To comply with the National Performance Review (NPR) directive to achieve regulatory reform, the Department of Agriculture is continuing an extremely important project to eliminate unnecessary regulations and improve all those remaining by making them easier to understand and more user friendly. To date the Department's review and revision effort has resulted in actions on over 50 percent of our NPR committment to regulatory reform. When the results are fully implemented, the Department will have eliminated or reinvented 81 percent of its regulatory holdings in the CFR.
Positive changes resulting from regulatory actions proposed as well as completed by the Department will reach into every corner of the country and, both directly and indirectly, touch the lives of most Americans. Those programs that offer support to specific rural and urban segments of the economy are being simplified so that persons who qualify for assistance, or some other form of participation, will find less burdensome rules. Yet high standards will be set for efficient and effective program management that makes the best use of taxpayer dollars. Farmers, ranchers, and others involved in U.S. agriculture will find significant changes in all aspects of regulations that govern their interaction with the Department and its programs. Farm credit, a mainstay of the Nation's rural economy, will be significantly streamlined by the merger of cumbersome loan-making regulations with forms and certifications simplified to facilitate the application process. The Department is undertaking a number of actions in the regulation of commodities that will increase efficiency, improve customer service, reduce intervention in markets, and allow States to assume greater responsibility in controlling the spread of plant pests or disease. The Department is also improving the regulations that serve rural communities. Several changes are being made in the rural housing programs. Nutrition programs are also being strengthened, their efficiency improved, and their integrity enhanced through regulatory reform. In the area of food safety, the Department has undertaken a significant reinvention of all policies and relationships with industry and the public. There are several important reinvention plans in the natural resources and conservation area.
The Role of Regulations
The programs of the Department are diverse and far reaching, as are the regulations that attend their delivery. Regulations codify how the Department will conduct its business, including the specifics of access to, and eligibility for, USDA programs. Regulations also specify the behavior of State and local governments, private industry, businesses, and individuals that is necessary to comply with their provisions. The diversity in purpose and outreach of our programs contributes significantly to the USDA being at or near the top of the list of Departments that produce the largest number of regulations annually. These regulations range from nutrition standards for the school lunch program, to natural resource and environmental measures governing national forest usage and soil conservation, to regulations protecting American agribusiness (the largest dollar value contributor to exports) from the ravages of domestic or foreign plant or animal pestilence and they extend from farm to supermarket to ensure the safety, quality, and availability of the Nation's food supply. Many regulations function in a dynamic environment which requires their periodic modification. The factors determining various entitlement, eligibility, and administrative criteria often change from year to year. Therefore, many significant regulations must be revised annually to reflect changes in economic and market benchmarks. Almost all legislation that affects Departmental programs has accompanying regulatory needs, often with a significant impact. The recently enacted Farm Bill, Public Law 104-127, has considerable regulatory consequences. This key legislation affects most agencies of USDA and will result in the addition of new programs, the deletion of others, and modification to still others.
Administration Guidance--USDA Response
In developing and implementing regulations, the Department has been guided by the regulatory principles and philosophy set forth by the President in Executive Order 12866 ``Regulatory Planning and Review.'' As prescribed in the Order, the USDA is committed to ``promulgate only those regulations that are required by law, are necessary to interpret the law, or are made necessary by compelling public need.'' When considering a rulemaking action, the Department will assess the costs and benefits of available regulatory alternatives, including the alternative of not regulating. Our analysis will consider the costs and benefits of both quantifiable and qualitative measures, and opt for approaches that maximize net benefits.
Major Regulatory Priorities
Five agencies are represented in this regulatory plan. They are the Farm Service Agency (which includes the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation), the Food and Consumer Service, the Forest Service, the Food Safety Inspection Service, and the Rural Business Cooperative Development Service.
This document represents summary information on prospective significant regulations as called for in Executive Order 12866. A brief comment on each of the five agencies appears below, which summarizes the agency mission and its key regulatory priorities. The agency summaries are followed by the regulatory plan entries.
Farm Service Agency
Mission: The Farm Service Agency (FSA) administers farm commodity, conservation, commodity purchase, crop insurance, and farm loan programs, as prescribed by various statutes, in order to support farming certainty and flexibility while ensuring compliance with farm conservation and wetland protection requirements and to assist owners and operators of farms and ranches to conserve and enhance soil, water, and related natural resources.
