On Monday, amid the rapidly intensifying COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Senate quietly approved a controversial scientist from Texas to oversee the safety of the nation’s supply of meat, poultry, and eggs. The confirmation of Mindy Brashears, formerly a food researcher at Texas Tech University, marks the end of the Trump administration’s two-year fight to install an industry-friendly bureaucrat as the nation’s top food safety official. Advocates said on Tuesday that Brashears’ confirmation could further erode food safety at a time when many Americans are scrambling to find safe food to eat.
Brashears was nominated to serve as undersecretary of food safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2018. Before that, she was the director of Texas Tech’s International Center for Food Industry Excellence, where she experimented with ways to eliminate pathogens on meat products and invented new food decontamination devices. At the same time, she was deepening her ties to agribusiness: She was paid $100,000 by a South Dakota meat company to testify on its behalf in a high-profile libel lawsuit against ABC; she accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in research funding from industry groups and, in some cases, published research that was favorable to them; she went on NBC’s Today show to defend agribusiness when reports of contaminated meat surfaced.
So it should come as no surprise that industry groups cheered Trump’s decision to nominate Brashears for the top food safety regulator in the nation. The position wields enormous power: The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has almost 8,000 inspectors stationed in processing facilities across the United States, where they check live animals and take up fixed positions along slaughter lines to spot infected carcasses. The agency can issue public health alerts and has the power to shut down businesses if they don’t follow federal rules.
