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7 Kan. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 142 (1997-1998)
Agency Capture: The USDA's Stuggle to Pass Food Safety Regulations

handle is hein.journals/kjpp7 and id is 320 raw text is: Agency Capture: The USDA's Struggle to Pass Food Safety Regulations Dion Casey I. Introduction A. Focus of the Paper For years, the meat and poultry industries had captured the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). In response to pub- lic outcry over the E. coli outbreaks in the Northwest in 1993, those agencies proposed a new meat and poultry inspection system. However, when the outcry faded, the industries recaptured the agencies by pressuring the courts and Congress. This article will describe the phenomenon of agency capture, focusing on the emerging problem of food-borne illness- es. In addition, this article will also examine the FSIS's response to the problem, and the role of the meat and poultry industries in delay- ing and, ultimately, weakening that response. B. Agency Capture Agency capture occurs when through lobbying the regulated firm is able to win the hearts and minds of the regulators.' When an agency is captured, regulation becomes a method of subsidizing private interests at the expense of a public good.'2 Agency capture can occur for many reasons. First, because of the limits on an agency's resources, regulators often must rely on the regulated industries themselves to furnish the information upon which the regulators base their decisions.3 This reliance can create an institutional bias favoring potentially responsible parties.4 Second, the regulated industries have far more at stake than individual members of the public. Regulations can cost industries mil- lions of dollars (e.g. to improve worker safety) or give industries millions of dollars (e.g., sub- sidies), while costing each individual taxpayer only a few extra tax dollars.5 Citizens also face the problem of high individual search costs.6 Unless citizens can get information about food borne illnesses and deaths in a cheap and easy manner (e.g., through the mass media), they either will not receive that information, or will have to search for it on their own. If the infor- mation is difficult to find, like scientific infor- mation, such a search can become costly in terms of both time and money. Most people simply do not have enough time or money to conduct such searches, and they remain unin- formed. Even if a person did conduct such a search and obtained the information, he or she would not have a way to distribute that infor- mation to a large number of people. Third, the transaction costs of organizing large numbers of individual taxpayers are much greater than the transaction costs of orga- nizing a small number of firms in a regulated industry.7 Organizing taxpayers face the addi- tional problem of free riders - people who may derive benefits from the group's efforts but do not share the transaction costs, thus rais- ing the costs to participating members of the group.8 Small groups, like industry trade asso- ciations, are less troubled by free riders because their members usually must pay dues Dion Casey is a third year law student at the University of Kansas School of Law in Lawrence, Kansas.

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