U.S. Gov’t May Blend FDA, USDA

Posted on Jan 19, 2012

Flickr / theunabonger (CC-BY-SA)

Here’s a fun story involving the USDA, the FDA, the GAO—i.e., the United States Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the Government Accountability Office—with the Office of Management and Budget thrown in for good measure.

The Office of Management and Budget is looking into the possibility of merging government agencies such as the USDA and the FDA, or at least key parts of those two that deal with food safety, according to rumors registered by The Atlantic. What would that make it, the FUSDA?  —KA

The Atlantic:

Rumors are that the Obama administration wants to do this to make “food safety independent of the USDA, which primarily exists to market and promote American farm products.”

If this happens, it could be one major benefit of cost-cutting measures. At the moment, the USDA gets about three quarters of the total appropriation for food safety (for roughly one quarter of the food supply) whereas the FDA gets one quarter of the appropriation for three quarters of the food supply.

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