Unanimous-Consent Request--S. 510

Floor Speech

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Mr. COBURN. Madam President, again, if I truly felt this bill was going to solve those problems, I would be out here supporting it. I do not think so. We have an inherent disagreement.

The Senator from Illinois can file a cloture motion any time he wants to proceed to this bill. He can file it today, and we can have a cloture vote next week--we are not going to be doing anything next week anyway--and we can go to the bill. File the cloture motion, if that is how he feels about the bill and he thinks I am dead wrong. File the cloture motion, get the votes, and do it.

What we are hearing is we want it to pass in a short period of time so there cannot be the real debate there needs to be on the problems in this country on food safety. That is what we just heard.

We have been talking about this issue. We could have been here tomorrow debating this bill. The fact is, they did not file a cloture motion. They filed cloture motions 179 other times this Congress, more than any other Congress in the history, and the vast majority of them less than 24 hours after the bill was introduced.

If the Senator really wants to have the debate, put the bill on the floor, file cloture, and have the debate. I will debate this for 30 hours.

Washington is great about saying they are fixing things. They are great about passing bills. They are not great about fixing things because they fix the symptoms, not the real disease. That is the problem with this bill. It does not drill down and fix the real disease.

My hope is that we can fix the real disease and that we will have the legitimate, tough hearings on why and how and what is needed to be changed in the agencies, not more regulations, not more money, but holding the agencies accountable, which we have not done. That is how Washington works. If there is a problem, we do not look at what we are doing already, we just create an answer for what we think needs to be done rather than holding people accountable. That is why we have a $3.9 trillion budget. That is why our kids are bankrupt or getting ready to be because we continue to make the same mistakes.

I do not apologize for my principles on this issue. If, in fact, we will ever get to where we fix the real problems in the Congress, my colleague will find me as docile and compliant as any other Member of the body. But do not
tell me to treat pneumonia with an aspirin because that is exactly what we are doing with this bill.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, first of all, to my friend from Oklahoma before he leaves the floor, I thank him for his kind words. I appreciate that very much. He is a very valuable member of our committee. We have done work together in the past.

I say to my friend from Oklahoma, I agree with a lot of what he said. This bill is not going to solve all our problems. It may not solve a majority of our problems. It will solve some of them.

The Senator is right. We read about these crazy pizza things--Agriculture has one, FDA has the others. It is a crazy quilt work of things.

I say to my friend from Oklahoma, I am about as frustrated as you are. I have been chairman of Ag and I am chairman of HELP. When I am on Ag and they want to get some stuff to have jurisdiction over, then the people at Health and Human Services step in and they say no. Now I am on HELP and we want to get more jurisdiction for FDA and Ag says no. It drives you nuts sometimes. So you have these interlocks that have been built up over the years, and, yes, we have a crazy patchwork quilt.

I would say forthrightly that what we need in this country, I believe, after having been through this for 35 years on the Ag Committee in both the House and Senate and now in the HELP Committee for 22 or 23 years there, we need a single food safety agency in America that would pull from Ag and pull from FDA and set up a food safety agency.

I would say to my friend that agriculture has a lot of things on their plate. They have exports, they have farms, they have a lot of stuff on agriculture. FDA, they have drugs and all the stuff with drugs that they have to do--new drugs and investigational new drugs and all this other stuff and then they have some foodstuff. Foodstuff always gets kind of left behind. I see the same thing in agriculture. They have so many other things on their plate that takes so much money, the foodstuff gets kind of left behind.

So I think what we ought to do, if you want to drill down, is to get rid of all that and put it in one food safety agency. I have proffered this in the past, but I don't find much support for that. The institutional biases against that are tremendous. So I say to my friend: You are right. This bill will not solve all our problems, but I think it is a good step. I think it is a good step forward. It has strong bipartisan support. It has the support of industry and consumers, and that doesn't happen too often around here.

There is that old saying: Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I hear my friend from Oklahoma, and what he is saying is we ought to have a more perfect system than what we have. I agree. We ought to have a more perfect system, but I can't get that done. We can't get that done here. But we can do some good things and we can take some steps to make it better than what it is and that is what this bill does.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, if the Senator will yield, I would just say that I think we ought to fix the real problems. By fixing the symptoms, we delay the time in which we fix the real problems, and I think that is what we are doing.

