As if there has not been enough change in food safety regulation over the last decade, the food safety regulatory landscape may be changing significantly once again.

Indeed, there has been a renewed movement of late to siphon off FDA’s food safety responsibilities and assign them to a new food safety agency. Representative Rosa DeLauro and Senator Dick Durbin recently introduced the Food Safety Administration Act. If passed, the legislation would rename the Federal Food and Drug Administration as the ‘‘Federal Drug Administration,’’ and create the “Food Safety Administration” (“FSA”), an entirely new agency tasked with the responsibility for overseeing the safety of foods currently regulated by FDA. In its current form, the proposed legislation would have no immediate or substantive impact on FSIS or FSIS-regulated products.

The legislation has been lauded by many consumer advocacy groups, who contend that the current regulatory framework, and absence of a single, dedicated food safety leader, contributes to a lack of direction, delays and failures in the implementation of food safety policies, responding to outbreaks, and inefficiencies in agency action.

While the idea of an agency solely dedicated to food safety, with its own food safety leader, is appealing in certain respects, implementing such a tectonic shift is certain to be an extraordinarily complex operation that would likely take some time. Moreover, the preliminary steps required to make such an agency a reality may be profoundly difficult to achieve.

First, the act would need to pass both houses of Congress. Given the current level of Congressional dysfunction, the extraordinary cost of conjuring a new agency, and FDA lobbying against such a change, I believe passage is exceedingly unlikely.

Second, even if the Act were to somehow pass, bigger hurdles would await. The first would be extracting the manifest complexity of excising the food safety apparatus from FDA. The FSA would (like FDA) fall under the banner of the Department of Health and Human Services. The FSA would excise from FDA the Office of Regulatory Affairs, the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, and the Center for Veterinary Medicine.

These sub-agencies are comprised of thousands of employees distributed across the entire United States (and, in some cases, the world). Importantly, they are not singularly self-sustaining and thus, would require the creation of an extraordinary amount of new logistical and infrastructural support. In other words, these inter-agency offices have been developed over the course of decades and are deeply integrated with the FDA framework writ large. Thus, creating the FSA would require building an entirely new agency virtually from the ground up. This would involve the outlay of enormous costs. Even something as minor as new letterhead would cost an exorbitant amount. Determining which funds are assigned to which agency would likely trigger significant territorial infighting. FDA would certainly object to the loss of funding it would incur and would fight tooth and nail to keep as much of its underlying infrastructure as possible.

While the idea of a new agency strictly dedicated to food safety is appealing, it would likely be extraordinarily expensive, complex, and challenging, to create. With that said, we remain squarely entrenched in a food safety revolution which has fueled a countless chorus of new food safety ideas, new food safety initiatives, new food safety policies, new food safety rules, and new food safety legislation. Given that we remain surrounded by so much fast-paced change, why shouldn’t we seriously entertain a new food safety administration?

Goodbye, FDA; Hello, FSA

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