USDA workers must do meat inspections, court rules

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USDA workers must do meat inspections, court rules

Agriculture Department meat inspectors must do hands-on inspections of carcasses at meat-packing plants, and not simply monitor inspection practices of processing companies, a federal appeals court ruled last week.

Since 1993, USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service has been experimenting with a program that shifts away from carcass-by-carcass inspections. Instead, the agency relies on companies to do the bulk of the inspecting (with FSIS oversight), while more of the government's resources go to establishing scientific systems to detect microscopic pathogens such as E. Coli.

The court ruled that federal laws prohibit such a change.

"The government believes that federal employees fulfill their statutory duty to inspect by watching others perform the task," ruled a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. "One might was well say that umpires are pitchers because they carefully watch others throw baseballs."

A 1907 meat inspection law, a 1957 statute requiring poultry inspection and a 1970 law covering egg products led to the creation of a "poke and sniff" inspection system at FSIS, in which employees examine billions of carcasses before and after slaughter at thousands of processing plants across the country.

USDA officials, along with scientists and consumer advocates, argue that the poke-and-sniff system wastes time looking for tuberculosis, brucellosis and other diseases that are extremely rare, while failing to detect pathogens in meat and poultry.

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents FSIS inspectors, sued USDA in 1998 to stop the department from implementing the new system. But last fall, a federal judge ruled FSIS could go ahead with the program. The appeals court decision, issued Friday, sends the case back to the lower court.