April 7, Transmitted via facsimile. Dear Chairman Aderholt:

Transcription

1 April 7, 2014 Representative Robert Aderholt, Chairman House Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations 2264 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC Transmitted via facsimile Dear Chairman Aderholt: I am writing to set the record straight on the shortages of inspection personnel being encountered by USDA s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). I understand that you raised the veracity of the February 20, 2014 New York Times article on this issue ( American Meat Plants Said to Face Shortages of Inspectors 1 ) during the April 3, 2014 hearing before your subcommittee. Food & Water Watch was cited in that article, so that is why I feel compelled to write to you. Food & Water Watch has long been concerned about the proper inspection staffing for U.S. meat, poultry, and egg products facilities. We have heard over the years that chronic shortages in some areas of the country have led to slaughter and processing facilities not receiving adequate inspection. My organization submits an annual Freedom of Information Act request to FSIS for the monthly vacancy rates for in-plant inspection personnel by each FSIS district. There have been some years, due to budget constraints, that most FSIS districts suffered from high vacancy rates. Beginning in FY 2008, enough resources were being made available to the agency so that it could properly staff inspection assignments. The vacancy rates in several of the FSIS districts fell dramatically. However, some areas of the country, particularly in the northeast, continued to encounter high vacancy rates due to the fact that the salaries paid to FSIS inspectors could not compete with those paid in the private sector. Before FSIS reorganized its field district offices in 2013, it was not uncommon for the inspection assignments that fell under the jurisdiction of the former Albany, New York District Office to have inspector vacancy rates as high as 20 percent. That was not the agency s fault, but was instead a problem attributed to the labor market conditions in that area of the country. The agency tried all sorts of incentives to attract applicants to take jobs in that area of the country, but they met with limited success. The agency s ability to staff its inspection assignments adequately began to change in FY 2012 when it embarked on a policy not to hire permanent inspectors to fill vacancies, but instead to hire temporary inspectors to fill the positions. As you know, the agency proposed a rule on January 27, 2012 that would drastically change the way inspection is conducted in poultry slaughter plants ( Modernization of Poultry Slaughter Inspection, Fed. Reg ). The public comment period for this proposed rule closed on May 29, The agency received over 175,000 comments and most of those were opposed to the proposed rule. With the comment period barely closed, the agency posted a job announcement in May 2012 that it 1 Nixon, Ron. American Meat Plants Said to Face Shortages of Inspectors. New York Times. February 20, 2014.

2 intended to hire temporary inspectors for one-year appointments. This job announcement was renewed in May The intent of the job announcement was very clear. It stated: As the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) looks to transition through modernization and implementation of the New Poultry Slaughter Inspection System, the Agency is announcing temporary Food Inspector positions to facilitate the transition and to help ensure seamless implementation should the Agency decide to proceed with implementation of the new system. 2 The advertised positions are not confined to those locales that have poultry plants, but temporary positions are also open in cities where there is not a poultry plant located in close proximity. This is the first instance that anyone can remember that the agency has advertised for temporary inspectors. Not only are these positions limited to one-year appointments, but the incumbents do not receive full Federal government benefits, such as health insurance and pension benefits. In addition, temporary employees do not enjoy the same personnel rights as permanent Federal government employees. The agency had thought it could proceed with implementation of this new inspection system in FY 2013, but because of food safety, worker safety and animal welfare concerns that have been raised about the new inspection system, the rule has yet to be finalized by the Obama Administration. The agency had requested that its FY 2013 and FY 2014 appropriations be cut in anticipation of implementing the new inspection system and through not filling permanent inspector slots that had become vacant. While the agency has frozen the hiring of permanent inspection personnel when vacancies develop, it has encountered difficulty in attracting candidates to take the temporary inspector positions because of their limited duration and because the jobs do not come with the same benefits and rights accorded to permanent Federal employees. As a consequence, the vacancy rates have increased across the country. FSIS districts that had once enjoyed 100 percent inspector employment levels now have vacancies they cannot fill. It has caused some districts to use veterinarians (GS-11 or higher) and Enforcement, Investigation, and Analysis Officers (GS-9 or higher) to staff slaughter lines that are normally assigned to GS-5 and GS-7 Food Inspectors. Other inspection personnel are being doubled-up and tripled-up in the their assignments. Because of the information we were learning about the vacancies, we sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on February 10, 2014 expressing our concerns. 3 It was that letter that served as the basis for the February 20, 2014 New York Times story. The agency cannot pretend that it did not know what was occurring with staffing because in one version of the FY 2015 Explanatory Notes, the following statement appears: FSIS took steps to permanently reduce personnel through actions such as the modernization of poultry slaughter methods, consolidating 15 District Offices into 10, imposing hiring restrictions, improving efficiency through systems like PHIS, 2 See FSIS Job Announcement See 2

