In early September I began circulating a working paper called Project 2027. It is a draft agenda, not a manifesto: thirty-five specific things that would make American food safer and that can be done within a year by people and agencies that already exist. The tagline is “Known Problems, Known Solutions.”
The paper has now gone to well over a hundred people and organizations: victims’ and consumer groups, public health and nutrition organizations, labor, environmental groups, state regulators, academics, former agency officials and people inside the food industry. This is an update on where it stands, and a request.
What the comments taught me
The paper got longer because people wrote back. They corrected it, added to it and told me what to cut. Several said thirty-five items is too many, and they are right. A shorter draft comes in December.
The most useful thing I learned, though, was not about any one item. Many of the groups reading the paper are drafting agendas of their own. That is welcome. But thirty-three years of this work have taught me how it usually goes from here: each organization works its own contacts, inside its own silo, on its own piece. The same agencies and the same committees then hear a dozen asks from a dozen directions, and it becomes easy to act on none of them.
Whether the subject is bacteria, antibiotic resistance, the chemicals in the food supply or the chronic disease that follows what we eat, we are all asking for the same thing, which is a food system that does not make people sick. Our voices are stronger together than separate.
We already agree
To test that, I built a simple grid. The proposals run down the side and the organizations run across the top, with a mark wherever a group has already petitioned, endorsed a bill, filed a comment or testified in its own name. It does not show what I hope people will support. It shows what they have already done.
On my count, thirteen of the thirty rows already carry marks from more than one camp – groups that rarely sign the same page. Among them:
• No federal preemption of state food law. Consumer groups, nutrition groups and state regulators have each taken the same position, separately. Nobody has put them on one letter.
• Information that runs both ways between FDA and the states. Victims’ advocates and state regulators are on the record for it, and I am told parts of industry are too, which I am working to confirm.
• Restoring foodborne illness surveillance. In 2025 the government cut its active surveillance network from eight pathogens to two. Consumer advocates want it back. The public health laboratories, the epidemiologists and local health officials do as well.
• A usable definition of ultra-processed food. Food safety groups and nutrition and heart health groups have already shared a signature page on this once.
• Safer food for infants. Pathogen testing of infant formula and enforceable limits on lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury in baby food both have deep support.
• Old fights that are riper than they look. Treating Salmonella in poultry as the adulterant it is, ending routine antibiotics in animals that are not sick, naming the companies linked to outbreaks, and keeping FDA’s traceability rule alive each have a long list of organizations behind them.
A caution, because I want this to be accurate. Nobody has agreed to anything, and nobody has been asked to sign anything. The grid is my reading of the public record, and the organizations themselves are correcting it as we go. But the pattern is holding. The supporters are largely different organizations from one proposal to the next, which is the whole argument for comparing lists before we finish writing separate ones.
Why now
The case is in the government’s own numbers. USDA puts the annual cost of foodborne illness at $74.7 billion. CDC reported this spring that not one of the pathogens it tracks declined against its 2016 to 2018 baseline. On the chronic side the numbers are larger still: heart disease and stroke killed more than 850,000 Americans in 2024, and roughly ninety cents of every health care dollar goes to chronic and mental health conditions. The people who work on pathogens and the people who work on diet have every reason to work together, and have mostly not.
The calendar matters too. On November 3 the voters changed the majority in both chambers of Congress, and when the 120th Congress is seated on January 3, every committee gavel that touches food changes hands. New chairs will be handed many agendas. They are far more likely to act on the items that arrive with a long and varied list of names than on thirty documents that each ask for something slightly different.
That is why letters are also going out to members of the House and Senate, returning and newly elected, who are likely to be champions for food safety. The letters ask for their thoughts and ideas. An agenda that the people who will have to carry it helped write has a better chance than one handed to them finished.
The ask
Keep your own agenda. Nobody is being asked to give anything up. The ask is only that where your list and this one say the same thing, we say it at the same time, to the same people, with each other’s names on it.
This is not about me, and it is not about who gets credit. The paper has no owner, and the measure of its success is how much of it ends up in other people’s documents. It is about preventing the next Kevin Kowalcyk or Riley Detwiler.
If you want to look at the working paper, just email me at bmarler@marlerclark.com and I will send it. I am taking comments through November 30. What comes back goes into the shorter December draft, and in early January, once the new Congress is seated, I plan to host a working meeting in Washington, with a way to join remotely, to settle it in a room rather than by email.
I have said for years that I would like to be put out of business. I cannot do that alone, and neither can any one organization. Together, on the things we already agree on, we might.
