The FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are pledging to work more closely together to oversee food safety, the agencies announced Tuesday.

“Today, [FDA] Commissioner [Scott] Gottlieb and I signed a formal agreement to promote coordination and the streamlining of capacities and obligations on shared concerns and jurisdiction,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement. “Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act and assigned responsibilities to the USDA and the FDA. The USDA has the knowledge and expertise to support the FDA’s work related to farming. We at the USDA have a motto: Do Right, and Feed Everyone. We believe this joint effort will help us move one step closer to that goal.”

“Over the last several months, the Secretary and I have worked closely and identified several areas where we can strengthen our collaboration to make our processes more efficient, predictable, and potentially lower cost to industry, while also strengthening our efforts to ensure food safety,” Gottlieb said in the statement. “This agreement not only formalizes this ongoing coordination, but presents a great opportunity to expand those efforts through better integration and increased clarity to the agriculture and food processing sectors. Our coordination with these sectors plays an integral role in helping to keep our nation’s food supply safe and secure.”

One thing the agreement seeks to do is reduce the number of food manufacturers who are supervised by both the FDA and the Agriculture Department. For instance, a canned soup manufacturing facility that makes both chicken noodle soup and tomato soup “is currently subject to regulation by both agencies,” the statement noted. “The agreement tasks both government organizations with identifying ways to streamline regulation and reduce inspection inefficiencies, while steadfastly upholding safety standards for dual-jurisdiction facilities. This can reduce costs on industry and free government resources to better target efforts to areas of risk.”

To a certain extent, such streamlining makes sense, according to David Katz, MD, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, in Derby, CT. “Each agency has responsibility for different parts of the food supply, and each has historically developed its own rules and regulations in a silo,” he said in an email. “The results have not been fundamentally incompatible, but they have not been uniform and reliably consistent, either.

“So, in principle, this effort makes good sense and could result in both greater efficiency at the agency levels, and greater efficiency, consistency, and user-friendliness where rules and regulations are encountered as guidance by consumers,” he continued. “There may be advantages in greater consistency in the handling of food industry clients as well.”

However, Katz said, “I do have a worry, particularly with the current administration. These agencies are historically overworked, and both understaffed and underfunded to do all that is expected of them — the FDA especially. The word ‘streamlining’ may be code for further reductions in a workforce that is already marginal at best … If ‘streamlining’ and ‘coordination’ are, indeed, code for ‘cuts’ — there is the possibility that this move could prove foe, not friend, and dangerous foe at that, to anyone eating in America.” Only time will tell, he added.