Providing for Congressional Disapproval of A Rule Submitted By the Secretary of Agriculture

Floor Speech

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I rise to support this Congressional Review Act resolution to block the USDA catfish inspection program.

Despite what my colleague from Mississippi has said, there is no evidence that the catfish program provides any additional food safety benefit. It was designed to create a trade barrier.

I appreciate the opposition of my colleague from Mississippi. He is working for his catfish farmers in Mississippi. I know I like Mississippi catfish, but I like all kinds of catfish. In fact, the USDA, FDA, CDC, and the GAO have all confirmed that catfish, both domestic and imported, is already safe under FDA's jurisdiction. In fact, you are more likely to get hit by lightning than to get sick from imported or domestic catfish.

Let's not lose sight of what we are talking about. The FDA inspects hundreds of species of domestic and imported seafood. There is nothing particularly dangerous about catfish that merits setting up a whole separate inspection program under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The fact is, the FDA is responsible for the safety of most--about 80 to 90 percent--of all U.S. domestic and imported foods, and it has years of successful expertise in the unique area of seafood safety. The FDA system has worked for both domestic and imported seafood, and it has done so for years.

Let's talk about how we got to this point. Before 2008, the Food and Drug Administration was responsible for inspecting all foreign and domestic fish products. The Department of Agriculture inspected livestock, such as beef, pork, and poultry. However, a provision was added to the 2008 farm bill that transferred the inspection of catfish--not all imported seafood, just catfish--to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, requiring that agency to set up a new, separate program to inspect just catfish alone. Again, inspection of all other noncatfish seafood remains at the Food and Drug Administration, and it still does today. This means that seafood businesses across this country that handle catfish are now subject to two different sets of regulations from two completely separate Federal agencies.

I have heard from businesses in New Hampshire and across the country that are being hit by these burdensome new regulations. They are affecting their ability to grow and create jobs. There is no scientific or food safety benefit gained from this new program. There is no evidence that transferring catfish inspection to the USDA will improve consumer safety.

I appreciate that there have been a couple of examples given in the last few weeks of imported catfish. I think we ought to address that and do it very quickly, in the same way we address domestic problems with our food system and do it very quickly.

Officials from the FDA and USDA have explicitly stated that catfish is a low-risk food. The USDA acknowledges in its own risk assessment that no one has gotten sick from eating domestic or foreign catfish for more than 20 years. The USDA catfish inspection program is a classic example of wasteful and duplicative government regulation that is hurting our economy, and it is expensive. The FDA has been inspecting catfish up until now for less than $1 million a year. The USDA, by comparison, has spent more than $20 million to set up the program without inspecting a single catfish during that time. Going forward, estimates are that the program could cost as much as $15 million to operate per year.

The Government Accountability Office, GAO, has recommended eliminating this program 10 separate times.

If there is no food safety benefit, costing millions and actively hurting jobs across the country, why was this program created in the first place? This program, as I said earlier, is a thinly disguised illegal trade barrier against foreign catfish. This kind of a barrier leaves us vulnerable on other American products, such as beef, soy, poultry, and grain, to a wide variety of objections from any WTO nation. Since there is no scientific basis for what we are doing, any WTO nation that currently exports catfish to the United States could challenge it and secure WTO sanction trade retaliation against a wide range of U.S. exports, as I said, things like beef, soy, poultry, grain, fruit, and cotton, to name a few.

Again, it is important to go back and note how this policy change was created. It was not included in either version of the 2008 farm bill that passed the House and Senate, and it was never voted on or debated in either Chamber before it was enacted. It was secretly included in the final version of the farm bill by the conference committee in 2008. The only other time the Senate has voted on this issue was in 2012, and we voted to repeal it in a strong bipartisan voice vote.

The resolution we are talking about today has strong bipartisan support. A discharge petition was signed by 16 Democrats and 17 Republicans in order to initiate floor action and, most importantly, this resolution actually has the chance to become enacted into law. This is not a program this administration ever wanted to have to implement. In fact, it delayed implementing a final program for 8 years, I think in hopes that we in Congress would finally be able to get a vote that repealed the program. Unfortunately, this is an expensive and harmful special interest program--something some might call an earmark--and it is already having severe impacts on some businesses.

I am hopeful that my colleagues will join me in supporting this important resolution to block the USDA catfish inspection program once and for all.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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