Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Food safety in the United States is chiefly regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but regulation is in fact diffused, primarily to states, which conduct the majority of federal inspections under contract with the FDA. Recent high-profile failures such as Chipotle’s multiple outbreaks have heightened the salience of food safety policy and demonstrate the interconnectivity of the country’s food safety system and the key role that states play in food safety. Since 2007, federal oversight of food safety has been on the Government Accountability Office’s High Risk List.  Chronic underfunding of the FDA is one relevant factor in this risk assessment.  Yet an Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigation, conducted in response to a widespread outbreak from peanut butter in 2009, identified numerous weaknesses in FDA’s oversight of its state contracts, as well as a failure among states to complete their required number of inspections.  The 2009 outbreak led to recent landmark criminal convictions, but the policy world has yet to adequately examine this growing phenomenon of relying on states for core regulatory functions.

This paper is designed to explore the performance and public health implications of FDA’s increasing reliance on states for food safety compliance.  I draw on food safety expertise I accrued during my previous professional experience at the GAO and build upon qualitative work in this area utilizing data, analyzed with NVivo, from 53 semi-structured interviews with federal and governmental actors responsible for food safety, officials in organizations performing inspections under contract, and representatives from stakeholder groups including consumer safety advocates and professional food safety organizations, as well as FDA officials and managers and state food safety officials. I use these data, along with additional information about states, to measure and analyze the relationship between states’ regulatory capacity and key performance and public health indicators, utilizing 14 years of detailed Centers for Disease Control (CDC) data on foodborne illness outbreaks.  Specifically, I address the following research questions:  To what extent does variation across states’ management capacities affect reporting rates of foodborne illness outbreaks? Does increased capacity lead to more robust reporting? Are states with greater regulatory capacity more likely to identify the cause of outbreaks than other states, a key indicator of performance? What are the policy implications of these performance and outcome variations?