Democrats will control both the House and the Senate when the 120th Congress convenes in January. NBC News projected both chambers before the night was over. By this morning the people who write agendas for a living were already writing them. Here is mine, and I would like it to become ours.
Food safety was not on anyone’s ballot. It never is. Nobody ran on Salmonella. But here is what happened to the food safety system in the two years before this election, and almost none of it required a vote of Congress. On April 25, 2025, FSIS withdrew its Salmonella framework for raw poultry, three years in the making. On July 1, 2025, FoodNet, the network that measures whether anything is working, went from eight pathogens to two. On September 30, 2025, the Justice Department eliminated the branch that prosecuted food cases. On November 12, 2025, the bill that ended the shutdown carried Section 780, which bars FDA from spending a dollar to enforce its own traceability rule before July 20, 2028.
The consequences arrived on schedule. This summer the country ran the largest parasitic foodborne outbreak in its history, 18,445 laboratory-confirmed Cyclospora cases, a year after the parasite was dropped from surveillance. Fifty-two infants have been hospitalized with botulism in two outbreaks tied to powdered infant formula. On September 10, FDA closed a romaine E. coli O157:H7 investigation and named no grower, no processor and no state. Last month, FDA and FSIS called the vehicle in a fifty-person E. coli outbreak “ready-to-eat multi-ingredient chicken wraps,” and the public learned the brand from a lawsuit.
Most of that was done by notice, by budget line or by reorganization. It can be undone the same way.
This has never been a partisan issue
The Food Safety Modernization Act passed the Senate 73 to 25 in 2010. The 1994 declaration that E. coliO157:H7 is an adulterant in ground beef, the 2002 law that required food facilities to register with FDA, and the 2022 law that put an FDA inspector in every infant formula plant once a year all came under presidents of both parties. This July, the Senate HELP Committee reported S. 4974, a food safety bill introduced by two Republican senators, by a vote of 22 to 0. The pathogens do not check party registration, and the people who vote on them do not have to either.
The new majority will govern alongside a president who has promised to use his veto. Almost nothing below needs his signature: hearings do not, appropriations report language does not, and a citizen petition to an agency needs no vote at all.
What Project 2027 is
Since September 5 I have been circulating a working paper called Project 2027 to the food safety, public health, consumer, labor and nutrition community: thirty specific things that would make American food safer and can be done within a year by people who already exist. It has been through two rounds of comments from people who have run FDA’s food center and FSIS, from state regulators and laboratories, and from industry; the current draft is version 10. Nobody is asked to sign it whole; the request is a signature, item by item.
Every item passes three tests: a named person can act on it, it has a vehicle, and somebody is already pushing it. Three come first.
Kill the traceability rider. The current continuing resolution runs out on December 11, so the first decision about Section 780 belongs to the lame-duck Congress, not the new one. The Senate’s own report language says full compliance and enforcement by July 20, 2028. Let it survive conference this time. Eleven consumer, public health and labor organizations asked for exactly this on August 12.
Put the surveillance back. PulseNet and the state public health laboratories first, because every other number in the paper is unmeasurable without them, then the eight FoodNet pathogens. Consumer and academic groups asked Congress a year ago for about $36 million more for CDC’s food safety program. This time the summer goes in with the request.
Name the companies. Stop Foodborne Illness petitioned FDA on February 4 to name every company linked to an outbreak, recall or no recall. It costs the government nothing, and every organization I know can sign a comment supporting it.
Seven petitions that need no vote
Seven citizen petitions were drafted from that agenda and posted for public comment before filing, six to FDA and one to FSIS. Four were filed on October 29, two more went in on Monday, and the seventh goes to FDA on Friday. They ask FDA to test powdered infant formula and its dairy ingredients for the clostridia that cause botulism, with Stop Foodborne Illness and forty-four parents of twenty-three hospitalized infants as co-petitioners; to put a warning on cheese made from unpasteurized milk and finish the 60-day aging review it promised in 2013; to put its twenty-eight-year-old advice about raw sprouts on the package; to say by rule that an implicated firm’s name is not a trade secret; to publish the stores that received a Class I recall when it is announced, as USDA has since 2008; and to take samples at a feeding operation implicated in a multistate outbreak. The seventh asks FSIS to finish what it started in 2024 and determine that Salmonella at 1 CFU/g or more is an adulterant in raw ground chicken, ground turkey and chicken parts. FDA owes an answer to each within 180 days, a deadline no bill in the paper has.
What the new majority has already written down, and what it has not
On September 1, the House Democratic caucus’s Cost-of-Living Healthcare Working Group sent Leader Jeffries an eighty-four-page memorandum on the first 100 hours, first 100 days and first year of the 120th Congress. Food is its seventh category. Three bills in Project 2027 are on it: H.R. 7867, the infant formula bill, and H.R. 8429, heavy metals in baby food, in the first 100 hours, and H.R. 4958, the GRAS Act, in the first 100 days.
Here is what is not on it: the traceability rider, surveillance, naming companies, Salmonella in poultry, imported food, and FDA’s authority to sample the feedlot next to the lettuce field. Every acute-illness item in the paper is missing. I do not read that as a rejection. I read it as the predictable consequence of who was in the room. The working group heard from 145 organizations, and the chemical-safety and chronic-disease side was plainly among them. The pathogen side either was not there, or was there and did not bring a list.
That is the most useful thing we can fix, and it has a date: every bill number dies with the 119th Congress in January. A one-page list of four or five acute-illness items, with bill numbers, cosponsors and supporting organizations in the working group’s own format, is two afternoons of work, and this month is when it matters.
Who has to be in the room
The paper asks for ten hearings and names the witnesses for each: the agency that has to answer, the expert who can be cross-examined, and the person it happened to. I would schedule the bipartisan Safe Food Caucus briefing on produce testing first, because it needs no gavel and it is the least ideological item on the list.
Industry belongs at every one of those tables; a hearing with only our side is a press conference. In 2007 I asked the Salinas growers, at their own lunch, to put me out of business. The beef industry before them took the request seriously. The offer stands.
Then the rest of the room: the consumer groups in the Safe Food Coalition and the other organizations doing the work, the state and local regulators and laboratories who do most of the inspecting and sequencing, the unions whose members stand on the line, the pediatricians, and the diet and chronic-disease groups, who have been treated as a separate world for too long. We share the goal and differ on focus, and on preemption of state food laws we are in the same fight.
What I am asking
Four things. Read the paper; email me at bmarler@marlerclark.com and I will send it. Tell me which items your organization would put its name on. Comment on the petition dockets as they post at regulations.gov. And send me the name of anyone who can get a one-page list in front of the new majority’s working groups before January.
The second draft goes out this month with an item-by-item signature block. A signed version goes to the new Congress in January, when every bill has to be reintroduced anyway. I have said for thirty years that I would like to be put out of business. That has never been closer to a policy proposal than it is this morning, and it is not going to happen one lawsuit at a time.
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