I thank the Senator.

Mr. HARKIN. Well, I agree we are not getting to the nub of it, but it is a good step forward. I mean, sometimes you do have to treat the symptoms before you can get to the underlying cause. I am not a doctor. I don't want to practice medicine without a license.

I would just say again--to repeat--this bill is a major step forward. It will not solve all the problems. I can understand that, and I think there is a lot of other things we need to do, but you have to do what is possible around here. Politics is the art of the possible--to try to move the ball forward, to make changes that are more beneficial than detrimental, and I believe that is what this bill does.

We have worked long and hard. I see my colleague, Senator Enzi, is on the floor. I couldn't ask for a better friend and a better ranking member to work with. We reported this bill out last November without one dissenting vote--a voice vote.

I am sorry the Senator from Oklahoma had to leave, but I would just say that he did not object. He is on our committee, and he did not object to reporting out the bill. We had hearings, a markup, and we went through all the right and normal procedures. Then, since last November, our staffs--Senator Enzi's staff, my staff, and others, Senator Gregg's staff, I know, Senator Burr's staff--have been involved, and we have too personally--the Senators have been involved in this since at least the first of the year--working out the problems and trying to get down to a bill that would have widespread support on the floor.

Again, on something such as this, where we want to tackle a problem that is certainly not in any way partisan, you would like to get broad support for it. We kind of like to get something that would have a lot of folks, rather than a few, in order to send a strong signal that the Congress wants to make changes in the way we inspect food in this country.

I would say this bill we have--if this bill were to come to the floor--would get over 90 votes. I bet it would get over 90 votes. Maybe it would get 95, maybe 98, I don't know, but there would certainly be over 90 votes. So we have strong bipartisan support. As I said, we have the industry that supports it and the consumers. That doesn't happen a lot around here.

I can understand why both sides support it. Senator Enzi, Senator Gregg, Senator Burr, myself, Senator Durbin's staff, Senator Dodd, and others on our side have been working together, and I think we have a good bill. Is it perfect? No, it is not perfect. Is it going to solve every single problem the Senator from Oklahoma brought up? No, it is not. I am not Pollyannaish about this. But we do what is the art of the possible. We do what we can to make the system work better, to make sure we have less foodborne illnesses than what we have today. This bill will do that, not 100 percent, but it will sure cut down on the number of foodborne illnesses in this country.

This is long overdue. It is long overdue. My goodness, the last time we addressed this issue on food inspection, under the jurisdiction of the FDA, was 1938. If I am not mistaken, it was in 1938. I wasn't born until 1939, and we haven't even visited this since 1938. Think of the changes that have taken place in our country in the way we process and ship food. My gosh, when these were passed in 1938, my own family had our own garden, we canned our own vegetables, we canned our own meat. Yes, we canned meat, in glass jars, by the way.

We process food differently now. We didn't buy food from other countries or halfway across the country. We ate locally. We grew our own food. But times have changed, and we like it now. I like the fact that I can buy strawberries in the middle of the winter in Washington or I can buy a mango sometimes when I want one or bananas and things such as that. It is a wonderful system of making food available. What is not so wonderful is how that food is inspected as it goes through the growing, the picking, the processing, the shipping, the packaging, and then on to the consumer. That is what is not working well, and that is what this bill does address.

Again, the objection the Senator had in terms of it not being paid for, this is an authorization bill, not a spending bill. I wish to clear up a few things. I know my friend from Wyoming is here, and I want to hurry up to give him the floor, but just a couple of things I wish to cover for the record.

No. 1, on the deficit, there has been some talk about this increasing the deficit. I wish to make this very clear, precisely clear, that according to the CBO there will be no deficit increase for 10 years on this bill. I wish to make that point. In fact, we added language, at Senator Coburn's request, to have Health and Human Services review its own programs to trim any fat to help ensure fiscal responsibility and we have a reporting system and other things the Senator from Oklahoma wanted and we put in the bill.

