Congress

fter more than a decade, there's still no thaw in the frozen pizza war. Eleven years ago, the General Accounting Office ridiculed the interagency food fight that lets the Agriculture Department inspect sausage pizzas but gives the Food and Drug Administration authority over cheese pizzas. It "makes no sense," growled an outraged Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., who commissioned the 1988 GAO study.

This year, the government auditors are back with the same complaint: The USDA still polices plants that produce pizzas with meat toppings and the FDA still inspects plants that turn out non-meat pizzas. "One hand doesn't know what the other is doing," groused an outraged House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas.

The GAO's broader message is that when there are too many cooks, the broth-or in this case the pizza inspection program-gets spoiled. In a January 1999 report on management challenges and program risks, auditors point out that up to 12 different agencies administer more than 35 different laws overseeing food safety.

The schizophrenic approach to pizza inspection and labeling results from the disparate regulatory approaches contained in the basic laws under which the USDA and the FDA operate. The USDA gets its marching orders from the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, while the FDA is guided by mandates authored by the House Commerce Committee and the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. This division of authority, in the GAO's opinion, "hinders the government's efforts to efficiently and effectively protect consumers from unsafe food."

The situation is by no means unique to food inspection. Fragmented approaches to regulation abound throughout government and there's plenty of blame to spread around. Sometimes "it's just that agencies with broad enabling legislation have gone off on their own and created programs that are overlapping and duplicative," says GAO Associate Director J. Christopher Mihm. Other times, however, agencies are simply carrying out the contradictory directions that are handed down from competing congressional overlords.

David C. King, a professor of public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, notes that federal managers frequently are run ragged trying to "keep multiple committees apprised of what [their] agency is doing." Worse yet for agency heads, King writes in his 1997 book, Turf Wars: How Congressional Committees Claim Jurisdiction, "their multiple masters occasionally give conflicting demands."

But pizza lovers-and devotees of saner and more easily digested government policies-should not despair. Despite the cautious pace of legislators who jealously covet turf and the prestige of having their own committee or subcommittee to chair, considerable progress is being made to reduce jurisdictional fragmentation on Capitol Hill.

In the 94th Congress (1975-76), dominated by Democrats who believed in governmental activism, the number of committees in the House and the Senate reached a bloated total of 385. Today, that number has been reduced by nearly half to 200. The biggest reduction-a 25 percent drop-came in the Republican-led 104th Congress (1995-96).

For efficiency-minded GOP leaders, paring down the committee system was an appetizing prospect. As King's book notes: "In 1994, there were 266 committees and subcommittees between the House and Senate combined. There were 107 of those panels which claimed some jurisdiction over the Pentagon; 90 claimed jurisdiction over the Environmental Protection Agency, and 52 claimed some authority over programs dealing with families and children. Such examples of alleged Democratic mismanagement hit a responsive chord among Republican voters."

The reforms enacted by the 104th Congress-including the elimination of a research support agency, the Office of Technology Assessment-produced a reduction of more than 1,000 staff positions. Nonetheless, more than 24,000 congressional employees remain on the books, "making Congress by far the most heavily staffed legislative branch in the world," noted American Enterprise Institute scholars Norman J. Ornstein, Thomas E. Mann and Michael J. Malbin, in their report, "Vital Statistics on Congress: 1997-1998."

While one can argue-as King does-that the GOP committee reductions of 1995 did not go nearly as far as they might have, the reformers nonetheless struck a significant blow against fragmentation and jurisdictional sprawl. Perhaps even more importantly, House Republicans, at Armey's insistence, established bipartisan teams of staff members from committees with shared jurisdictional interests. As the GAO approvingly commented in a 1997 report, the purpose of the teams is "to coordinate and facilitate committee consultations with executive branch agencies."

Those are all steps in the right direction, but it still may be a while before the GAO's dream of a single food-safety agency that carries out a cohesive set of laws comes to fruition. Plenty of time to send out for pizza, no matter who inspected it.