Don Quixote Slays the Catfish

The farm bill spends $30 million on a nonexistent catfish threat.

U.S. News & World Report

Don Quixote Slays the Catfish

Catfish gasp as they are moved from their Quiver River Aquaculture Inc., pond in Moorhead, Miss., to a transport truck, June 3, 2008.

Not actually a dragon.Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo

Buried in this year’s farm bill, the Office of Catfish Inspection has been equipped to do battle. Somewhere, deep in the heart of the old U.S. Department of Agriculture building, there is a wizened warrior fighting the good fight against the mighty catfish threat. Perhaps it is a lifelong bureaucrat, or maybe a young, ambitious federal employee who saw heading up the Office of Catfish Inspection as a stepping stone toward the coveted Senior Executive Service.
Mostly gone are the critics who pointed out that there has not been a problem with salmonella in catfish for nearly a quarter of a century, not to mention the regulations that already govern the safety of all seafood. But the farm bill is passed, and like so much of government spending, the merits of the expenditure matter not at all.
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I imagine our USDA warrior as a modern day Don Quixote, convinced of the rightness of his quest. But our warrior needed a horse, a shield and a spear, and that could only have been provided by that great deliberative body, the United States Congress. After all, the president signs budgets, but only Congress has "the power of the purse." 
Did its members debate the wisdom of tilting at windmills? One can only imagine that if the funding for Don Quixote came up how the conversation might have gone? "I wish to ask the gentleman from (a state that wants to protect catfish from international imports), do you sir have proof that windmills are not dragons? Isn't it better that we put this preventive control in place, to be safe rather than sorry? If these windmills in fact turn out to be dragons and take to the air and destroy our towns and incinerate our children? Are you sir, so cavalier as to not care about our children?"
In fact, the last known problem came 25 years ago, with 10 cases of salmonella that were possibly related to the consumption of catfish. Using this evidence, USDA risk assessors constructed a dragon estimating that there are likely to be 2400 cases of salmonella poisoning every year. Note that the Food and Drug Administration has been regulating catfish intensively for nearly 20 years.
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And so, a small part of farm bill – about $30 million — is awarded for slaying the mighty catfish windmills. This is just one of many other questionable, Quixotic projects embedded into regulatory agencies’ budgets. No doubt each one has an active lobby that would remind the public of a terrible menace and and make small but meaningful contributions to keep the dragon slaying funding continuing. At the end of the debate, no doubt the members of Congress congratulated themselves; they kept support for one aspect of agribusinesses and funded a small but important lobby for at least one representative and one senator. In return, they probably agreed to vote to fund other dragon slaying projects elsewhere.