The next-to-the-last thing I wish to say is this. The food industry wants this bill. Why do they want it? Well, on the one hand, people get sick and people die. On the other hand, the food industry suffers too. First of all, a lot of times they get sued and they have to pay out big compensations. But, secondly, the disruption costs them a lot of money. When salmonella led to the recall of tomatoes, the entire Florida industry suffered, losing over $500 million in revenue--$500 million. When we had E. coli in spinach, growers lost $350 million. So they have an interest also in making sure we have a good food inspection system, and that is why they are for this bill.

I have letters from the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Restaurant Association, Consumers Union, PEW Charitable Trust, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Trust for America's Health.

It is a rare thing when I can say that both the Chamber of Commerce and the Center for Science in the Public Interest are on the same page. You have pretty broad support. So it is a shame we can't move this bill forward. It is needed.

I wish to also pay my respects to Senator Durbin. He has been working on this issue, literally, I know for the last 10 years. He has been bugging me about it for 10 years, and I didn't even have the power to do anything about it. So I know he has been insistent we work on this for a long time. Our committee has taken it up under Senator Enzi's leadership, then later under Senator Kennedy, and now it falls to me, as chairman, to work together on it in a very good bipartisan way.

Madam President, on November 18, 2009, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions reported out S. 510, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, without a single dissenting vote. Since that time, the bipartisan group of cosponsors--Senators Durbin, Dodd, and I on the Democratic side, and Senators Enzi, Gregg, and Burr on the Republican side--have continued to work with Senators on both sides of the aisle to refine and improve this much needed legislation.

Legislation to reform our Nation's outdated food safety system is long overdue. And that is why I am so deeply disappointed that after all of this work, the Senator from Oklahoma has decided he will not allow us to move the bill forward.

I understand that Senator Coburn's primary objection to the legislation is that it is not paid for. I think that objection is misguided, for reasons that I will explain. But I would also like to emphasize that the unanimous consent agreement proposed yesterday by the majority leader, and objected to by Senator Coburn, would have allowed the Senator to have an up or down vote on an amendment to offset the cost of the bill, notwithstanding the fact that the bill contains no mandatory spending.

I know Senator Coburn states that this bill will contribute to the federal deficit. However, I have to respectfully disagree. In fact, as this chart clearly shows, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has indicated that this legislation does not contribute to the Federal deficit.

Our bill has no mandatory spending--only authorized spending. This legislation, like countless others that have passed this year, will be subject to the annual budget and appropriations process.

Furthermore, during the negotiations on the bill, we added language at Senator Coburn's REQUEST to have HHS review its own programs to trim any fat to help ensure fiscal responsibility. The Secretary is required to annually report her findings to Congress on these programs' effectiveness in achieving their goals.

Conservative Republicans like Senators Gregg, Enzi, and Burr all support this bill. I am again disappointed that Senator Coburn won't even let us consider it on the Senate floor, even though we have agreed to give him an opportunity to offer his amendment to the bill.

While I am here on the floor today, I would like to address some other misstatements that I have heard about this legislation as we have worked over these past weeks and months to bring it to the floor. First, there are claims that this bipartisan legislation is harmful and burdensome to the food industry. I find that very hard to believe. This legislation has widespread support amongst industry and consumer groups. The reality is that every time there is an outbreak of foodborne illness, the food industry suffers, as consumers lose confidence in the safety of our food supply.

When salmonella contamination led to the recall of tomatoes, the entire Florida tomato industry suffered, losing over $500 million in revenue.

And during the 2006 spinach e. coli contamination that originated at a single farm, the spinach industry lost $350 million.

The good actors in the food industry already take steps to prevent food borne illness, but the entire industry suffers when FDA does not have sufficient authority to ensure that all processors will sell safe food.

I have received letters from the Grocery Manufacturing Association, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Restaurant Association, The PEW Charitable Trust, Consumers Union, Center for Science in the Public Interest, and Trust for America's Health, to name a few. It is a rarity when I can say that both the Chamber of Commerce and CSPI are on the same page. Here are several letters of support by both groups and a joint letter that both industry and consumer groups have signed. Let me read an excerpt from the joint letter:

Our organizations--representing the food industry, consumers, and the public-health community--urge you to bring S. 510 to the floor, and we will continue to work with Congress for the enactment of food safety legislation that better protects consumers, restores their confidence in the safety of the food they eat, and addresses the challenges posed by our global food supply.

