House Republicans vote to cut funds to implement food safety

[frigidmagi]

Washington Post

[quote]Arguing that the U.S. food supply is 99 percent safe, House Republicans cut millions of dollars Thursday from the Food and Drug Administration’s budget, denying the agency money to implement landmark food safety laws approved by the last Congress.

Saying the cuts were needed to lower the national deficit, the House also reduced funding to the Agriculture Department’s food safety inspection service, which oversees meat, poultry and some egg products. And lawmakers chopped $832 million from an emergency feeding program for poor mothers, infants and children. Hunger groups said that change would deny emergency nutrition to about 325,000 mothers and children.

The House also waded into a controversial issue pending at the FDA, forbidding the agency from approving the sale of genetically engineered salmon, a matter that has triggered an intense debate about the place of biotechnology in the food supply.

No Democrats voted in favor of the agriculture appropriations bill, which passed by a vote of 217 to 203. Nineteen Republicans joined the Democrats in opposition.

The White House opposed many of the cuts, saying they would force the USDA to furlough inspectors at meat and poultry processing plants and leave the FDA unable to meet the requirements of a food safety law passed in December. The legislation, which was the first major change to the nation’s food safety laws since 1938, calls for the FDA to significantly step up scrutiny of domestic and imported food and devise a system aimed at preventing the kind of contamination that sickens one in six Americans every year.

The law, which received bipartisan support, followed years of cutbacks at the FDA and waves of food-borne illnesses linked to foods as varied as spinach, peanuts and cookie dough.

To carry out the new law, President Obama is seeking $955 million the FDA’s food safety program in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.

Republican leaders in the House pared back that to $750 million, which is $87 million less than the agency currently is receiving for food safety.

They also shaved $35 million from the USDA’s food safety and inspection service.

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), chairman of the House subcommittee that wrote the agriculture appropriations bill, said the cuts to food safety were justified because the nation’s food supply was “99.99 percent safe.â€

[LadyTevar]

WTF? Are they serious? Even the problem over in Germany should have been able warning that we need to keep food safety standards high! Or are they thinking "oh, well, that was Germany", and forgetting how the US has had recfalls on spinach, tomatoes, and other foods recently?

[The Minx]

So, they're arguing that the food is not perfectly safe. What price is the life of a person in their eyes?

[LadyTevar]

The price of a human life? Not their problem. After all, it won't be THEIR food that's affected, no sirrie. It'll be those damn brown people whose children will die.


*snarl* Bastards.