Advocates of stricter food enforcement have urged the Academy to recommend consolidating food oversight duties into one super-agency that would regulate practically everything you put in your mouth. The Academy devoted two days of meetings in April to consider the issue, and a General Accounting Office report released in May endorsed the idea. Food regulation is now mainly carried out by six different agencies in three cabinet departments, with jurisdictions that often overlap. Rethinking federal food policy may be warranted, but there are serious reasons to oppose a food super-agency. The primary goal of such an agency would be to eliminate what is alleged to be a conflict of interest at the USDA-the fact that its current mission includes both protecting and promoting the nation's food supply.
Critics argue that the second function necessarily undermines the first.
Dual-mission agencies don't bear their regulatory costs either, but at least their promotional functions force them to consider tradeoffs with their regulatory functions. Contrast this with the group that bears every regulatory cost-consumers, who in the real world must make tradeoffs in choosing how to spend their money. We, for instance, could spend thousands extra to buy a super-safe Volvo. Buying a subcompact instead doesn't mean that we're unconcerned about safety. It simply means that there are better things we could buy with our limited resources-like education or health care for our kids.