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“Smoked” Sausage [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-05
3,500 workers from FDA were fired at the beginning of April out of a workforce of 19,500 full-time equivalent employees. Add another 1000 in voluntary separations and FDA is left with about 15k, a 25% reduction.
An unnamed source said that FDA’s Office of Inspections and Investigations (OII) San Francisco laboratory has been decimated in the RIF.
“So, we are keeping inspectors but not the people who test the samples,” they said.
Now if you don’t eat food, take pills, or depend on medical devices, you can just skip to the next story. The rest of us, though, need to be afraid. How afraid? Very.
In any sane world RIFs occur after there has been either a reduction in the responsibilities of the organization or someone has figured out (and tested) a way to increase productivity. All of these reductions have occurred with no commensurate reductions in FDA’s responsibilities. And nobody has publicized any magical machinery – AI or otherwise – that could possibly increase productivity at FDA by 25%.
We can only conclude that we, the taxpaying public, are going to have to accept a 25% reduction in output from what most of us would consider to be a mission critical agency.
Why should you be concerned? I could wax on forever, but I’ll just leave you with one anecdote from the Senate hearings that occurred when Congress was considering the first American food and drug law in 1906.
Before 1906 there was never any national food or drug law. Consumers were on their own. By 1906 meat processing had evolved from family butcher shops to giant meat packing factories. Cleanliness was lost in the competition for profits. Of course, the piles of scrap meat attracted rats. You couldn’t have rats eating the profits, so THE WORKERS SPREAD POISONED BREAD AROUND TO KILL THE RATS.
The workers were then directed to clean the place up, which they did by shoveling the dead rats, the remaining poisoned bread, and the scrap meat into holes in the floors. Those holes led to grinders on the floor below. The mixture was ground together and sold as ‘smoked sausage’.
This story first became known to the American public in ‘The Jungle’ by Upton Sinclair. Subsequent investigations by Congress and the President confirmed that it was not only true, but was systematic in the food processing industry.
Could this happen again? It certainly could. Take away the laws that prevent it from happening today, or, even worse, keep the laws, but stop enforcing them, and QUALITY STANDARDS WILL GO INTO FREE-FALL. Exactly the same thing will happen again. To be frank, people will die by the millions.
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