The Balance of Social Forces in the Administration of the Pure Food and Drug Act

Abstract

T HE failure of the 74th Congress to pass an amendatory pure food and drug bill was a major omission of the session. With the merits of the particular legislation proposed we are not concerned. Remedial legislation is essential now but this need for statutory reform must not distract attention from the great influence of social and economic forces lying beyond the legal realm. Our purpose here is to analize the proper conditions for free administrative action in terms of the social, economic, and political forces that make this possible. If a regulatory bureau is to execute the law in the interest, those forces impinging upon the bureau from without must tend to counter-balance one another. It is only in an environment of this sort that the civil servant can freely perform his official duties. The experience of the officials enforcing the federal pure food and drug act for nearly three decades shows the effect of environmental conditions in changing the very character and purpose of a statute. This becomes clear if the execution of the law is reviewed in relation of the social forces and economic influences touching the administrators themselves. The Food and Drug Administration must be considered in its context. The situation can be clarified if this federal agency is viewed objectively against the economic, legal, political, and technical forces that touch the bureau in its day to day operations. What is the bureaucratic environment within which these government officials carry on their work? In the Food and Drug Administration we find a personnel of about 500 scientists and specialists: chemists, bacteriologists, physicians, veterinarians, entomologists, plant pathologists, microscopists, pharmacologists, and the like. About half of this force man the executive supervisory offices and technical control laboratories in Washington. The rest are scattered over the country in the various branch stations. Sixty-one inspectors are designated to watch for infractions of the law. These officials are responsible for enforcing not only the pure food and drug law but also five other acts regulating insecticides, caustic poisons, naval stores, and importations of milk and tea. They unquestionably have plenty to do. An idea of the enormity of the task is shown by the fact that the total value of the year's output of canned goods alone amounted to about $745,000,000 in I93Z while drug products exceeded $400,000,000. With an appropriation of about one and a quarter million dollars a small corps of officials are charged with regulating a vast number of products in a great variety of industries. These bureaucratic specialists confront a highly specialized public composed of the manufacturers, the producers, the shippers, and the distributors engaged in the collossal work of supplying the nation with nourishment through the arteries of interstate commerce. Officials come into daily contact with dairymen, patent medicine men, canners, fruit growers and shippers, retail grocers and wholesalers. The variety of interests is kaleidoscopic and their number is legion. Under the best of conditions one cannot