Through July, people outside the federal government have met in private with the leadership of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) 54 different times. Forty-eight of those meetings have been with Alfred V. Almanza, USDA’s Deputy Under Secretary of Food Safety and acting Administrator of FSIS. The remaining six meetings have been with Brian Ronholm, the other Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety, who was named USDA’s acting Under Secretary for Food Safety when Dr. Elisabeth Hagen left government. She is the most recent of just four people who have held the presidential appointment as Under Secretary for Food Safety, a post requiring U.S. Senate confirmation since a law mandating how FSIS leadership is supposed to be organized was signed in 1994 by President Bill Clinton.
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