3 using shared services, reorganizing some staff functions and disbanding the Office of International Affairs to increase effectiveness for both the staff and field. FSIS also permitted its hire lag to increase in FY 2013 to reduce salary costs. If the agency continued current operations, some of the staff reductions that the Agency has absorbed would not be sustainable, and it would be vital to the successful accomplishment of the Food Safety mission to back-fill these positions. However, due to anticipation of Poultry Slaughter Modernization rule publication in FY 2014, the Agency has determined that it is not prudent to rehire the formerly filled positions at this time because the new methods for poultry slaughter requires fewer Federal in plant personnel. While this will continue short term staffing and scheduling issues, FSIS thinks that it can continue to operate effectively until it begins to implement modernization of poultry slaughter methods. In this manner FSIS will avoid hiring and then firing inspectors as Poultry Slaughter Modernization further decreases the available inspector positions and the overall Agency costs. 4 There is another set of FY 2015 Explanatory Notes in which that paragraph has been removed. 5 That in and of itself should raise concerns for you and your Subcommittee about the trustworthiness of the top officials at the agency who have prepared the budget request that is currently under consideration. Since the new hiring policy went into effect, there has been an increase in the number of recalls announced by FSIS because products under its jurisdiction have entered into commerce without the benefit of inspection. There were four such announcements in 2012; there were six in 2013; and we have already experienced three so far in The most recent round of recalls caused by the lack of inspection involved the 8.7 million pounds of beef products being pulled from the market produced by the now-defunct Rancho Feeding Corporation in Petaluma, California. Our information indicates that there was a shortage of inspection personnel assigned to that plant. What is interesting is that soon after that recall was expanded on February 8, 2014, Dr. Keith Gilmore, Executive Associate for the Office of Field Operations at FSIS sent the following to Charles Stanley Painter, the Chairman of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Local Unions. As you know, Mr. Painter resides in Crossville, Alabama and is one of your constituents. On Thursday, February 13, :55 AM, Gilmore, Keith FSIS <Keith.Gilmore@fsis.usda.gov> wrote: 4 United States Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service Explanatory Notes, p see 5 See 6 See FSIS-RC ; FSIS-RC ; FSIS-RC ; FSIS-RC ; FSIS-RC ; FSIS- RC (expansion); FSIS-RC ; FSIS-RC ; FSIS-RC ; FSIS-RC ; FSIS- RC ; FSIS-RC (expansion); FSIS- RC

4 Stan, I wanted to give you a heads up on some new BUE hiring that the Agency is going to proceed with. As you probably heard, we had a couple of incidents that recently occurred in California and New Jersey that got considerable press. In California, Rancho Foods was found guilty of slaughtering diseased cull cattle without the benefit of ante-mortem inspection during the lunch hour when IPP were in the office. In New Jersey, Catelli was suspended for inhumane handling based on video taken by HSUS. In both instances, our employees were in the plants, however were not in the pens at the time that these activities were occurring. As a result, Congress is upset with the Agency, and we are being asked to address the situation. One of the items we plan on doing moving forward is to hire up to 32 new permanent full time FI s, and put them in each of our high risk plants those slaughtering significant numbers of veal and cull cows. It is expected that these employees, along with others currently stationed at these plants, will take turns rotating between online inspection, and doing humane handling observations in the pens. Our goal is to have a permanent inspection presence in the pens to ensure animals are handled humanely in the high risk slaughter operations. If you have any questions, please call me. Keith Gilmore Executive Associate for Regulatory Operations 210 Walnut St Room 923 Des Moines, IA OFO-Verifying food safety and animal welfare every day. The reference in the to BUE hiring is describing bargaining unit employee hiring, or permanent inspectors. FI refers to Food Inspectors. What is especially troubling about Dr. Gilmore s is that the USDA Office of Inspector General (OIG) found in 2008 that FSIS had failed to station inspection personnel in holding pens of cull cow slaughter facilities after the OIG conducted its investigation into the Hallmark/Westland beef recall for some of the same issues raised in the Rancho Feeding recall. 7 Six years later and we find that the agency has still not addressed the problem. But the agency s duplicity on the inspector shortage issue does not end there. On March 31, 2014 three days before the Acting Under Secretary for Food Safety and the Deputy FSIS 7 United States Department of Agriculture Office of the Inspector General. Audit Report: Evaluation of Management Controls Over Pre-Slaughter Activities. Report No KC. November

