Washington, DC, USA
November 14, 2011
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) today announced plans to dramatically streamline and improve several programmatic processes, including the Agency’s processes for conducting risk assessments and rulemaking. Last week, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack highlighted improvements to a host of USDA programs and processes, including to the risk assessment and rulemaking process, being made to help farmers, ranchers and businesses continue to drive America’s productive agricultural economy.
“Risk assessment and rulemaking are at the heart of APHIS’ efforts as a regulatory agency,” said Ed Avalos, undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs. “Our ambitious review, however, found ways to capture significant time-savings while protecting agriculture and supporting trade. This change is part of our commitment to improving the customer experience by streamlining processes, accelerating delivery and using innovative technologies.”
APHIS reviewed its risk assessment and rulemaking processes in response to trading partners’ requests to ship new plants, animals and products to the United States. APHIS found that by streamlining the drafting of risk assessments, improving project management and tracking, and assigning deadlines to specific steps in the process, the agency can expect to see dramatic improvements, including time-savings of more than 70 percent.
“We are making these improvements while maintaining the rigor of our analysis and the public’s involvement in our rulemaking,” said Avalos. “Such improvements benefit U.S. agriculture and other industries, as our customers are also importers, brokers and transporters of imported agricultural products.”
Overall, APHIS’ process improvements will help evaluate import requests in a more reasonable timeframe and improves trading relationships with foreign partners--potentially opening new market opportunities for U.S. products abroad.
The improvements to APHIS’ risk assessment and rulemaking processes are part of Secretary Vilsack’s effort to transform USDA into a high-performing organization that focuses on its customers. These process improvements are part of the USDA Customer Service Plan which identifies key actions and initiatives aimed at improving the customer experience, modernizing and streamlining processes, reducing costs, accelerating delivery and using innovative technology to advance customer service.
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