Priorities: FSA's priorities for 1997 will be to continue to implement these programs and to implement the many revisions to the farm program regulations that were identified by the President's Regulatory Review Initiative. The most significant FSA regulations are those that implement crop and commodity programs and farm loans. FSA administers commodity loan programs for wheat, rice, grain, sorghum barley, oats, oilseeds, tobacco, peanuts, upland and extra long staple cotton and sugar. The programs for wheat, feed grains, rice and upland cotton were significantly changed by the 1996 Farm Bill, which instituted production flexibility contracts in place of the deficiency payments and production adjustment of past programs. The contracts removed the link between income support payments and farm prices by providing for seven annual fixed but declining payments. FSA's farm loan programs provide farm ownership, operating, emergency loss and rural youth loans to help farmers who are temporarily unable to obtain private, commercial credit. While the commodity and farm loan programs have significant economic impact, they are driven by specific statutory requirements. Therefore, they are noted here to acknowledge their significance in the overall USDA regulatory plan but are not further listed in the body of the plan which appears below.
Food and Consumer Service
Mission: The Food and Consumer Service (FCS) provides children and needy families access to a more healthful diet through its food assistance programs and comprehensive nutrition education efforts.
Priorities: In addition to responding to recently enacted provisions for welfare reform, FCS has established broad strategic policy goals that are enabled and/or supported by the Agency's regulatory agenda. These goals include:
Forest Service
Mission: The mission of the Forest Service is to achieve quality land management, under the sustainable multiple-use management concept, to meet the diverse needs of people. It includes:
Priorities: The President's environmental program includes efforts to incorporate the principles of ecosystem management in natural resource decisionmaking on the National Forests. In support of that effort, final regulations will be published governing the amendment, revision, and implementation of forest land management plans. Significantly, the regulation will also streamline the planning process and update planning procedures and requirements in order to reflect court decisions and the Agency's experience gained with the first generation of forest plans.
Food Safety and Inspection Service
Mission: The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is responsible for ensuring the Nation's meat, poultry, and egg products are safe, wholesome, and properly packaged and labeled.
Priorities: FSIS is carrying out a comprehensive review of its existing regulations in light of the July 25, 1996, final rule, ``Pathogen Reduction Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) Systems,'' requiring that official meat and poultry establishments develop and implement HACCP, a science-based process control system for food safety. Establishments will be responsible for developing and implementing HACCP plans incorporating the controls they have determined are necessary and appropriate to produce safe products. HACCP places the responsibility for food safety firmly on meat and poultry establishments, but enables them to tailor their control systems to the needs of particular plants and processes and to take advantage of the latest technological innovations.
FSIS must revise its existing regulations to be consistent with HACCP principles. Many are ``command-and-control'' regulations, prescribing the exact means establishments must use to ensure the safety of their products. Some specify, for example, precise cooking time-and-temperature combinations. Further, many of these regulations require prior approval of equipment and procedures by FSIS, therefore assigning the Agency responsibility for the means used by establishments to comply with the regulations. As a general matter, command-and-control regulations are incompatible with HACCP because they deprive plants of the flexibility to innovate and undercut the clear delineation of responsibility for food safety. Therefore, to prepare for the implementation of HACCP, FSIS is conducting a thorough review of its current regulations and, to the maximum extent possible, converting its command-and-control regulations to performance standards. Some of the Agency's recent and planned initiatives, both to convert command-and-control regulations to performance standards and to generally streamline and simplify the regulations, follow:
Rural Business-Cooperative Development Service
Mission: The mission of RBCDS is to enhance the quality of life for all rural Americans by providing leadership in building competitive businesses and cooperatives that can prosper in the global trading marketplace.
Priority: Despite decades of investments in infrastructure and business development, rural America continues to face many significant challenges. Some of the challenges, like the persistence of poverty in major parts of the South and in Appalachia, have been with us for a long time. Others, such as the loss of jobs and businesses from rural economies, are due to changes in the structure of rural economic bases and the globalization of competition.
The primary goals of RBCDS regulatory changes are to economize in the use of public resources while making the programs more effective at rural community economic development and more customer friendly. New or revised regulations will generally be shorter, better organized, and clearer than the current regulations for the same programs, and program requirements will be more flexible.