Federal Contract Accountability for Peanuts

Last Thursday, the Peanut Corporation of America had all its federal contracts suspended and was barred from doing further business with the government for a year, though that may be increased to three years. The decision was surely helped along by the revelation that peanut butter from a PCA plant implicated in eight deaths and hundreds of illnesses ended up in disaster relief packages distributed by FEMA in Kentucky and free school lunches.

While that makes last Thursday a red letter day for food safety, I hope it represents the shape of things to come throughout the federal government.

Consider Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a Halliburton subsidiary and major supplier of contractor services to the US military overseas.

KBR management had one of their American employees in Iraq locked in a shipping container to keep her from reporting a gang rape by her colleagues and avoided a lawsuit because of an abusive clause in their employment contracts. Their faulty wiring caused the electrocution deaths of 13 soldiers in Iraq, while they were doing things like showering on base. They have knowingly provided sewage contaminated water to military bases as though it were fit to use for drinking, cooking and bathing. They have extravagantly overbilled for their services. Services which included shipping beverage ice in a truck that previously held rotting corpses for two weeks.

Have they lost contracts or been suspended from further contracts? Have they been fined? No. No, they have not.

So, again, I hope there's more like this. Regulation, accountability and oversight have been seriously lacking at the federal level for some time, and particularly during the last eight years. Consider what was revealed last September about the state of corporate 'oversight' at the Interior Department:

As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

... The report says that eight officials in the royalty program accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski and paintball outings; meals and drinks; and tickets to a Toby Keith concert, a Houston Texans football game and a Colorado Rockies baseball game.

... The culture of the organization “appeared to be devoid of both the ethical standards and internal controls sufficient to protect the integrity of this vital revenue-producing program,” one report said. ...

The ethics and oversight failures that accompanied this latest, deadly salmonella outbreak aren't only a failure of food safety, though they are certainly that. They're part of a disrespect for regulation and public accountability that has lead to systematic underfunding of inspection services, a culture of corporate impunity, a revolving door between jobs in industries and the regulatory agencies that oversee them.

Failures of accountability this widespread, this endemic to so many government functions (more than I've listed here, certainly) create a climate where it's near certain that food safety (and other) crises of this sort will be with us regularly. Which is bad for business.

None of us has time to test all our food and consumer goods for safety, we can't test our water and we personally make almost nothing of what's in our house. That means trusting thousands of strangers every year to do their jobs properly when we aren't looking. Well, someone has to be looking. And at more than peanuts.

(Photo credit: Katie Hannan on Flickr.)