Reagan, Bush, and Rotten Eggs
Excellent article (as usual) by Jonathan Cohn:
The next time you hear a conservative ranting about big government, ask him how he likes his eggs–plain or with a side of salmonella.
As you’ve probably heard by now, a massive egg recall is underway. A Midwest producer shipped tainted eggs to supermarkets across the country, causing more than 1,300 known infections–with more, possibly, to come. The company ran the kind of factory farming operation that, experts have long warned, made salmonella infection more likely. Its owner had previously paid millions in fines for violating labor and safety regulations. But nobody had inspected the plant and, as a result, nobody knew about the contamination until after people started getting sick.
Outbreaks of food-borne illness are nothing new in modern America. Last year it was tainted peanut butter. Before that it was leaf spinach, hamburger meat, and jalapeño peppers. A new set of federal egg safety rules just went into effect, while a bipartisan bill to strengthen the Food and Drug Administration has passed the House and seems headed for approval in the Senate. Experts seem confident these steps will improve safety substantially. But consumer advocates and sympathetic officials have advocated such changes for more than a decade. That egg regulation has been under discussion since 1999, when the Clinton Administration first proposed it.
Why the long delay? And are we really doing better now?
The answers are long and complicated, so, for the moment, let me focus on just one element: The new standards for egg production. Based on what several sources, including former FDA officials, tell TNR, the saga of these standards seems like a case study in how conservative politics and conservative politicians have weakened federal regulation, exposing the public to greater health risks.
This is not a story that begins with the administration of George W. Bush. It begins, instead, with the administration of Ronald Reagan. Convinced that excessive regulation was stifling American innovation and imposing unnecessary costs on the public, Reagan’s team changed the way government makes rules.
Prior to the 1980s, agencies like the FDA had authority to finalize regulations on their own. Reagan changed that, forcing agencies to submit all regulations to the Office of Management and Budget, which cast a more skeptical eye on anything that would require the government or business to spend more money. The regulatory process slowed down and, in many cases, the people in charge of it became more skittish.
Clinton didn’t share Reagan’s antipathy to regulation. Prodded by consumer advocates and more liberal Democrats, his administration announced its intention to impose new safety requirements on the egg industry. But that happened in 1999, a year before Clinton left office. When George W. Bush succeeded him, the administration’s posture reverted to its 1980s version.
Like Reagan, Bush was skeptical of government interference in the market. And, like Reagan, he appointed officials sympathetic to businesses that wanted to avoid the cost of complying with new federal rules. It was not until 2004, five years after Clinton had proposed the new egg rules, that the Bush Administration issued actual regulatory language. And by 2009, when Bush left office, the administration still had not finalized the rule.
William Hubbard, who was associate FDA commissioner from 1991 until 2005 and now advises the Alliance for a Stronger FDA, tells TNR that the delay was not accidental: . . .
