Food safetyLittle progress despite $3.4 billion spent on food safety programs
In the past decade the U.S. government has gone to great lengths to secure the nation’s food supply against terrorists, but more than $3.4 billion later it has little to show for its efforts; despite all the government spending, key food safety programs and counter-terror policies have been bogged down by a murky, convoluted bureaucratic process

Food safety audits help insure compliance // Source: foodsafetyspecialists.com
In the past decade the U.S. government has gone to great lengths to secure the nation’s food supply against terrorists, but more than $3.4 billion later it has little to show for its efforts.
An analysis by the Associated Press revealsthat despite all the government spending, key food safety programs and counter-terror policies have been bogged down by a murky, convoluted bureaucratic process.
Currently there is no single agency in charge of coordinating the government’s food safety efforts and agencies lack an effective way to monitor outbreaks.
Testifying before the Senate last month, John Hoffman, a former Department of Homeland Security senior adviser, stated, “We may be blindsided by an intentional food-based attack on this nation sometime soon.”
“The unfortunate truth is that we, as a nation, lack effective surveillance … At present, our primary detection capability is the emergency room,” Hoffman said.
With no agency clearly in charge, progress has been slow. Federal auditors found that one Department of Agriculture surveillance program designed to test for chemical, biological, and radiological agents was still not working properly five years after it was created in part because agencies could not agree on who was in control.
LeeAnne Jackson, the Food and Drug Administration’s health science policy adviser, added that progress to date has largely been voluntary on the part of the private sector, which has proven to be a significant problem.
“We have made solid progress, but everything that has been done to date on food defense in the private sector has all been voluntary,” said Jackson. “We can’t go out and ask them what they have done, because they’re not obliged to tell us, so we don’t have a good metric to measure what’s been done.”
Much of the billions spent by federal agencies on food defense are not required by the private sector thereby making it difficult to actually measure the success or failure of federal programs.
With the current budget climate on the Hill, lawmakers are now proposing cuts to the government’s troubled food safety programs.
Representative Bill Pascrell (D – New Jersey) is targeting a $550 million DHS Office of Health Affairs program that was designed to build a data integration center where food, agriculture, disease and environmental officials could see each other’s surveillance information in real time.
According to Jeff Runge, the former chief medical officer for DHS and the manager of the data center, the program never succeeded because the disparate agencies refused to hand over data and infighting consumed much of their time instead of focusing on the mission at hand.
“FDA was going on its own track, DHS was on its track, and no one was talking to each other,” added David Acheson, the assistant commissioner of the FDA at the time.
As a result, Representative Pascrell introduced a bill in June that would eliminate the data center entirely.
“It just didn’t work,” said Runge. “Now al-Qaida is headed by a physician who has expressed interest in biological attacks, and I don’t think we are putting enough brain cycles on this issue.”
In the meantime, the federal government will likely continue to struggle with food security so long as there is no clear leadership on the issue.
“The implication, of course, is that it puts the country at risk if we do not know what agencies are doing,” Lisa Shames, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment, concluded darkly at the Senate hearing last month.