More lobbyists in the lobbyist-free White House?
Remember yesterday in the weekly radio address the president said this;
“I know these steps won’t sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they’re gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this: So am I,” he said.
Well, I guess by fighting, he means that he’s going to recruit the lobbyists to work in the government (Washington Times link);
Barbara J. Masters, a longtime USDA employee and now a senior policy adviser at a Washington law firm, and Caroline Smith DeWaal, food-safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, are the leading candidates to head the department’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), whose mission is to ensure that the nation’s supply of meat, poultry and egg products is safe.
I seem to remember that Obama signed an executive order forbidding the executive agencies of the Federal government from hiring lobbyists who had served in the capacity in the last year. In fact, an article from nearly a month ago in the Washington Times, reported on this phenomena;
Nearly two dozen executive-branch hires, all the way up to Cabinet level, have been registered federal lobbyists, with the most-prominent being Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and William Lynn, the No. 2 man at the Pentagon.
I guess he brain washed all of those lobbyists from “being invested in the old ways of Washington”.
Category: Politics
Well, perhaps a reactionary type in the food safety driver’s seat would help the US get its food system supervision up to par. The inspection protocols are not being applied sufficiently: http://www.newsy.com/videos/is_the_fda_broken/ And, the issue goes beyond funding, it’s about a policy of assuaging fear on two sides – on the one hand, consumers concerned about what they can cook and feed their families safely and businesses seeking to avoid regulatory interference with cost management strategies in food processing that often toe the line of safety. The ref needs to be on the field for this one.