The 'Better FDA' Act will cement FDA’s failed chemical review system into law

Yesterday Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), founder and co-chair of the MAHA Caucus, introduced The Better Food Disclosure Act (The Better FDA), a bill ostensibly aiming to reform the "Generally Recognized as Safe" or "GRAS" practice by which the Food and Drug Administration currently allows food companies to self-certify the safety of new food chemicals and introduce them into commerce without publishing their assessments or informing FDA.

Unfortunately, rather than closing the loophole and requiring independent FDA review of new additives, the bill actually cements the current ineffective loophole into law. The bill requires companies to submit notices of new chemical uses to FDA, a positive step not currently required. But it requires no publication of the notices, leaving the public in the dark until a decision is made, and offers no standards for substantiating such notices. Worst of all, it directs that the additives be automatically listed for use in foods by default if FDA takes no action within 180 days.

Senator Marshall's proposal also provides no new funding to the agency, meaning the short-staffed and underfunded agency will swiftly be overwhelmed by the task of reviewing new GRAS notices.

The bill also amends the process for the FDA to ban unsafe chemicals. Yet contrary to Marshall's press release, it offers no new rights for citizens or state officials to petition for removal of unsafe chemicals, a process that already exists. Instead, it adds new, resource-intensive procedural steps for FDA to remove unsafe chemicals, including requiring FDA to promulgate a notice and comment regulation before it can remove a chemical from the market, a step that will further impede the agency from acting on safety risks. In contrast, FDA can currently remove a chemical via administrative order, as the agency did recently for Red 3.

The bill is like a lobster trap: Chemicals slide in easily by default, but a ton of process is needed to ban them, ensuring an exhausted FDA will struggle to take effective action. This bill is not meaningful chemical safety reform. It's a trap to kill a chemical safety movement.

Earlier versions of the bill also included broad preemption of state food safety laws, a key ask for industry lobbyists eager to overturn state laws restricting synthetic food dyes and other additives, but this has fortunately been removed following widespread backlash by CSPI and other advocates.

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Tags

• Trump
• Food and Drug Administration
• GRAS

Topics

• Government Accountability
• Food Additives