Sincerely,
American Beverage Association, American Frozen Food Institute, American Public Health Association, Center for Foodborne Illness Research & National Restaurant Association, The PEW Charitable Trusts, Trust for America's Health, Snack Food Association, S.T.O.P. Safe Tables Our Priority, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
National Association of Manufacturers, National Coffee Association of the USA, National Confectioners Association, National Consumer League Education, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Food Marketing Institute, Grocery Manufacturers Association, International Bottled Water Association, International Dairy Foods Association.

Madam President, Senators often talk about the importance of addressing so-called ``kitchen table'' issues''--the practical, everyday concerns of working Americans. Well, food safety is literally a ``kitchen table'' issue. And it couldn't be more urgent or overdue. It is shocking to think that the last comprehensive overhaul of America's food safety system was in 1938--more than seven decades ago.

On the whole, Americans enjoy safe and wholesome food. The problem is that ``on the whole'' is just not good enough.

As you can see from this chart, recent food-borne outbreaks in America have been wide in scope and have had a devastating impact on public health.

When kids die from eating peanut-butter sandwiches their mothers pack for lunch, we have a problem. When people get sick--and many die--from eating bagged spinach and lettuce, we have a problem. When cookie dough sold in supermarkets contains deadly E. coli, we have a problem. When 1,000 Americans get sick from eggs that have been recalled for possible salmonella contamination, it is undeniable that we have a problem.

As you can see from this chart, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that foodborne illnesses cause approximately 76 million illnesses a year, including 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths.

According to Georgetown University, these foodborne illnesses costs the United States $152 billion per year in medical expenses, lost productivity, and disability.

Those numbers are just staggering. This is like learning that, each year, nearly 200,000 people in the United States die because of medical errors and hospital-acquired infections--most of them totally preventable.

As this chart shows, the cost of foodborne illnesses in my home State of Iowa alone is nearly $1.5 billion per year.

These aren't just numbers, these are real people. Real people like Kayla from Monroe, IA. On October 22, 2007, Kayla turned 14 and passed her driver's test. The next day she stayed home with a foodborne illness and was admitted to Pella Community Hospital when her symptoms worsened. She did not respond to antibiotics and within a week her kidneys began to fail. Kayla was transferred to Blank Children's Hospital for dialysis, but her condition continued to deteriorate. She suffered a seizure and began to have heart problems. Just a few days later Kayla's brain activity stopped and her parents made the painful decision to take their beautiful 14-year-old daughter off life support.

These things are totally intolerable. And yet, apparently, we tolerate them.

Well, no more. We can no longer tolerate the unnecessary pain, suffering, and death caused by America's antiquated, inadequate food safety system.

Let's put it plainly: Our current regulatory system is broken. It does not adequately protect Americans from serious, widespread foodborne illnesses.

Bear in mind that, at the beginning of the 20th century, Americans ate a much simpler fare--and, most of the time, they prepared meals from basic ingredients in their own homes, with their own hands.

Today, our meals have grown more complex, with much more varied ingredients and diverse methods of preparation. By the time raw agricultural products find their way to our dinner plates, multiple intermediate steps and processes have taken place. Food ingredients typically travel thousands of miles from farms to factories to fork and they are intermingled and mixed together along the way.

We love today's broader selection of fresh foods available year-round. But this brings with it major new food safety challenges. For instance, we rely more on foods imported from countries with less rigorous inspection rates and different production standards and conditions than our own.

Yet despite dramatic changes in our tastes, as well as in methods of production and distribution, our food safety laws have not changed. The U.S. regulatory system has failed to incorporate the latest scientific research on ways to make and keep food safe. Another shortcoming: Food safety agencies are still encumbered by methods that often allocate disproportionate resources to activities that do little to make our food safer. FDA's own subcommittee on Science and Technology concluded in 2007 that FDA does not currently have the capacity to ensure the safety of our food.

OK, so what do we need to do?

