The Internal Revenue Service isn't the only federal bureaucracy to be recently taken to task by its Office of the Inspector General. Amid considerably less fanfare in early May, the US Department of Agriculture's OIG issued a report damning the department's oversight of pork slaughterhouses and trashing a USDA pilot program that allows plants to operate with fewer inspectors on hand.

First a bit of background. Every Cabinet-level department and independent agency in the federal government has an OIG—a kind of in-house watchdog. While some OIGs have been convincingly accused of being toothless, the USDA's internal watchdog has long been pretty blunt and straightforward. I'm still reeling over its 2010 report on the USDA's porous system for halting the "contamination of meat with residual veterinary drugs, pesticides, and heavy metals." Then there was this 2012 report about the rather cracked, so to speak, efforts to keep eggs safe.

The new pork report paints a Keystone Kops portrait of hog slaughter inspection, catching plants being cited for the same "egregious" (the OIG's word) food safety and animal welfare violations over and over again, with little fear of reprisal or incentive to improve. "Enforcement policies do not deter swine slaughter plants from becoming repeat violators of food safety regulations," the OIG concluded—including "violations as egregious as fecal matter on previously cleaned carcasses."

If that sounds like just an "ooh, gross" concern, it's not. Pigs raised on concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs) expel feces loaded with antibiotic residues, antibiotic-resistant microbes, and heavy metals. (Their waste has also been spawning mysterious—and occasionally explosive—foam 

Mysterious Poop Foam Causes Explosions on Hog Farms

in the cesspits under the Midwest's teeming hog CAFOs.) This is not stuff you want to pick up at the supermarket along with your pork chop—and the USDA is the federal agency that's supposed to help us avoid it.

Continue reading at:  http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/05/usda-inspector-gene...