This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 4th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama today signs into law new regulations governing how food gets produced in the US, but the FDA's broad

new powers are largely at odds with the FDA's ability to get the job done.

That's if the job can truly be done at all.

Regulation magazine editor Peter Van Doren offers his thoughts.

To me, some of what's going on here with this bill reminds me of the SEC and

Bertie Madoff in the sense that lots of tasks that our regulators

are tasked with by the Congress are impossible in the sense of the set of things out there that that would have to be

investigated.

I think with Bernie Madoff, I read that there were 700,000 tips given to the SEC each year to investigate financial wrongdoing.

There's only 3,000 inspectors in the SEC.

So you work out the math,

an inspector would have to process something every,

you know, whatever second, in order

to go through every possible thing that anybody had ever told it could be wrong with their

financial system.

The FDA, the figures vary, but a GAO report I read earlier today said there's 60 to 70,000 facilities

in the United States that are subject to FDA food inspection authority, and there's around 2,000 inspectors. Okay, so again

that's 130th and inspections to come to to to measure all of the things the FDA does in fact

regulate would be very time consuming. Right.

And so the task that the public and the Congress in effect want the agency to do is in some sense,

...