♪ next officials from the fda and usda at a forum on food safety and nutrition. then a panel with alan simpson and michael nutter on congress and the federal budget. and later a hearing on designating some financial institutions too big to fail. tomorrow night, marco rubio is the keynote speaker at a south carolina republican party fundraiser. other speakers include south carolina governor nicki hailey and lindsey graham and jim demi demint. 8:00 p.m. eastern tomorrow on c-span. even though job opportunities are scarce in this

economy, it's not for nothing that you have spent this time preparing. you don't determine a man's greatness by his talent or wealth as the world does, by rather what it takes to discourage him. america needs your talent and skill. >> don't accept somebody else's construction of the way it ought to be. it's up to you to right wrongs. it's up to you to point out injustice. it's up to you to hold the system accountable. and sometimes upended entirely. it's up to you to stand up and to be heard, to march, to organize, to vote. don't be content to just sit back and watch. >> president obama and mitt romney delivered commencement addresses in the past few days. you can watch them online any time at the c-span video library and over the next few weeks look for other commencement addresses on the c-span networks which you

can clip and share. the food commissioner michael taylor talked about food contamination and preventing food safety problems. he talked about food regulator shift from responding to preventing food contamination. he spoke at the consumer federation of america's conference in washington, d.c. it's about 40 minutes. >> good morning. i'm the director of the son coup consumer federation of america. i would like to thank our sponsors and our advisory committee for their help in putting together this great agenda. we had a great day yesterday. looking forward to another great panel. we'll be tweeting the conference again this year.

so you can follow us at cfafoodpolicy. katie bryan is going to be live tweeting the speeches and panel sessions. we have a hash tag that's food policy conference. we have a terrific program today. in just a few minutes, we'll hear from mike taylor, deputy commissioner of foods at the food and drug commission. we'll hear from undersecretary for consumer services kevin cohn cannon. a giving an update of a number of the key administrative initiatives that have been going forward. we'll see where things are and where they are headed. we're pleased to have mike taylor here with us. before he begins, i would like to introduce carol tucker foreman. she's has a distinguished

history of working on food issue as an consumer advocate for cfa. i'd like to turn it over to carol. carol? >> thanks, chris. good morning. good morning, folks. it's a terrific pleasure to be able to introduce mike taylor, the deputy commissioner of foods for the food and drug administration this morning. consumer advocates who work with mike know that there's no other federal official who has ever brought the same level of intelligence, energy, creativity and integrity to the effort to make our food supply safer. as the administrator of the food safety and inspection service in the 1990s, he lead the effort to

install the system, modernizing meat and poultry inspection, and he declared e. coli a 157 h 7 to be an adult rat beginning the long effort to overcome that terrible pathogen. he with a lot of assistants along the way from caroline smith delawawall worked to modee fda's food safety programs. and then he sold it first to the obama administration and then to congress. we all celebrated the passage of the food safety and modernization act in late 2010. it's landmark legislation that completely reorients fda's approach to food safety and provides important new tools to reduce the 48 million illnesses and 3,000 deaths attributable to

food-born illness in the united states each year. consumer advocates and industry believed then and now that passage and implementation of the new law would spare thousands from the pain and suffering of food-born illness. we worked along victim who set aside their sorrow and came to plead for new legislation. and we worked alongside leaders in the food industry, some of whom are here today, who shared our believes that new law was necessary. we were successful in our effort in large part because in march of 2009, the newly inaugurated president of the united states endorsed the need for new law to

modernize fda's archaic food safety provisions. the president endorsed the legislation at each step along the way and signed it into law on january 4th 2011. even before the bill was signed, mike taylor had organized the staff at fda to produce within the very short time limits set by congress the massive body of proposed regulations necessary to make the law real. . it passed a law, but it doesn't mean anything until there are regulations to carry it out. and they have worked efficiently and massively to get ready to put this law into effect. while we have not seen the p proposed regulations, most of us in the broad coalition that

