Oh good, the Trump administration has thought of an excellent plan to make everything cheaper and more efficient: just turn over all the monitoring duties to local people.
The Trump administration plans to shift much of the power and responsibility for food safety inspections in hog plants to the pork industry as early as May, cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40 percent and replacing them with plant employees.
See? Great! No federal dollars going to inspection, industry made to do the job itself. Win-win!
Under the proposed new inspection system, the responsibility for identifying diseased and contaminated pork would be shared with plant employees, whose training would be at the discretion of plant owners. There would be no limits on slaughter-line speeds.
Whatever. They’re paying for it, that’s the important thing. I’m sure they’ll train the employees to spot diseased and contaminated pork at least 50% of the time.
The Trump administration also is working to shift inspection of beef to plant owners. Agriculture Department officials are scheduled next month to discuss the proposed changes with the meat industry.
These proposals, part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to reduce regulations, come as the federal government is under fire for delegating some of its aircraft safety oversight responsibilities to Boeing, which developed the 737 Max jets involved in two fatal crashes over the past six months. Federal Aviation Administration certification of the two aircraft involved in the crashes took place under President Trump, but the major shift toward delegating key aspects of aviation oversight began during the George W. Bush administration.
Republican are good at cutting costs by delegating oversight. More $$$ for bombs and trips to Mar-a-Lago.
Pat Basu, the chief veterinarian with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service from 2016 to 2018, refused to sign off on the new pork system because of concerns about safety for both consumers and livestock. The USDA sent the proposed regulations to the Federal Register about a week after Basu left, and they were published less than a month later, according to records and interviews.
“Look at the FAA. It took a year or so before the crashes happened,” Basu said. “This could pass and everything could be okay for a while, until some disease is missed and we have an outbreak all over the country. It would be an economic disaster that would be very hard to recover from.”
Oh get a grip. So a few people throw up; big deal.
Basu’s top concern is with giving plant workers the responsibility for identifying and removing live diseased hogs when they arrive at the plants. He said that job should remain with trained USDA veterinarians so they can identify contagious diseases like foot-and-mouth disease, which can maim and destroy livestock, creating profound effects on the economy. One analysis by Kansas State University researchers determined such an outbreak could cost producers and the public $188 billion and state and federal governments $11 billion.
Erm. I’m starting to have doubts.
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7 responses to “Faster and cheaper”
Why don’t we just turn over all inspections to Ivanka and Donald Jr? I’m sure they have the best qualifications.
Great idea! They’ve already got the security clearances and secret decoder rings.
They might want to get themselves some good overalls, though. I’m sure Ivanka has something in one of her lines that would work just perfectly!
Then there’s the gutting of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
(Much more at the link.) But hey, at least it’s not fetuses at risk.
Yep. Once that baby’s born, it’s on its own. To do otherwise would be *gasp* socialism *choke*.
Next, get rid of public school teachers and let the kids grade themselves. Government funding hospitals? Nah, let the patients self-diagnose, self-prescribe, self-operate. Police poor areas? Nope, what do you think the 2nd. is for? Who needs firefighters when you’ve got faucets in the kitchen?
That isn’t as big a joke as people might think. So far it seems to be let the computers teach, grade, and entertain them all at once, but sooner or later they’ll be allowed to select what grade they want and pay on a sliding scale based on that. What does it matter if they do the work as long as they pay?
And let’s not forget how internal monitoring worked out for Boing recently. Or rather the people who died because of that.