Proposed House Bill Would Fund FDA During Shutdown

The U.S. House of Representatives will vote today on a bill that would fund the Food and Drug Administration during the government shutdown.  The so-called Food and Drug Safety Act was introduced last Thursday by House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Robert Aderholt (R-AL).  The bill is the latest in a series of stopgap funding measures proposed in the House. Several attempts to fund individual agencies have cleared the House in recent days, but the White House and Senate leadership have opposed such bills, arguing that the entire government should be reopened.  FDA, which oversees 80 percent of the U.S. food supply, has furloughed 45 percent of its staff during the shutdown. As a result, FDA inspectors are not available to perform routine food inspections, and FDA personnel are not available to investigate outbreaks and perform tracebacks through the supply chain on foods suspected of sickening people.  In a statement Friday, Caroline Smith DeWaal, the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s food safety director, said that the shutdown “means some outbreaks will never be investigated and solved while others might be solved days or weeks later than they otherwise would. And each day of delay means that more consumers could be sickened from the undiscovered contaminated food.”