supported the bill feel confident that the agency has worked in good faith and that we will agree with a large part of what they propose. i'm pretty sure as well that we'll disagree with parts of it because there's never been a time that we didn't want an agency to go further and do more. i, for example, am absolutely sure that the fda will not invest the resources necessary to provide adequate inspection of food processing plants and too far in favor of industry self-regulation. remember i said it here. if and when that happens, cfa and the other consumer and public health groups will do our best to persuade the agency during the comment period to see the light and revise the regulations. we might even try to get congress to change the law if

that's necessary. that's part of the give and take that makes our system work. you have a debit over the law, you have a debate over the regulations, and by the end you have a product that's pretty well honed to do what it's intended to do. when planning this conference, we were really confident that this morning would provide an opportunity for all the people who worked on the legislation to get together and debate how well fda had done in its efforts to administer the new law in the most effective manner. we figured we would have had plenty of time to wade through the pages and be ready to congratulate the agency and argue for improvements in the final product. it's funny how life springs these little surprises on you. here we are over three years after the president endorsed the

legislation, 16 months after he signed the bill into law, five months after fda was to have implemented four major portions of the law and we're still waiting for omb to publish the proposed rules. not the final rules, but the proposed rules. a small staff of white house bureaucrats and their boss, the president of the united states, have brought the effort to bring new weapons to the fighting food-born illness to a complete halt. the administration that proposed transparency has dropped a shroud of secrecy over the fda's proposals. they have shut down what was to have been an open process. it won't go forward on a bill that the president endorsed and

signed and congress passed. it authored no reason for this for a simple reason. they don't have to. they can pretty much sit back and ignore our frustration. now mike is going to tell us that fda continues to move ahead educating the public and the industry and preparing for implementation. fda will indeed soldier on. that's what they have always done. the reason that we sought passage of this law was that fda had soldiered on for 70 years with legislative language that didn't address the problems of a modern food safety system and they are going to continue working on it, i'm sure. we're entering that season of the year when food-born illness cases tend to rise. in 2008 as the president campaigned across the country,

we became aware of an outbreak of salmonella attributable to contaminated peanut products. it continued all through the campaign and into 2009. in the end, nine people died over 600 people were made sick, hundreds of food products that no one knew had peanuts in them had to be recalled. the cost to the industry was billions of dollars. and endorsing the need for the new law, the president mentioned that food safety is something we cannot do for ourselves. it requires government action. and he added a personal note about his daughters -- the staple of his daughter's diet, peanut butter sandwiches. it would be an unspeakable tragedy if in the midst of his reelection campaign this year

another series of food-born illness outbreaks were to hit the country and the president had to explain why the bill was still sitting in the white house -- why the rules were still sitting in the white house. this will not end food-born illness, but it's also true that until we get a chance to debate the proposed rules and fda gets a chance to begin implementing final rules, the efforts to reduce food-born illness will be severely crippled and the american people exposed to unnecessary risk. as i said, mike is going to tell us all the things that fda is doing to try to overcome this additional burden that has been laid on them.

and we wish them well, but there's some things that even mike taylor can't accomplish by himself. so i'm going to say to y'all, rig write to your president, write to your members of congress. tell them to get these things off the desk and and start moving this thing forward. mike, thank you. >> now that's an introduction. it really is a really great honor for me personally to be introduced by carol tucker foreman. i was a young staff lawyer at the food and drug administration in the late '70s when carol was the assistant secretary for agriculture overseeing food safety and a bunch of other things. she was a big presence in my professional life then on a number of issues like nitrate,

and affecting those two programs. i saw carol in action then. and she was an unbelievable dynamic force. and she's been one for many years since. i don't think there's anybody who has had a more unairing deed and has been more evident i have in holding folks in government accountable for doing the right thing. we all benefit from it enormously. i also want to thank chris and cfa for inviting me to be here. glad to have this opportunity. this conference really is an important annual event. the food safety and nutrition community come together and it's a great opportunity for sharing information, but building opportunities and relationships for real collaboration and partnership to accomplish things. and it takes that to get things done in washington these days to say the least. i am going to talk about the food safety act and what we're doing to implement it.

