Meat&Poultry - February 2012 - 18

Washington
BY BERNARD SHIRE
meatpoultry@sosland.com

Government cutbacks cause concern
While the Presidential election won’t take place for another nine months, from the amount of newspaper space and airtime the campaign is occupying, voters might think Election Day is tomorrow. The Republican candidates have been castigating each other more than they are criticizing
Vilsack

an infinitesimally tiny slice of USDA’s annual budget of $145 billion for 2012. Vilsack disclosed this last month at a meeting of the American Farm Bureau Federation in Hawaii. These “savings” will come from shutting down a number of Farm Service Agency (FSA) offices, which serve farmers across the country on a daily basis; shutting a number of Food Stamp offices; cutbacks to the Agriculture Research Service, and slicing seven other USDA agencies, including Rural Development and the Food Safety and Inspection Service. As part of this effort, USDA also plans to consolidate a number of cell phone plans in the department. The FSIS budget for the coming year is estimated at a little over $1 billion, a slight cutback from the current year. But the main cutbacks at FSIS, which are being proposed rather quietly, would close a number of FSIS district offices, which control the inspection of meat and poultry products in USDA-regulated plants across the country. Under the Obama plan, the number of district offices would be re-

duced from 15 to 10. The FSIS offices to be closed include Albany, NY; Beltsville, Md.; Madison, Wis.; Minneapolis, Minn.; and Lawrence, Kan. This is the first major change to FSIS’ structure in more than 15 years, according to Dr. Elisabeth Hagen, Undersecretary for Food Safety, and Al Almanza, FSIS Administrator, who spoke with the employees who will be affected by the consolidation. “We will do everything we can to limit the impact on our employees and their families, including offering all permanent employees an option to move to another location, as well as exploring telework possibilities for affected employees,” Almanza said. But the real question is how this consolidation will affect the day-today work of USDA in the poultry and meat plants. The FSIS district offices, and the district managers who head those offices, supervise the work of FSIS “frontline” supervisors, who are the midlevel supervisors out in the field, and who supervise the FSIS meat and poultry inspectors. How that will change with the reduction in

President Obama. And because the country is still mired in a recession, bot h Republicans and Democrats are crowing about how much government spending they are cutting back in order to shrink the size of the federal government and save taxpayers money. While tax cutting has been pretty much a Republican practice, with Democrats generally moving in the other direction, President Obama has decided to make some headlines by cutting government spending in his administration.

Hagen

Almanza

Maybe he’s getting tired of being called a “socialist” by the Republicans. Curiously, he’s picked on the US Dept. of Agriculture to absorb a lot of these spending cuts. He and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack recently announced the closure of 259 domestic USDA offices, labs and other facilities in 46 states, as part of an effort to “save” $150 million a year,

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Meat&Poultry - February 2012

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