Keeping America's Families Safe: Reforming the Food Safety System

FDA is the gold standard worldwide among public health agencies. After many years of inadequate resources, Congress has provided significant funding increases to FDA for food safety and related activities such as information technology. While it is important to sustain these increases, FDA also needs a modernization of its authorities. The powers the agency was given 100 years ago were appropriate for a world in which most of our food was grown and processed domestically. That is no longer the case, and FDA’s tools need to keep pace with the challenges.