i want to give you a process check. i also want to put what we're doing on the regulations in the context of a larger effort and in ways we're working to manage its work differently to make this law successful over the long-term. but let me just first answer the when question. that's the question that i get. here's the way i would answer it. i seriously want to be very reassuring. i wouldn't just blow smoke at carol tucker foreman in an attempt to be reassuring, because it would always come back to me. but i want to assure folks that throughout the administration, people are working hard to get this done and it will get done. it will get done soon. we're close. and i think the time it has taken is a reflection of the scale and complexity of the regulations. we have more than one. we have several major regulations that interconnected. they have to work together. we have had to do a lot of work

within fda to figure out how the pieces fit together. the review process, the normal process has been one in which legitimate questions are raised. and we feel very good about the way that process has gone. we feel very good about the proposals that we anticipate publishing soon. so just watch this space. keep your reading glasses close at hand. there's going to be a lot of work for folks in this room to be doing in the coming weeks and months on this matter. so again, i appreciate the sentiment and the spirit that underlies your remarks, carol, about the importance of getting this process going and everybody shares that and that's why folks are working hard to get that done. so don't despair and don't, again, keep an eye on us and we'll be shifting some burdens to you pretty soon.

one thing that i want to talk about is just in the way of just a sense of how we're seeing implementation is to talk about how we have approached developing these rules at sort of a high level. one element of it is the outreach that we have done. and in fact, we have invested e enormous effort over the last year plus since enactment in engaging the community that cares about this it. it was an industry/consumer coalition that brought this law into being. we have been benefitting enormously from a lot of engage ment in meetings and dialogue sessions, farm tours with folks across the food system and from the consumer community. i want to assure you that that input has very much informed our proposals. carol is absolutely right. when you read these proposals, you're going to find issues. we're going to have a robust comment process. we think we have done a pretty

good job of laying out framework for implementing this law as envisioned by those who came together and got it past, but we want to continue this dialogue in a serious way. it's got to be a robust comment period. we'll find ways to direct in person. we need your engagement to get the rules right. we are very much conscious of implementing this law in a way that carries forward the themes that were central to its enactment and the motivations that brought people together. it's all about prevention and achieving the public health goal of food-born illness through systematic farm to table prevention that's risk-based, targeted on interventions that can make a practical difference for improving food safety. a central theme of this law is recognizing industries capacity for producing safe food, but with clear standards for

implementation of modern preventive controls and enhanced accountability for meeting those standards on a continuous basis. the law, again, as you know, not only includes a mandate to set the standards we'll be setting through the regulations, but also new tools, new inspection mandates to ensure we get high rates of compliance. we take that extremely seriously. a third theme of the law is to address globalization. so the import tool kit is really transformative. shifting a system that's rested on the exam by fda inspectors to catch problems, shifting to a system where the importers have a defined responsibility to provide assurance that problems have been prevented with much greater tools for us to see that supply chain responsibility is being met. that's the theme that we embrace. it's a serious part of the law

and you'll see our approach to implementing that as we go forward with the process. the fourth theme that we're attached to and i think it's really a strong theme of the law is partnership. recognizing that fda can't do this by itself. there's some 50 specific mandates, just as an example, to connect with other agencies to coordinate and to collaborate in various aspects of implementing the law. we are collaborating with foreign governments and build capacity there. but also to collaborate again with the private sector to figure out a way we make the public role of setting standards and creating accountability work with the industry responsibility. how do we get the right guidance out there over time to ensure that the expectations are clearly defined about what preventive controls mean in particular circumstances. and of course, collaboration and partnership with the consumer

community. this is all about meeting the public's high expectations for the safety of the food supply and we look forward to both the rule-making process and beyond and benefitting from really active engagement with the consumer community. that's broad brush, how we're approaching implementation. you'll judge for yourself when we put out proposals. we'll look forward to comments and work together from there. the thing that i want to sort of emphasize in the few minutes more i'll take of your time this morning is that as much as our focus has been over the last 16 months on the regulations, which are critical. they are the legal regulatory framework for the system we're creating. this system is about a lot more than the regulations. it's really about creating a whole new system that involves effort by fda. it's involved effort by the private sector. it's going to require change in

