Without a Senate-confirmed head, rulemaking at the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has ground to a halt. FSIS, the agency responsible for ensuring the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products, made progress on only one significant regulation in the past six months, according to the semiannual Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions published Monday.

President Obama did not nominate Elisabeth Hagen to serve as USDA’s Under Secretary of Agriculture for Food Safety, a.k.a. the head of FSIS, until Jan. 26, 2010, more than a full year after he took office. Now, Hagen’s nomination awaits a hearing and vote in the Senate Agriculture Committee.

FSIS’s last Unified Agenda, published in October 2009, listed 22 ongoing rulemakings. The agency set 22 target dates for 21 of those rules (one rulemaking had two projected actions, and one had none). 11 of those projections were to have been met sometime between October 2009 and April 2010.

According to the new Unified Agenda released this week, FSIS missed all 11 target dates, and has taken action on only one of those rules – a proposal to require companies to notify the government if they learn a meat or poultry product is contaminated or has been mislabeled. The target dates for the other ten rulemakings have been rescheduled. Of the other, longer term rulemakings, FSIS has further delayed several timetables, some into 2011. FSIS did not add any new rulemakings to the latest Unified Agenda.

(The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the office responsible for reviewing agency draft proposed and final regulations, does not appear to be doing FSIS any favors. FSIS could have met its target date for the proposed rule on notification of contaminated products, but OIRA spent almost 3 months reviewing the rule. For a proposed rule on statutorily mandated catfish inspections, OIRA has been reviewing the proposal since November 2009.)

There is not necessarily anything wrong with an agency missing a target date it sets in the Unified Agenda, especially if agency staff is using the extra time to make the rule better. But when an agency accomplishes as little as FSIS has these last six months, it begs the question, What is the hold up?

One can only assume FSIS is struggling in the absence of leadership. While top deputies have been running FSIS in the meantime, regulatory agencies like FSIS need full-time, Senate-confirmed heads to set an aggressive rulemaking agenda (and to butt heads with OIRA if need be). The Senate Agriculture Committee needs to get off its duff and approve Elisabeth Hagen’s nomination, and the full Senate must follow.