— OPINION — In case you missed it, among the Supreme Court’s panoply of precedent shredding opinions last week was one that overruled the court’s watershed 1984 decision in Chevron U.S.A.
v. Natural Resources Defense Council . Under Chevron , federal courts deferred to an agency’s interpretation of a law, as long as the interpretation was reasonable.
Last Friday’s ruling gives federal judges more leeway to question federal agency decision making. The ruling has important implications for food safety. To understand why, consider that federal food safety agencies, like federal agencies more generally, are not the most dynamic organizations.
Risk aversion tends to permeate their organizational cultures. Advocates for regulatory reforms—whether pro-consumer or pro-business—know that simply disrupting the status quo often poses the greatest obstacle to their agenda. Federal agencies often will not act until required to do so by extraordinary circumstances, like dead children.
In 1994, the families of four children who died in the Jack in the Box hamburger E.coli outbreak succeeded in pushing the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), led by then-Administrator Michael Taylor, to change its beef inspection rules. In the fall of that year, FSIS announced that it would begin testing raw ground beef from federally-inspected establishments and retail stores for E.
Coli O157:H7. If a sample tested positive for the pathogen, FSIS would treat it as “adulterat.
