Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Protected from terrorists, threatened by food


The emptiest boast of the Bush-Cheney presidency—and the source of its worst failures—is its claimed prowess as an efficient manager of the public's needs.

A growing list of flops proves its ineptness:

- The Iraq war was launched with inadequate armor and supplies for combat troops, with no-bid contracts for corporate cronies that led to scandals in shabby construction, reckless shootings of Iraq civilians by civilian mercenaries and skyrocketing costs of $10 billion per month.

- Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, was met with slow and pitiful aid and to this day has left rehabilitation of the city incomplete.

- Treatment of returning wounded veterans of the Iraq war was slipshod until news reporters exposed the Pentagon's inattention.

- Port cargo arriving from abroad is largely uninspected.

- Tax collections have fallen drastically because of inadequate funding of the Internal Revenue Service and outsourcing to private collection firms.

- Imported prescription drugs with uninspected, dangerous ingredients were only belatedly discovered and banned.

Those, however, pale when compared to the damage incurred by chintzy budgeting for the Food and Drug Administration. Despite a small bump in spending, the budget for FDA's foods inspection program is down 133 positions from 2005.

While FDA funds were being cut, one tainted food scandal after another has terrified Americans.

Recalls have included more than 143 pounds of beef, E.-coli-contaminated spinach, peanut butter poisoned by salmonella and toxic pet foods from China.

And now it's clear that Mexican peppers have been a source of salmonella that has stricken 1,400 Americans.

The scandal here is that border inspectors had been turning away tested samples of diseased peppers, but the majority of 491,000 tons of Mexican peppers imported into the United States went unchecked.

The FDA can't be blamed for this failure. The agency has been hamstrung by insufficient budgets and personnel, leaving it to inspect less than 2 percent of all imported foods and drugs.

What folly. The White House and Congress will spend $120 billion a year on war in Iraq, but penny pinch on programs to protect Americans from dangerous, poisonous foods and drugs.

Protecting Americans at home from terrorists is meaningless if Americans can't feel safe with the food they eat or the medicines they take.




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