5 Administrator testified before your Subcommittee and told you that there were no staffing shortages, Dr. Gilmore sent this to your constituent, Mr. Painter: On Monday, March 31, :15 PM, Gilmore, Keith FSIS wrote: Stan, I wanted to let you know that we have assessed staffing and will begin the hiring of permanent full time inspectors in hard to fill locations. The Districts let us know where their critical staffing needs were, and we selected from that list. We will be announcing 22 PFT positions in the near future. The locations for the announcements will be: Tolleson AZ 1 Schuyler NE 1 Fort Morgan CO 1 Greeley CO 1 Grand Island NE 1 Wallula WA 1 Ottumwa IA 2 Cactus TX 1 Del Rio TX 1 Logansport IN 1 Delphi IN 1 Rantoul IL 1 Plainwell MI 1 Tar Heel NC 2 Ellijay GA 1 Millsboro DE 1 Souderton PA 2 Wyalusing PA 2 Keith Gilmore Executive Associate for Regulatory Operations 210 Walnut St Room 923 Des Moines, IA OFO-Verifying food safety and animal welfare every day. What the agency officials told you last Thursday in response to your question was not completely honest. The analogy to having 200 substitute teachers fill in staffing shortages is inaccurate in light of the recent s from Dr. Gilmore. I would like to share two other pieces of information that might of interest to you. First is a chart that was provided by the FSIS Denver District management to representatives of the National 5

6 Joint Council of Food Inspection Local Unions at a January 2014 meeting. 8 I call your attention to the column that has the numbers with the minus signs. Those numbers reflect the number of inspector vacancies by FSIS district. The total number of inspector vacancies nationally was 864 positions in January. The analogy of 200 substitute teachers breaks down again in light of this figure I know that when I went to school, substitute teachers had enough difficulty controlling one classroom assignment much less four. Second, on March 19, 2014, the agency issued FSIS Notice 14-14, Instructions for Conducting Verification Tasks on Missed Inspection Visits in Meat or Poultry Processing Facilities. 9 Does the Notice refer to any disruptions to production when inspectors are not able to make their daily inspection visits? No. But it begs the question of whether agency officials are condoning a violation of statutes and regulations. So once again, the witnesses were disingenuous to you are and the Subcommittee in their testimony on Thursday. The only error that the New York Times made in its February 20 story on the inspector shortages was that it incorrectly attributed the January percent inspector vacancy rate in the Raleigh District to information Food & Water Watch received in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. That information was communicated verbally by the Raleigh District Manager Mr. Steve Lalicker, directly to your constituent Mr. Painter at a January 2014 meeting. The New York Times posted a correction to the story that read as follows: Correction: February 27, 2014 An article on Friday about meat and poultry plants that are said to face a shortage of inspectors misidentified the source of a statistic showing an 11 percent vacancy rate for inspectors in the Raleigh, N.C., area. The information came from the Agriculture Department; it was not from data obtained under a Freedom of Information request by Food and Water Watch, a consumer advocacy group in Washington. 10 The agency officials who testified before you on April 3, 2014 have never worked a day as FSIS inspectors. The Alice-in-Wonderland perspective that they have of what is going on in the field is pure fantasy. The inspectors we have come to know are dedicated public servants whose primary motivation is to protect consumers from unsafe and unwholesome meat, poultry and egg products. They work in some of the most inhospitable conditions imaginable. Their jobs are being made tougher by the irresponsible staffing decisions being concocted in Washington. I would highly recommend that you contact your constituent, Mr. Painter, to learn about what is really going on in the field assignments where over 70 percent of the FSIS staff work. That should provide you with the reality check that the Congress desperately needs about the operations of this agency. 8 See 9 See 10 Editorial correction. American Meat Plants Said to Face Shortages of Inspectors. New York Times. February 27,

7 Should you have any questions regarding this letter, please feel free to contact me. Sincerely, Wenonah Hauter Executive Director cc: Representative Sam Farr Representative Rosa DeLauro Representative Sanford Bishop Representative David Valadao 7