Tue, Jul 1, 2008 (2:04 a.m.)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration takes plenty of heat, and deservedly so, for its often glacial response to the spread of food-borne diseases. Its administrators are currently scratching their heads over the national salmonella outbreak linked to certain types of tomatoes. They are not too busy, though, to spend their fat bonuses.

Thanks to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, we learned Thursday that the agency’s top staffers collected $35 million in bonuses in 2007, a 29 percent increase from the $27.1 million in bonuses they received the prior year. The FDA’s chief of regulatory affairs struck pay dirt with a cash bonus of $48,663. As noted by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., the committee’s chairman, the average federal worker in Washington makes $88,000 but many FDA managers and employees receive more than $200,000. For an agency that has a shortage of inspectors, the disclosure about the bonuses is an outrage.

The FDA came under stinging criticism in early June when the Government Accountability Office, the auditor for Congress, reported that the agency had been slow to implement a new food safety plan announced late last year. Noteworthy is that the number of businesses under the agency’s jurisdiction continues to increase while the number of inspections of those companies has declined.

Here is a terrific idea. Take the bonuses and spend them on more inspectors. As Dingell said, “These back-scratching bonuses could be used to hire inspectors that might have gone to China and uncovered the unsafe manufacturing practices that led to the heparin deaths, or the tomato pickers that shipped salmonella to hundreds of Americans.”

Though the FDA argues that the bonuses help attract and retain good employees, they do not seem to have resulted in speedier resolutions of the spread of diseases that affect the nation’s food supply. Bonuses should be based on tangible results. Given the FDA’s track record in recent years, it is difficult to see how those bonuses could be justified.