs needing to be recalled, and
pathogen-tainted peanuts knowingly shipped to forty-six states. By
20 0 , public confidence was sufficiently shaken that Congress was fi-
nally forced to act.
As had happened before, the National Academies and the Gov-
ernment Accountability Office pushed for a single agency. “The time
had come to modernize the nation’s food safety system,” said a National
Academies report, recommending that “the federal government move
toward the establishment of a single food safety agency.” Instead, in
20 Congress tacked on another law, the Food Safety Modernization
Act (FSMA), by which FDA’s newest mandate was to stop reacting to
problems by preventing them from ever occurring in the first place.
The act was touted as “a sea change for food safety in America” that
would bring about “sweeping improvements to the security and safety
of our nation’s food supply.” Others said it was historic, the first time
in “more than seventy years since our nation’s food safety regime was
overhauled top to bottom.” The senator authoring the bill remarked that
“the FDA finally has all the tools it needs to ensure the food on dinner
tables and store shelves is safe.”
Well, not quite. Congress’s own budget office said that the FDA
needed an additional $. billion for implementation over the next five
years. Instead, the bill was enacted as an unfunded mandate. FDA still
needed to convince Congress that more money was needed.
At FSMA’s core was an expectation that growers, processors, manu-
facturers, importers, transporters, retailers, etc. would voluntarily im-
plement what FDA mandated. Meanwhile, as FDA was preparing new
comprehensive standards, the agency was still expected to provide over-
sight and technical support, ensure compliance, strengthen the global
food-safety system, enhance protection of public health, deliver train-
ing, serve as a repository of science and expertise, provide leadership for
innovation and action, ensure that firms are consistently implementing
effective prevention systems, enhance partnerships with states and other
government counterparts, build robust data integration and analysis sys-
tems along with information-sharing mechanisms, significantly expand
its inspection and surveillance tools to include a wider range of inspec-
tion including sampling, testing, and other data-collection activities,