how fda manages its work. to emphasize and remind the kind of work that will go on beyond the rule making. i mentioned the guidance point. e we know we can't just put the regulations on the books and think that answers all the questions and meets the needs of those who are out there seeking to comply. think of the small growers who will be responding for the first time to national mandatory food safety standards. we have to work with them and provide the technical assistance and guidance of how that's going to work. same with small processors. but across the system, we take seriously the burden to go beyond the rules to work with the community in how firms can comply with the new preventive control mandates. we have to retrain our own workforce to have the knowledge and skills to inspect in the framework and use the new enforcement tools that we've got. that's something that i think our workforce will, i know it

will, embrace enthusiastically. it's empowering them to have a greater impact on public health. but it's a whole new skill set and orientation. we have to invest in that training activity. we have to invest in building the federal state partnership. this is a feature of the law. one that can ensure harmonized oversight across the country as states are conducting inspections under their own authority, but also in partnership with us. we want joint work planning with the states. we ought to be efficient in using all the food safety resources that government can bring to bear to bright oversight. we want to share data with the states and really harness the vast amount of testing data and inspection results that the states have that if we do it right, can be integrated and shared and used to improve the

whole system. and we have to invest in the import system that congress has mandated. the regulations that establish the verification program are central. they are foundational. they have a new accountability. but they are part of a larger system. the regulation itself, of course, just spells out the rules of the game. how do we orient our work at the ports of entry in our relationship with the importers to be sure we're able to audit those programs effectively to be sure they are working well. that's a whole shift in how we deploy our front line field force. the voluntary program, one that's intended to give incentives to companies going the extra mile, thoroughly document food safety performance and give them a little bit of advantage at the port of entry,

that has potential to really help us focus our efforts more effectively and ensure that incentivizes firms to go the extra mile. but that's a whole new program. we don't think we issue a new rule and that's operationalized. the third party certification program, one of the important rules we'll be moving forward on soon is a program that's all about taking an existing body of work that's done by private auditors and turning into that into something used for food safety. so how do we establish rules that guarantee the quality and objectivity and transparency of those audits, but operationalize that? have an adequate supply. have ways to oversee the accrediting bodies themselves and be sure the system has integrity. if done right, that can be a valuable part of the system. if we don't build the infrastructure to do that right, it won't add, and i think, will create its own issues.

i could go on. mandates have a foreign presence far beyond what we have now. we have invested a good bit in that in establishing foreign offices. that's an important part of the law. it's all part of this new system of import oversight that, again, goes well beyond the regulation itself. so i go through all of this just to emphasize that there's a big agenda there that goes well beyond just these regulations. it's an agenda that i will say is putting enormous pressure on fda's staff and management. i really appreciate what carol said about the effort that folks have made. it's been extraordinary effort by the people to develop these proposals. while also engaging in the programs we have in place today, every day, they have been

incredibly resilient, incredibly thoughtful, and i can't say enough about the effort that they have made. just to flush out the picture a little more about why we're looking to manage differently. i don't have to remind folks that our job in the medicine program isn't just implementing the modernization act. we have chemical safety, which is coming to the floor with a set of issues we have to address. we regulate dietary supplements and continuing challenges there and that part of the food soom. food labeling and claims. we're looking to update the nutrition facts panel. we're implementing the menu labeling law. and looking to improve information that consumers have. we are investing an effort in looking how to reduce sodium in the food supply. to there's this enormous body of work and opportunity, actually, to improve public health.

how do we address it all? i haven't even mentioned our animal drug work and you saw the initiative we announced a couple weeks ago. major areas r of work. we're investing effort. and taking advantage of opportunities to protect public health. so it's in this context of this enormous set of mandates and limited resources in the world we're currently working that's really focused our attention on how do we prioritize? how do we target our efforts to protect public health? and we went through a process over the last 18 months or so to try to hone in on our priorities. that resulted in a strategic plan for the program we leased in february. i know strategic plans aren't the most engaging documents typically, and we tried to make it as concise as possible. but if you want to know what we're focused on internally at