President Clinton yesterday signed an executive order calling for a new interagency body to consider risks to the nation's food supply, such as chemical or microbial contamination.
The Council on Food Safety is to be jointly chaired by Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala and Neal Lane, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (Rick Weiss, Washington Post). Clinton said the council's mission is to develop a "comprehensive strategic plan" for federal food safety activities by establishing a coordinated, science-based framework for federal decisionmaking. It will not have any new regulatory authority, but it will coordinate the budgets of agencies that regulate food safety and identify food research "gaps" (Wall Street Journal).
The move came less than a week after the release of a National Academy of Sciences report that denounced the current patchwork character of the federal food safety system. For example, the manufacturing of frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, whereas a frozen pepperoni and cheese pizza is regulated by the Agriculture Dept. (Reuters/Washington Times).
In addition to Shalala, Glickman and Lane, the new council will include the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Secretary of Commerce, director of the Office of Management and Budget, assistant to the President for domestic policy, and the director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. The council is to review last week's NAS report and present its recommendations to Clinton in six months (Weiss, Washington Post).
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