Yesterday, President Obama recess appointed Elisabeth Hagen to serve as the USDA Undersecretary for Food Safety. Hagen was nominated by Obama in January 2010, but has had difficulty getting the Senate’s attention.

Hagen had been the chief medical officer at the USDA. Now, as undersecretary, she will head the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the regulator of meat and poultry products.

Recess appointments are never ideal, but this must be viewed as good news. As I have complained many times, the failure to secure leadership at FSIS was inconsistent with Obama’s pledge to improve food safety and made it difficult for FSIS to write new food safety regulations.

Hagen was not a controversial nominee. There was no apparent reason for the Senate’s feet dragging. Agriculture Committee chair Blanche Lincoln failed to schedule a nomination hearing until May 27. The committee didn’t approve the nomination until June 30. (Obama deserves a share of the blame as well for waiting a full year into his term to announce a nominee.)

But that’s all in the past. Hagen can now work to get FSIS’s wayward rulemaking agenda back on track. One of her first challenges will be to wrest control of the agency’s pending catfish inspection rule from the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which has been reviewing the rule since November 2009. Apparently, the U.S. Trade Representative objects to the rule. Because of the delay, FSIS has missed a statutory deadline (Dec. 31, 2009) to propose the rule. I have speculated in the past that the lack of leadership has complicated FSIS’s efforts to advance the rulemaking.

Sargeant to Head SBA Regulatory Office

Obama also announced another recess appointment with a regulatory angle: Winslow Sargeant is the new Chief Counsel of Advocacy at the Small Business Administration. Sargeant’s nomination was among the longest not yet taken up by the Senate; Obama nominated him in June 2009.

The Office of Advocacy is SBA’s lobbying arm and focuses on agencies’ proposed rules. It takes great pride in its recommendations, which often call for exemptions for small businesses or generally advocate weakening regulations.

It has historically been a thorn in the side of both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Just yesterday, the office submitted comments to OSHA objecting to provisions in a proposed rule meant to reduce slips and falls in the workplace. None of the office’s major objections appear to relate to small businesses specifically, rather they reflect the views of businesses generally. In 2009, an official from the office complained to the White House about EPA’s declaration, at the time not yet finalized, that greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and welfare.

Business representatives often argue that regulation has a disproportionately negative impact on small businesses. But recent regulatory failures like the BP oil spill have reminded us that lax regulation can disproportionately punish small businesses. Fishermen and small businesses in the Gulf’s tourism industry will struggle mightily to recover from the damage caused by the oil spill, while BP is likely to be just fine.

I hope Sargeant takes the Office of Advocacy in a new direction – one that is less combative and more constructive. Gaps in regulation can leave small businesses vulnerable, and the office ought to assist agencies in identifying such gaps, not just to funnel the objections of industry lobbyists.