Politicians for Sale

Elected officials are increasingly being bought off by farmed-animal industry lobbyists, by campaign contributions from meat, dairy, and egg companies, and by promises of cushy industry jobs after their terms in office end. As a result, politicians have turned a blind eye to the problems caused by factory farms and have appointed industry-friendly officials to key positions in government agencies.

According to a report by The Center for Public Integrity: “The meat industry has created one of Washington’s most effective influence machines, partly by recruiting federal lawmakers and congressional aides for its lobbying juggernaut. . . . From filling lawmakers’ campaign coffers to plying them with all-expenses-paid trips and dangling the possibility of lucrative post-employment opportunities, the meat interests have overwhelmed the supposedly objective decision-making process in Washington.”⁵

In the past five years alone, agribusinesses have funneled more than $140 million to politicians, which is more than was donated by either of the other two corporate powerhouses in Washington, the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries.^6,7 According to Carol Tucker Foreman, who served as undersecretary of agriculture during the Carter administration, “The meatpacking industry has more power today than at any other time in my career because you have one-party rule, and that party’s coffers are larded with money from the industry.”⁸

The money trail from the meat industry leads all the way to the Oval Office—during the 2000 presidential campaign, meat industry groups donated $600,000 to George W. Bush, compared with $23,000 to Al Gore.⁹ The Bush administration earned that money soon after the election—one of its first gifts to the meat industry was a move to end the testing of meat for deadly salmonella bacteria before it is sold to school lunch programs.¹⁰ Within about a year, the Bush White House and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) changed the classification of data about the meat industry and public health to “sensitive,” making it more difficult to get information about the impact of factory farming on public health. Dr. James Zahn, who studied the relationship between bacteria and pig farms at the USDA, calls it “a choke hold on objective research.” Dr. Zahn resigned from the USDA in protest after USDA officials barred him from presenting research about the impact of factory farming on human health at a conference in Iowa.¹¹

Some government officials say that the Bush administration has also made it difficult for them to enforce the rules that are designed to protect the public from factory farms. For instance, in October 1999, Michele Merkel, a former staff attorney in the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) enforcement division, filed the EPA’s first-ever lawsuit against a factory farm for Clean Air Act violations. However, she says: “Once the Bush team came in, I was not allowed to pursue any further air lawsuits against CAFOs [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, i.e., factory farms]. We got political cover to continue what was underway, but I was told that new efforts were off-limits. It wasn’t just coming from my EPA superiors, it was coming from the White House.”¹²

Even when they are taken to task for accepting money from the meat industry, few politicians are willing to return the cash. In 2005, PETA called on several elected representatives to return large campaign contributions that they had accepted from the owners of the AgriProcessors slaughterhouse in Iowa. A PETA investigator documented routine cruelty to animals at AgriProcessors, including ripping the windpipes out of animals who were still conscious and then dumping them on a blood-soaked floor where many stood and struggled to flee. Despite the fact that the slaughterhouse was being investigated for cruelty to animals and was sued by the EPA for violations of the Clean Water Act, none of the politicians returned AgriProcessors’ money.

The Revolving Door Between Government and Industry

Elected officials who receive campaign contributions from the meat, dairy, and egg industries often return the favor by working to ensure that industry-friendly officials are appointed to high-ranking posts in government agencies such as the USDA, the EPA, and the FDA. In turn, elected and appointed officials who do the bidding of the farmed-animal industries are frequently rewarded with cushy industry jobs once their terms in office end. As a result of this “revolving door” between the government and the meat industry, it’s not surprising that many top officials in government agencies have previously worked for the very industries that they’ve been assigned to monitor.

For example, a report by a network of farm industry and public interest groups titled “USDA Inc.: How Agribusiness Has Hijacked Regulatory Policy at the U.S. Department of Agriculture” details how many leaders in the USDA have close ties to big agribusiness and the meat industry, including former Secretary Ann Veneman, who also served on the board of the massive agricorporation Calgene.¹³ The report states: “Veneman’s chief of staff, Dale Moore, was executive director for legislative affairs of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), a trade association heavily supported by and aligned with the interests of the big meatpacking companies, such as Tyson and Cargill. Deputy Secretary James Moseley was a co-owner of a large factory farm in Indiana. Floyd Gaibler, a [d]eputy [undersecretary], used to be executive director of the dairy industry’s National Cheese Institute. Assistant Secretary for Congressional Relations Mary Waters was a senior director and legislative counsel for ConAgra Foods, one of the country’s largest food producers.”¹⁴

The pro-agribusiness slant of high-ranking officials in the USDA, the EPA, and the FDA is reflected in the implementation of watered-down food-safety and environmental policies that put consumers at the mercy of meatpackers. Eric Schlosser, author of the best-selling book Fast Food Nation, writes: “[T]he [USDA] today offers a fine example of a government agency that has been thoroughly captured and corrupted. … As a result, ordinary Americans, both Republican and Democrat, are paying the price with their health and, sometimes, their lives.”¹⁵

Read more about how the government fails to protect consumers and animals.