Currently browsing posts about: GAO

I love Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports.  Some member of Congress requests them and GAO resaearchers then get to work.

I particularly like the way GAO understates what its reports are about.

Try this, for example: Oversight of Future Supplemental Assistance to Farmers Could Be Improved

This program gave $23 billion to farmers during the pandemic.

Of this, 95% went to “nonspecialty crops” (translation: feed for animals and fuel for cars, aka Big Ag).

And hardly any of the money went to minority, new, or military farmers.

Leah Douglas, now working for Reuters, did the math.

• Collectively, socially disadvantaged, military, and beginning farmers got a combined $818 million across the two years,—3.6%
• Socially disadvantaged farmers  got $435.7 million—1.9% (they comprise 6.7% of farmers)
• Beginning farmers got $152.1 million—0.7% (they comprise 27% of farmers).
• Military veterans got $240.5 million—1% (they comprise 11% of farmers).

Comment: The USDA has a long history of discrimination against these groups.   It needs to make up for that.

Remember USDA’s Harvest boxes?

I posted about them at least nine times since 2018.  For example:

• The Trump Admnistration’s announcement of its forthcoming Blue Apron program.  This was widely derided, but USDA’s Sonny Perdue never gave up on it.
• What the Harvest Box program was supposed to do (help farmers, feed the poor)
• What the boxes actually looked like
• And the program’s end

I thought the program was ill conceived from the start.  Its idea was to collect food from farmers that could not otherwise be sold, and deliver it to private food banks for distribuiton.  There were three types of boxes: produce, dairy products, and meat products.

I worried, and for good reason, about:

• The enormous expense
• The complicated and burdensome logistics
• The burden on food banks
• Most of he money going to distributors rather than small farmers
• The lack of choice for recipients
• The unsustainable focus on charity

Now, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report on the program, “USDA Food Box Program: Key Information and Opportunities to Better Assess Performance,”

The program, it says,

• Used 243 contractors
• Delivered more than 176 million boxes of food
• Reached 78% of US counties, and 89% of counties with more than 20% of the population in poverty

By those standards, I guess, it was a success.

Did it help farmers?  USDA did not collect data on this point so we don’t know, but I don’t think it did.

The report does provide data on several points.

The astronomical overall expense

The absurdly high cost of each of the boxes

The switch from lots of small farmers to a few big ones

From photographs of the contents of the boxes, it’s hard to believe they would cost more than $10 to $20 at a supermarket.  Since so few small farmers were helped by the program, it would have been much cheaper and more efficient to give people coupons for the food or increase SNAP benefits.

But the real purpose of the program was to undermine SNAP.  Fortunately, it did not succeed in that purpose.

The summer is a good time to catch up on reports.  Early in July, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a government watchdog agency—sent a firm letter to USDA chiding that agency for not implementing GAO’s recommendations in a timely manner.

In November 2020, we reported that on a government-wide basis, 77 percent of our recommendations made 4 years ago were implemented…[but] USDA’s recommendation implementation rate was 46 percent. As of May 2021, USDA had 171 open recommendations. Fully implementing all open recommendations could significantly improve USDA’s operations.

Among the GAO’s recommendations were two of particular interest:

I.  Strengthen Protections for Wage Earners. See: Workplace Safety and Health: Better Outreach, Collaboration and Information Needed to Help Protect Workers at Meat and Poultry Plants. GAO-18-12. Washington, D.C.: November 9, 2017.

Recommendation: The FSIS Administrator should work with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to assess the implementation of their agencies’ joint memorandum of understanding (MOU) regarding worker safety at meat and poultry plants and make any needed changes to ensure improved collaboration, and also set specific time frames for periodic evaluations of the MOU.

Comment: This is about the failure of OSHA and USDA to protect meat-processing and -packing workers from Covid-19 (for data on the effects of Covid-19 on these workers, see Leah Douglas’s regular reports on the Food and Environment Reporting Network.  GAO is essentially calling on the two agencies to get busy on protecting workers at those plants.

II.  Improve Cybersecurity.  See Cybersecurity: Agencies Need to Fully Establish Risk Management Programs and Address Challenges. GAO-19-384. Washington, D.C.: July 25, 2019.

Recommendations:  The USDA should (1) develop a cybersecurity risk management strategy that includes the key elements identified in this report; and (2) establish and document a process for coordination between cybersecurity risk management and enterprise risk management functions.

Comment:  The GAO is asking USDA to work with other agencies to improve cybersecurity at meat-processing plants.  Why?  Because the meat industry’s weak cybersecurity—a long-standing problem—was recently exposed when hackers did a ransomware attack on JBS meat plants that cost the company $11 million to resolve.

NutraIngredients.com had an intriguing (to me, at least) article about the latest complaints about FDA’s lack of action on GRAS ingredients—those Generally Recognized As Safe.

A recent paper claims FDA is in the dark as to how many new ingredients have come onto the market via the GRAS process. Only limited progress has been made in the decade since a Congressional report first raised the issue and directed the Agency to make changes, the authors found.”

The article referred to a this paper, Ten years post-GAO assessment, FDA remains uninformed of potentially harmful GRAS substances in foods.

The starting point for this paper is a study done by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) ten years ago: FDA Should Strengthen Its Oversight of Food Ingredients Determined to be Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS)

The new paper argues that ten years later, the FDA has done little to address the GAO’s concerns.

Since 2010, FDA has addressed only a few of the criticisms regarding its process for establishing a food substance as GRAS. …most critically, FDA has chosen to remain uninformed about food substances self-determined as GRAS by manufacturers…FDA cannot fulfill its statutory obligation for ensuring the chemical safety of the U.S. food supply if it does not know which substances, in which quantities, have been added to foods.

This took me right back to a blog post I did in 2016: The FDA’s unfortunate ruling on GRAS regulations.