For starters, we need improved processes to prevent the contamination of foods and improved methods to provide safe food to consumers. To achieve this, more testing and better methods of tracking food can be utilized to verify that the processes are working.

Thirty years ago, the Nation had 70,000 food processors and the FDA inspectors made only 35,000 visits a year to cover these processors. Even that level of oversight was inadequate. But today, a full decade into the 21st century, we have 150,000 food processors, twice as many plants, and the problem has grown far worse. Today FDA inspectors make just 6,700 visits each year; only one-fifth as many visits as they made three decades ago. This is absurdly inadequate. It is a wide-open door to an endless series of outbreaks of foodborne illness.

As this chart shows, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act overhauls our food safety system in four critical ways:

It improves prevention of food safety problems, improves detection of response to foodborne illness outbreaks when they do occur, enhances our Nation's food defense capabilities, and increases FDA resources.

With the most recent recall for possible Salmonella contamination in at least 550 million eggs, we have yet another example of how this food safety bill, had it been in place, could have improved the FDA's ability to prevent and respond to the outbreak. This bill includes the following provisions that would have been beneficial to respond to this contamination and prevent future contamination:

It requires stronger trace back provisions so the contamination source and affected egg products could have been more readily and quickly identified.

It provides the FDA with mandatory recall authority in the event that businesses do not voluntarily recall products.

It requires retailers to notify consumers if they have sold food that has been recalled so consumers may have been aware of the contamination sooner.

It provides stronger disease surveillance so the outbreak may have been discovered earlier. It includes stronger enforcement provisions that would generally deter producers from cutting corners on food safety so the contamination may have been prevented or detected sooner.

It gives the FDA increased access to company records to identify contaminated foods so the likelihood of contamination may have been minimized.

The bill before the Senate today will also dramatically increase FDA inspections at all food facilities. And it does much more. It will give FDA the following new authorities:

It requires all food facilities to have in place preventive plans to address identified hazards and to prevent adulteration; and it gives FDA access to those plans.

It expands FDA's access to records in a food emergency.

It requires importers to verify the safety of imported food.

It strengthens surveillance systems to detect foodborne illnesses.

It requires the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to establish a pilot project to test and evaluate new methods for rapidly tracking foods in the event of a foodborne illness outbreak.

And, as I previously mentioned, this bill gives FDA the authority to order a mandatory recall of food.

I want to say a word about the impact of this legislation on farms and small processors. I have long said that our new regulations should be effective, but not excessively burdensome. I am proud to say that this legislation comprehensively modernizes our food safety system, but does so without injury to farms and small processors. There are requirements throughout this bill to assure that the compliance burdens on farms and small processors are minimized to the extent practicable, and the legislation directs FDA to exempt both small processors and farms from certain provisions of this bill if they are engaged in low-risk activities.

As this chart shows, this bill makes several accommodations to address the concerns of small businesses. We have included language to ensure that state and federal personnel help educate small businesses about the new regulations and help folks comply with these regulations. This approach is tied to risk, grounded in common sense, and set up to help everyone succeed. I am confident we have addressed the legitimate concerns we have heard from small business owners.

This food safety bill has been bipartisan from the beginning. It is an important, measured, and necessary effort to modernize our food safety system and protect American consumers across the country from foodborne illness.

I hope we can find a path forward and move this critical legislation as soon as possible.

I have some letters here, Madam President, and I also ask unanimous consent to have these printed in the Record at the end of my comments in support of this bill.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

(See exhibit 1.)

Mr. HARKIN. It is a shame we can't move this forward. Like I said, it would get over 90 votes. I think we could dispose of a couple amendments fairly rapidly. I don't think it would take much time at all to move this legislation. So I am hopeful that even though we can't take it up now, maybe we can work with the Senator from Oklahoma, perhaps work something out to get some kind of agreement to get this moving forward.

As I yield the floor, Madam President, I will recognize and thank my colleague from Wyoming, Senator Enzi, who has also worked diligently for a long time, and his staff. I will tell him we will continue to work on this bill. We will continue to try to see what we can do to overcome some of these bumps in the road and try to get this bill through.

So I thank my friend from Wyoming for his great leadership and his working relationship specifically on this bill but on a lot of other things too.

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