Corporate special interests nominated the Listeria rule for rollbacks in response to a call from the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which used its annual draft report on the costs and benefits of regulations last February to request industry's nominations for regulatory protections to be weakened or eliminated.

When OIRA released the final version of that report in December, it summarized the public's nominations and submitted them to the agencies for their review. In addition to a separate list of the White House's own suggestions for rollbacks and a list of anti-regulatory initiatives that it wanted moved to higher priority status, OIRA included a list of what it called "regulatory reform accomplishments." The Listeria rule was on that list.

OIRA released a new report on March 9, announcing 76 of the industry-nominated rollbacks that the administration was endorsing as its regulatory reform priorities. Incredibly, the same Listeria rule touted in December as an accomplishment appeared on that list of regulatory protections to be weakened or eliminated.

Listeria monocytogenes is a deadly pathogen that has the highest hospitalization rate and the second-highest fatality rate of all foodborne pathogens. Pregnant women who contract Listeria poisoning will almost always miscarry or bear a child with severe developmental disabilities. Because Listeria outbreaks have been traced to ready-to-eat meat products such as hotdogs and lunch meats, the Clinton administration began work on a performance standard with related requirements to test the final products as well as food-contact surfaces.

When the Bush administration took office, however, the Department of Agriculture made an about-face and abandoned the idea of a strong performance standard, issuing instead an interim final rule that favored the food industry and weakened the USDA's power to enforce any protections against Listeria in ready-to-eat meats. As the Consumer Federation of America has documented in a recent report, the Bush administration has campaign finance ties to the big food companies, in particular ready-to-eat meat producer Pilgrim's Pride. After holding a meeting with food industry representatives, OIRA ordered the USDA to make changes in the rule.

The case of the Listeria rule is not the first in which OIRA has sent inconsistent signals in its anti-regulatory hit lists. OIRA called for a similar hit list in its draft annual report in 2001, with similarly confused results. One of the hit list nominations that OIRA designated that year as a "high priority" for weakening or elimination was a rule requiring labeling of trans-fatty acids in food products -- the same rule that OIRA had urged the Food and Drug Administration to develop. That same high-priority list included the rescission of the Clinton administration's standards for arsenic in drinking water, although in a matter of months OIRA administrator John Graham delivered a speech to the National Economists Club in which he characterized the Clinton arsenic standard as having been well-founded in science and thus deserving of OIRA's deference.