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The three heads of a new presidential council appear unlikely to act on a call for a single authority to be put in charge of the US government's food safety efforts.

The President's Council on Food Safety must respond to the report, by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, within six months. At a recent press conference the joint chairs — Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services; Dan Glickman, the Secretary of Agriculture; and Neal Lane, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology — pledged to consider its recommendations seriously.

But their comments made clear that they are unlikely to embrace its proposal for a single, powerful official, possibly heading a unified agency. The report recommended that a presidentially appointed official should control the country's food safety budget and policy, to unify and render science-based what it called a fragmented system “in critical need of attention” (see Nature 394, 822; 1998).

The three chairs say that existing policies need to be coordinated. “What we're interested in is ratcheting up and improving the quality of food safety ⃛ not automatically [concluding] that what you need is a powerful new bureaucracy,” said Shalala.

Lane said that too many different fields of science were involved. “You can't expect all that to appear in one agency. First, it would be huge, and second, you would have pulled all the pieces out of the other agencies that need these ⃛ scientific and technological underpinnings for their own missions.”

Within a week of the report's release President Clinton responded by establishing the Council on Food Safety, charging it with coordinating the efforts of a dozen US agencies involved in ensuring food safety.

In addition to its three co-chairs, the council includes five cabinet-level and White House officials. It will be responsible for developing a “comprehensive strategic plan” for national food safety — taking into account the report's recommendations — and will present a unified budget to Congress. But it will not have control over food safety funds; this remains with the agencies.

Opposition to the single-agency idea goes beyond the council. Political observers widely agree that the Republican Congress would be highly unlikely to enact a law establishing a food safety bureaucracy or leader. The idea is also opposed by the food industry.

“The President can't really do what the [National Research Council] has recommended without help from Congress. so the Clinton administration is going as far as it can” by establishing the council, says Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Timothy Willard, of the National Food Processors Association, says the new council is a step forward. “We're supportive as much of what wasn't done as what was done in creating this,” he says.