I hadn’t thought about this topic until recently when Coral Beach, editor-in-chief of Food Safety News, called me to talk about the relationship between the FDA’s budget and the overall federal budget.
If I remember correctly, an old General Accounting Office (GAO) report listed 15 federal agencies involved in food safety. The FDA, CDC, and USDA are the best known, but other organizations also have specialized roles.
In a perfect world, it would be possible to collect and track food safety spending for all of these agencies. Budgets are essential because they are policies.
When the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently released the president’s request for fiscal year 2025, Congress was running out of time to prepare for a potential government shutdown as the fiscal year 2024 budget remained incomplete. .
At a minimum, monitoring the federal budget requires tracking it with historical goals, current moving targets, and future demands in mind. But what is far more confusing is how the federal budget is presented.
Before we go any further, we should ask the Alliance for a Stronger FDA to provide a budget analysis and timely speech on these issues. The Alliance provided me with a document that I also understood.
From there, we learned that the FDA’s food safety budget this year is $1.186 billion, and that the president will increase it by $61 million to $1.247 billion in fiscal year 2025.
Interestingly, it is also located near USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). He’s got a billion here, he’s got a billion there, and that starts to add up for food safety.
But nothing about this is easy. Federal budget documents appear to only show dollar increases in broad spending areas. You often scratched your head and thought, “What if Hank did this?”
At some point, we hope to provide our readers with the total budgets of all federal agencies that play a role in food safety. I can’t do it today.
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