The best sign that post-pandemic normalcy is back at USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service is that everybody is again getting their meeting times.
That means that Dr. Emilio Esteban, USDA’s Under Secretary for Food Safety, is again rounding up top FSIS personnel like Administrator Paul Kiecker and his deputy
Continue Reading Food Safety and Inspection Service leadership meets with public, industry representatives
Getting a Presidential appointment and Senate confirmation turned out to be no easy task for Jose Emilio Esteban, the new Undersecretary for Food Safety. Yet he’s turned in his first couple of months on the job with apparent ease.
Between the time Esteban’s predecessor, Mindy Brashears, exited the USDA building
Continue Reading Here’s what Esteban is up to now that he is finally in USDA’s top food safety job
It costs the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) more than $1 billion a year for close to 10,000 inspectors to provide their services at more than 6,200 locations where the private sector produces meat and egg products.
For the past two years, a few executives in Washington D.C.,
Continue Reading First signs that the executives may remove FSIS from remote controls
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service named its key achievements for 2021 that the agency claims highlight progress in its mission to prevent foodborne illness and protect public health.
The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) provides on-the-spot inspection services at more than 6,200 meat and poultry processing facilities
Continue Reading Key achievements were only a phone call away during pandemic year 2
The coronavirus pandemic has left some hating and some loving telephonic communications options like those Zoom calls. USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service’s recently released public calendars for May and June are pretty good evidence that Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety Sandra Eskin likes talking on the phone.
Or
Continue Reading Working the phone for food safety comes naturally to Eskin
Mindy Brashears, the fifth in history confirmed USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety, said goodbye to her consumer, government and industry stakeholders January 14.
Her political appointment as the federal government’s top food safety official expired a week later on Inauguration Day, ending her two-year tenure, including 303 days as
Continue Reading How the food safety transition went, according to the public calendars
After eight months on the job as boss over USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service headquarters (FSIS), Administrator Paul Kiecker likely is feeling like P.T. Barnum.
Kiecker’s meetings with people outside of the federal government occur with enough frequency and in such numbers that his schedule must feel like a
Continue Reading New FSIS boss moves from one telephonic ring to another
Unlike the first 90 days or so of the coronavirus pandemic, not every outsider who made contact with USDA’s top Food Safety and Inspection Service executives in June wanted to talk about COVID-19. Nor was normalcy making a comeback during the summer months as the only contact outsiders had with
Continue Reading Food safety brass over summer were taking COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 calls
The day after she was finally confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Mindy Brashears was back home in Lubbock, TX, giving an Ag Appreciation Day speech to the local Chamber of Commerce. After that, she’s found her new job is pretty much about COVID-19.
From her presidential appointment on May 4,
Continue Reading At the start, Brashears finds Under Secretary for Food Safety job is all COVID-19 all the time
In March, when Mindy M. Brashears became the fifth Senate-confirmed USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety and Paul Kiecker moved up to be theUSDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service Administrator, it’s likely neither could have imaged the meat industry crisis that was in store for them.
But just as former
Continue Reading Rottenberg’s last 6 months were busy, and were over before the storm
