In 1938 this was replaced by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. As one would reasonably expect with any regulatory agency, the FDA's responsibilities have multiplied and become complicated over the years. Each year, the FDA checks on 95,000 businesses in the U.S., its agents visit 15,000 commercial facilities, and they obtain 80,000 samples of domestic products and imports. Why Food Monitoring Needs to Be Fixed Like the other U.S. regulatory agencies, the FDA is in flux. Altering laws in whose enforcement the FDA is central entails increases in annual operating appropriations for the agency.
Consumer advocacy is a modern creation.
For the last four decades Ralph Nader has been its most influential voice among individual advocates, inducing substantive changes in governmental consumer protection and spawning many advocacy groups that continue along the lines he set. From the time of the Nixon Administration there have been periodic attempts to reorganize massively all consumer-related governmental agencies. Several other federal regulatory agencies share jurisdiction over foods Ameri-cans eat. The Federal Trade Commission deals, for example, with fraudulent advertising of food products. Such a calculation would be extremely difficult.