FDA's Excuses to Court on Food Safety Rule Delays Are Unconvincing

The saga of the missing FDA food safety regulations continues with a new government filing in a lawsuit challenging FDA's failure to promulgate regulations implementing three critical programs that Congress established in the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011. As I noted in a previous posting, the three sets of regulations are currently bottled up in the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), where they have gathered dust for a year. Well before the statutory deadlines, FDA sent OIRA proposed regulations requiring most food processors and manufacturers to come up with hazard analysis at critical control point (HACCP) programs, requiring growers to comply with "science-based" minimum sanitation standards, and for importers to verify that their products were produced under conditions that complied with FDA food safety requirements. But the deadlines came and went while OIRA sat on the regulations to avoid criticism from Republicans during the 2012 election season. Last summer, the Center for Food Safety and the Center for Environmental Health sued FDA (and the White House) for failing to meet the deadlines and asked the court, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, to order FDA to promulgate the rules by a date certain.