WH Ag Budget Scraps Food Safety Agency Proposal, Bumps FAS Funds

摘要

President Obama's budget for fiscal year 2017 drops last year's proposal to combine the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) into a single food safety agency, while boosting funding for a number of trade-related USDA functions. The proposal to combine FSIS, which conducts inspections for meat and poultry, and FDA, which has jurisdiction over seafood and most other foodstuffs, was made in Obama's FY2016 proposal. But this year's budget nixes that idea completely. It also does not take into account recommendations from a congressionally chartered think tank that USDA separate its trade functions from the domestic farm service functions (Inside U.S. Trade, Oct. 30, 2015).