On Thursday, USDAs Inspector General issued a report on the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety Inspection Services (FSIS) New Swine Inspection System (NSIS), which went into effect in October 2019. The report concluded that FSIS didnt fully disclose sources for its analysis on how the rule would affect worker safety.
NSIS is a voluntary program that is designed to increase efficiency and effectiveness of the federal inspection process and to provide more flexibility for adopting new food-safety technologies. In its response, FSIS stated that the worker safety analysis was not used as a basis for the NSIS rulemaking, and the agency feels the inspector general has placed distorted emphasis on minor omissions in the NSIS proposal text, including a website citation and a typo in a table.
The response also reinforced the responsibility that Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), not FSIS, holds for regulating employee safety.