The US government is ill-equipped to deal with a “devastating or highly contagious outbreak” on livestock and poultry farms, the Government Accountability Office warned in a report published Tuesday.
The US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which is charged with responding to widespread animal illnesses, lacks “a detailed plan to augment or train its workforce to respond” to a major epidemic, and is also without sufficient staffing levels, the investigation concluded.
Per a tabulation calculated earlier this fiscal year, APHIS employs only 624 animal doctors. And while foreign allies and other government agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services could lend human resources to the USDA in a time of crisis, the total number of animal doctors employed by Washington—some 2,000—is not nearly enough, the GAO warned.
It referenced a study, which showed that “a national-scale outbreak would require approximately 6,000 veterinarians,” and claimed that figure itself was an underestimation, with the calculation based on narrow geographic and scientific parameters.
Moreover, the extent to which HHS could help isn’t even clear. GAO noted that the department has failed to audit its veterinarian workforce, despite agreeing to do so in 2009. It charged that agencies within HHS “do not consider veterinarians to be a mission-critical occupation.”
USDA and HHS employ the bulk of the government’s veterinarians who carry out a wide range of tasks including inspecting food safety and humane treatment of animals at slaughterhouses; monitoring wildlife for diseases; ensuring animal feed and medicine is safe; and investigating human disease outbreaks that originated from animals.
Human capital problems go beyond veterinarians, however, and have persisted across government since 2001, prompting GAO to then designate personnel shortages as a “high-risk area of government operations.”
In 2015, the watchdog kept the designation in place, citing a wave of employee retirements and “current budget and long-term fiscal pressures” that could produce “gaps in leadership and institutional knowledge” and “threaten the government’s capacity to effectively address a wide range of national issues.”
Despite its years of inaction, the government largely concurred with GAO’s findings and recommendations.
