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The Senate Agricultural Appropriations Committee has just announced that it will give the FDA an extra $48 million to fund food safety oversight. In federal terms, this is chump change but at least it’s an admission that the FDA is not adequately funded to meet its regulatory obligations. Why so little? Note that the money comes from agricultural appropriations, not health appropriations. This is the result of an historical anomaly; the FDA used to be part of the Department of Agriculture. When it was split off and eventually joined to the Department of Health and Human Services, its appropriations stayed with Agriculture. This, of course, is precisely the wrong place for it and helps explain why the FDA is so badly underfunded for what it has to do to protect the public from unsafe food. This is also part of the reason why the Government Accountability Office has been calling for creating a separately funded food safety agency that would take politics out of the food aspects of public health. If you think the present situation makes no sense, this is a good time to contact your congressional representatives.

The FDA announced today that manufacturers of dietary supplements will be required to follow Good Manufacturing Practices, meaning that supplements will have to contain precisely what the labels say they contain. What a concept! The supplement industry, concerned about the decline in sales resulting from loss of consumer confidence, has been lobbying for FDA regulation. This could not be more ironic since the supplement industry essentially wrote the legislation that deregulated supplements in the first place, an issue I had a lot of fun discussing in my book, Food Politics.