WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) today sent a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack asking why he never requested funding flexibility from Congressional Appropriators to avoid furloughing crucial employees like food safety inspectors.
“USDA has had more than a year and a half to prepare for these spending reductions,” Johanns said. “During that time, Sec. Vilsack asked Congress to give USDA funds to the Department of Interior to roundup wild horses and requested additional funds to process the 2012 Census of Agriculture, among other spending changes. However, no request was made to prioritize keeping food safety inspectors on the job. I hope the absence of such a request is not intentional.
“Americans are tired of this Administration playing the blame game and leading from behind.”
Vilsack and USDA officials have requested more than $100 million worth of funding flexibility as part of the upcoming Continuing Resolution, which funds government operations for the remainder of fiscal year 2013, but has not requested additional funding for the Food Safety and Inspection Service.
Full text of the letter is available HERE or below:
Dear Secretary Vilsack:
Thank you for your letter of March 8, 2013, in response to a letter I sent with my colleagues on February 26, 2013, regarding the impact of sequestration on meat and poultry inspection.
I appreciate you recognizing “that furloughing our food safety inspectors would have harmful consequences for consumers, the economy, the meat and poultry industry, and our workforce.” Your letter notes that 80 percent of FSIS funding is dedicated to salaries and benefits. In light of this, you undoubtedly anticipated many months ago the need to prioritize food safety inspectors. Yet, you chose not to request funding flexibility to avoid furloughs.
Your letter states that you “view such furloughs as the last option we would implement” to achieve the required savings. Yet, one of your first options to avoid the furloughs—requesting funding flexibility in the Continuing Resolution—was never pursued. Based on your requests to the Appropriations Committees, you apparently deemed the following priorities more worthy of requests:
• Authority to transfer up to $10 million from USDA to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management for rounding up wild horses.
• An additional $19 million for expenses associated with data collection and processing for the 2012 Census of Agriculture.
• The flexibility to transfer funds between Farm Service Agency and Rural Development to supplement the availability of home loans.
• Providing an additional $75 million to the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to ensure benefits are available to all individuals.
It is not my intention to suggest that any of these priorities are unimportant, but why would the Administration have failed to submit a similar request in order to prevent the harmful consequences of furloughing food safety inspectors, as outlined in your letter? This lack of effort seems to suggest that there is no interest in resolving this issue. Instead, it seems that the threat of inspector furloughs is simply part of the Administration’s broader messaging efforts to make the sequestration seem as painful as possible. Our country’s food safety and the livelihood of our nation’s meat producers should not be used as pawns in such a manner.
I sincerely hope this is not the case, and I would welcome information about any requests you have made to Congress in order to preserve food safety inspections. Clearly, you submitted requests to preserve, and in some cases increase, funding for some USDA priorities; I would appreciate knowing why food safety inspection did not rise to that level.
Sincerely,
Mike Johanns
United States Senator
No comments:
Post a Comment