How else to explain their posture on funding for the Food and Drug Administration? As part of their campaign to reduce federal spending, House Republicans want to reduce FDA food safety funding by $241 million for the duration of this fiscal year. As my friend and former colleague
Suzy Khimm recently reported for Mother Jones, that would mean, among other things, furloughing inspectors and reducing examinations of imported food.
And that could be just the beginning of cutbacks at FDA. For next years budget, the Republicans have said they want to reduce discretionary spending to 2008 levels. According to calculations by David Plunkett, who is a staff attorney at the
Center for Science in the Public Interest, such a cut at FDA would likely force the agency to lay off 600 inspectors, actually reducing the force to slightly less than what it was in 2008. (I cant vouch for those figures personally, but he extrapolated the figures based on official FDA budget justifications--and his method seems sensible.)
What makes this particularly troubling is that 2008 spending levels were clearly inadequate--even in 2008.
Food inspections got a funding boost at the very beginning of the Bush Administration, in response to 9/11. But afterward, funding remained essentially flat, even though the demand for inspections was rising, thanks in part to growing imports of food. In November, 2007, a non-partisan
scientific advisory committee concluded that the FDA lacked the resources, including not just personnel but also technology, to do its job correctly
http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/85186/salmonella-fda-budget-cut-republican