WASHINGTON – U.S. Reps. Joe Barton, ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Greg Walden, R-Ore., ranking member on the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, today wrote to acting Food and Drug Administration Frank Torti about the FDA’s oversight of the state inspection programs.

Barton and Walden are concerned that the arrangements and partnership agreements the FDA has made with states to conduct inspection is not being adequately monitored. A recent hearing about the recent peanut-caused salmonella outbreak exposed the problem. For fiscal year 2008, 59 percent of the FDA’s inspections of food firms were conducted by states.

In 2000, the inspector general at the Health and Human Services Department released a report concluding that FDA’s oversight of inspections done under contract is limited and that the FDA does minimal assessment of the quality of inspection reports and “provides limited feedback to the state on how to conduct an FDA-contract inspection.”

Barton and Walden have asked FDA to provide answers to a number of questions, including providing a list of all the current FDA-state contracts and FDA-state partnership agreements.

A copy of the letter can be found here.