An Examination of the Removal of Federal Meat and Poultry Inspection

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is one of the largest federal agencies in the U.S. It has many different subdivisions. Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is one of them. FSIS is responsible for ensuring that the nation's commercial supply of meat, poultry, and egg products is safe, healthy, and correctly labeled and packaged. Last year, the U.S. House of Representatives has introduced an enormous bill called the Food and Energy Security Act of 2007. Nutrition, conservation, energy, producer income protection, rural development, trade, forestry, and livestock are the major provisions that are part of this massive farm bill. The purpose of this paper is to examine how a policy issue is introduced, planned, and carried out, along with the differences among the state inspections and federal inspection techniques to show how effective they are. In the livestock provision, it stated that this bill would remove all federal inspection of meat and poultry products done by the USDA-FSIS in the U.S. Inspection would then have been done by individual states with their own individual agendas. This would have lowered food safety standards by encouraging meat and poultry producers t