I'm curious why you'd say that. It sounds to me like a bureaucrat pointing out a scientific fact about the testing.
I'm not an expert on testing for prions, but it doesn't surprise me that the test isn't good enough to pronounce an animal disease-free. And if that's correct, it's very much their purview to make it clear that advertising it as disease-free would be false.
Most of the work at US agencies is done by career employees who are largely insulated from changes at the top. Politics certainly happens, but rarely at the level of individual decisions like this.
Such agencies certainly aren't immune to regulatory capture, and it's conceivable that it's the case here. The scientists and bureaucrats who wrote that have likely worked with the cattle industry their whole careers, and have many personal contacts. Same for their bosses.
But this memo turns on a specific technical point. If the tests aren't good enough, then they're not good enough. It wouldn't take regulatory capture for them to reach that conclusion, and this memo is exactly how they'd say it. It's also what it could sound like if they were being influenced by industry, but I'd say that the burden of proof is on somebody making that claim.
"Most new cars sold in USA have breaks that work. It doesnt make sense to test them since this would give the public a wrong impression that cars are safe".
If 3,4 million new cars are sold in USA then probably 99% are generally ok. Because in current world generally most things are ok by default (custom software might be different, but off the shelf software generally works).
But if you would be unlucky 1% where nobody checked the breaks... this would be 34 yhousand cars.
And there is much more cattle raised and consumed so checking everything makes sense.
Not checking anything because 99% will be ok is a pseudoscientific argument.
> "Most new cars sold in USA have breaks that work. It doesnt make sense to test them since this would give the public a wrong impression that cars are safe".
This isn't what the argument against testing every cow is about. It is really 'You can't test every car's brakes with a test that will say the car's brakes are OK even if those brakes are bad'. If a food product had a toxic ingredient, do you think it's appropriate for a company to run a test that can detect it, say, 50% of the time, and say their product is xyz-toxin-free? What if the test is only effective 10% of the time? 1%?
The USDA didn't decide not to perform no tests for BSE tests at all. They decided to perform tests specifically for those cases where, if the cow had BSE, the test could actually catch it. Again, I don't entirely agree with the USDA's approach, but it isn't unreasonable.
I'm not an expert on testing for prions, but it doesn't surprise me that the test isn't good enough to pronounce an animal disease-free. And if that's correct, it's very much their purview to make it clear that advertising it as disease-free would be false.
Most of the work at US agencies is done by career employees who are largely insulated from changes at the top. Politics certainly happens, but rarely at the level of individual decisions like this.
Such agencies certainly aren't immune to regulatory capture, and it's conceivable that it's the case here. The scientists and bureaucrats who wrote that have likely worked with the cattle industry their whole careers, and have many personal contacts. Same for their bosses.
But this memo turns on a specific technical point. If the tests aren't good enough, then they're not good enough. It wouldn't take regulatory capture for them to reach that conclusion, and this memo is exactly how they'd say it. It's also what it could sound like if they were being influenced by industry, but I'd say that the burden of proof is on somebody making that claim.