Without a Senate-confirmed head, rulemaking at the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has ground to a halt. FSIS, the agency responsible for ensuring the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products, made progress on only one significant regulation in the past six months, according to the semiannual Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions published Monday.

Today, the Obama administration cleared a major hurdle for agencies seeking to solicit public input into policymaking and implementing the reforms called for in the Open Government Directive (OGD) issued on December 8, 2009.  The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo that exempts web-based interactive technologies from the requirements of the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA).  Now, agencies are freer than before to communicate with the public in an unstructured way but there are still some restrictions on the solicitation of structured feedback.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has proposed requiring companies to alert the government if contaminated or mislabeled meat or poultry products escape into the market. USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) published a notice of proposed rulemaking yesterday. The proposal is open for public comment until May 24.