The Food and Drug Administration vowed to make big changes to its food safety teams after the 2022 infant formula crisis exposed deep flaws in the agency’s culture, technology and structure. On Tuesday, the FDA finally revealed its fix: creating a new deputy commissioner for human foods. This is a major disappointment.
The new deputy commissioner position would not even have authority over all food safety and nutrition. Confusingly, there will still be a separate Office of Regulatory Affairs at the FDA that handles food safety investigations. On a call with reporters, FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and Principal Deputy Commissioner Janet Woodcock spent 45 minutes trying to explain which powers this new deputy would have and which authorities the Office of Regulatory Affairs’ leader would exercise. The purpose of this reorganization is to create a clear leader overseeing human food safety and a streamlined reporting process. It needs to be simple. This proposed change does not achieve that.
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In fact, the FDA has already tried this before. There was a deputy commissioner of food. The position was eliminated in the early years of the Trump administration. Even in the unlikely event that reestablishing the job spurs broad improvement, there is no guarantee it will endure under future FDA commissioners.
It’s important to remember why the FDA — a massive agency that handles drug oversight and the bulk of food safety oversight — needs overhauling. During the baby formula disaster, the FDA was too slow to react to tragic infant deaths and a whistleblower report outlining safety failures at an Abbott baby formula plant in Michigan. It was unclear who was in charge at key moments. But the baby formula crisis wasn’t an isolated incident. Several independent reviews of the FDA’s food operations found years of “constant turmoil” and slow responses to food emergencies. Congress passed the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act after a series of distressing foodborne outbreaks. A decade later, similar problems persist.
It does not help that for years the agency’s food program has been an afterthought compared with the FDA’s drug side. An independent report released in December recommended splitting the FDA into a food agency and a separate drug agency to finally give food safety the attention, funding and clear leadership it deserves. This is a good idea that Mr. Califf should have endorsed on Tuesday.
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End of carousel- D.C. Council reverses itself on school resource officers. Good.
- Virginia makes a mistake by pulling out of an election fraud detection group.
- Vietnam sentences another democracy activist.
- Biden has a new border plan.
The D.C. Council voted on Tuesday to stop pulling police officers out of schools, a big win for student safety. Parents and principals overwhelmingly support keeping school resource officers around because they help de-escalate violent situations. D.C. joins a growing number of jurisdictions, from Montgomery County, Md., to Denver, in reversing course after withdrawing officers from school grounds following George Floyd’s murder. Read our recent editorial on why D.C. needs SROs.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) just withdrew Virginia from a data-sharing consortium, ERIC, that made the commonwealth’s elections more secure, following Republicans in seven other states in falling prey to disinformation peddled by election deniers. Former GOP governor Robert F. McDonnell made Virginia a founding member of ERIC in 2012, and until recently conservatives touted the group as a tool to combat voter fraud. D.C. and Maryland plan to remain. Read our recent editorial on ERIC.
In Vietnam, a one-party state, democracy activist Tran Van Bang was sentenced on Friday to eight years in prison and three years probation for writing 39 Facebook posts. The court claimed he had defamed the state in his writings, according to Radio Free Asia. In the past six years, at least 60 bloggers and activists have been sentenced to between 4 and 15 years in prison under the law, Human Rights Watch found. Read more of the Editorial Board’s coverage on autocracy and Vietnam.
The Department of Homeland Security has provided details of a plan to prevent a migrant surge along the southern border. The administration would presumptively deny asylum to migrants who failed to seek it in a third country en route — unless they face “an extreme and imminent threat” of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder. Critics allege that this is akin to an illegal Trump-era policy. In fact, President Biden is acting lawfully in response to what was fast becoming an unmanageable flow at the border. Read our most recent editorial on the U.S. asylum system.
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He told us that splitting up the FDA “deserves some due consideration.” Specifically, Congress would have to make such a big change (lawmakers introduced a bill last year to do this), and it would have to adequately fund the federal government’s food safety programs, too. This sweeping reform would better reflect the scale of the FDA’s problems than the modest reorganization the agency announced this week. How many more crises — and infant deaths — will it take for lawmakers to accept that modest reform is not enough?