Federal Inspection services are actually provided for free at nearly 6,000 slaughter and processing plants in the US, including chickens, turkey and other poultry. The Feds already charge the Bison industry for inspection, why not the rest?

Consumer Federation of America and every other consumer group I know oppose user fees to pay cost of meat and poultry inspection. The purpose of inspection is to protect the public health. Any market benefit provided to meat and poultry firms is incidental to the public health function. USDA inspectors have always viewed themselves as "cops on the beat" protecting the public from contaminated food and that's how we view them too. We don't want inspectors going into filthy meat plants thinking of the owner as their customer or constituent. We don't want the food inspection version of a rent-a-cop. That is a real risk of an across the board fee attached to inspection.

However, there are fees we do support, including the reinspection fee in the new FDA food safety law. It will be imposed on plants that consistently fail to operate effective preventive controls and produce safe food.

CFA enthusiastically supports the proposed "reinspection fee" that has been proposed for meat and poultry inspection. Some companies consistently operate at the lowest possible level of safety. USDA has to send in Food Safety Assessment teams and take other steps to bring these operations up to an acceptable level of safety and sanitation. As it is now these firms are both a threat to public health and pose an unfair competitive burden on the companies that invest time, money and effort into meeting their obligations to produce safe food. Additional oversight imposes extra costs and they should have to pay the extra cost that remedial inspection imposes on the public.

CFA also supported the "registration fee" for companies regulated by FDA that was included in the House-passed version of the FSMA. Although it qualifies as a user fee, it is not a fee attached to the act of inspection.

FSIS is grossly negligible with how they waste taxpayer dollars while overseeing the meat industry. They have overlapping layers of supervisors, dedicate a full day to accomplish a 1-hour task, have layers upon layers of bureaucrats both at District Offices in DC, who usually cannot provide quick answers to easy questions from the field. A horribly inefficient bureaucracy. And, federal employees are paid higher wages than plant workers, but do much less. The idea of making plants pay for such wasteful use of tax dollars is unconscionable. How many times in the past four decades have I shook my head in disbelief, as I've observed two or more agency employees lolly-gagging in the gov office, and as many as four of them at a time "touring" my plant, looking for something to write up.

And think about the "second fee" as described above, which can be used for Food Safety Assessments (which can be triggered by an excessively high number of NR's or adverse lab results), follow up sampling, and additional inspections required in the event of an outbreak of disease. This group of second fees would be focused on so-called "problem plants". Anyone familiar with FSIS misbehavior at my plant would readily perceive that additional agency fees at my plant would have put me into bankruptcy.......while ignoring the source of contamination. Therefore, closing down plants will not improve public health, but it will certainly reduce agency payroll expenses, since there will be fewer plants needing coverage. I can honestly say that if plants had been forced to pay for all FSIS expenses directly related to each plant, that my plant would NOT have been able to pay the fee, and would either have closed its doors, or gone custom exempt.

Folks, FSIS is an absolute waster of funds, and user fees would remove any incentive for agency employees to be accountable for their inefficient. If you want to remove small plants from the American countryside, have them pay for all of USDA's irrational expenditures. You will only see a relative handful of huge meat plants left, and with an absence of competition, this oligarchy can easily pass all increased costs onto their customers.

When the Federal Meat Inspection Act was passed in 1906, mandating federal oversight of the industry for public health purposes, legislators were responsible for providing funding, which they did, via tax revenues. If contemporary legislators now mandate federal inspectors at every restaurant, the legislators must provide funding for this additional level of protection which is deemed essential for consumers. Since such oversight is for the public's benefit, the public must pay for the benefits provided. And with FSIS, the benefits are much less than current costs.

John Munsell

Locally, businesses pay for similar types of licensing (e.g. Seattle King County food service permits), which includes inspections. Why the government/taxpayers at the federal level pay for (some) meat inspections is bewildering; borrowing money to pay for them is ludicrous. Licensing/inspections are a requirement and cost of doing business.

My itty bitty plant had probably ten licenses required of various government entities, local, county, and state, costing hundreds of dollars a year. Believe me, I had plenty of licenses, and paid for them all.

In the case of FSIS however, I would estimate the cost to my plant would have been a minimum of $60,000 annually, probably substantially more. In addition to the inspector's wages and the plethora of federal benefits, I'd have been paying a portion of all the travel expenses (and wages) of the numerous supervisors who frequently visited my plant: his immediate supervisor, the Front Line Supervisor, the Humane Handling specialist from the Minneapolis District Office, EIAO's etc etc. How about the thousands of dollars recently invested in training all the various levels of inspectors and supervisors at the current PHIS training sessions in California?

Frankly, these expenses would shutter the majority of small plants. I really don't think that Pres Teddy Roosevelt and the Senators and Representatives who passed the FMIA in 1906 had this in mind.

John Munsell

Oh, thanks for the info, John. I am a huge supporter of small, local businesses and buy few, if any products from national producers (meat, eggs, fish, produce, etc). I did not realize, until your explanation, what the impact to smaller, regional producers would be.

So I stand corrected and support federal funding of FSIS inspections.