Chapter 1 Results in Brief
United States Government Accountability Office
Despite a growing shortage of veterinarians, the federal government does not have a comprehensive understanding of the sufficiency of its veterinarian workforce for routine program activities.
Specifically, although four of five component agencies we reviewed have assessed their veterinarian workforces, little has been done to gain a broader, departmentwide perspective, and no assessment has been conducted governmentwide.• At the component agency level, APHIS, FSIS, ARS, and Army assessments have each identified actual or potential veterinarian shortages. First, APHIS reported it has filled all of its veterinary positions but has identified a potential future shortage of, for example, veterinary pathologists, who diagnose animal diseases. In addition, 30 percent of APHIS' veterinarians will be eligible to retire by the end of fiscal year 2011. Second, FSIS has not been fully staffed over the past decade, according to agency officials. In fiscal year 2008, it had a goal of employing 1,134 veterinarians to carry out its mission of ensuring the safety of meat and poultry products, but it had 968 as of the end of that fiscal year—a 15 percent shortage. FSIS veterinarians working in slaughter plants told us that a lack of veterinarians has impaired the agency's ability to meet its food safety responsibilities, but FSIS headquarters officials told us this was not the case. In 2004, we recommended that FSIS periodically assess whether the level of resources dedicated to humane handling and slaughter activities is sufficient, but the agency has yet to demonstrate that they have done so. Third, ARS reported a 12 percent shortage of veterinarians. Officials told us the agency needed 65 veterinarians—most of them with a Ph.D.—to conduct critical animal disease research, such as detecting avian influenza and developing vaccines against it.
However, in fiscal year 2008, ARS had only 57. Fourth, while the Army has filled all of its active-duty veterinarian positions, officials reported that the veterinary reserve corps is 12 percent short of its goal and identified an increasing demand for veterinary pathologists and medical intelligence specialists. In contrast to these four agencies, FDA does not regularly assess the sufficiency of its veterinarian workforce. FDA officials told us the agency has enough veterinarians to meet its responsibilities, despite a 2007 internal review that found its scientific workforce, including veterinarians, is inadequate and that FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine is in a state of crisis.• At the department level, neither USDA nor HHS has assessed its veterinarian workforce to gain a departmentwide perspective on trends and shared issues, whereas DOD has a process for doing so. USDA does not perform such assessments because, according to department-level officials, workforce planning is the responsibility of the component agencies. As a result, USDA's agencies compete against one another for a limited number of veterinarians. According to FSIS officials, APHIS is attracting veterinarians away from FSIS because the work at APHIS is more appealing, there are more opportunities for advancement, and the salaries are higher. HHS officials told us they do not assess veterinarian workforce needs departmentwide because veterinarians are not deemed mission critical for the department, even though they are critical to the missions of its component agencies that employ veterinarians.
• Governmentwide, no integrated approach exists for assessing the current and future sufficiency of the veterinarian workforce. Yet officials from 16 of the 24 component agencies and other federal entities that employ veterinarians told us they are concerned about the sufficiency of their veterinarian workforce. This includes four of the five key agencies where we focused our agency-level review.
Further exacerbating these concerns is the number of veterinarians eligible to retire in the near future. Our analysis revealed that 27 percent of the veterinarians at APHIS, FSIS, ARS, Army, and FDA will be eligible to retire within 3 years. OPM officials told us they will initiate a governmentwide effort to address this issue if the departments demonstrate that a shortage exists. This could include allowing departments to expedite the hiring of veterinarians, as OPM has done in the past in the case of doctors and nurses.We are making several recommendations to improve the federal government’s ability to meet its routine veterinary responsibilities.
The federal government has undertaken efforts to identify the veterinarian workforce needed during two catastrophic events—a pandemic and multiple intentional introductions of foot-and-mouth disease. However, these efforts are insufficient because they are either incomplete, based on an infeasible planning assumption, or lacking in adequate data.
• Four of the five agencies we reviewed—APHIS, FSIS, ARS, and FDA—have developed pandemic plans that identify how they will continue essential functions, including those that veterinarians perform, during a pandemic that severely reduces the workforce. However, each plan lacks elements that DHS has deemed necessary. For example, FDA’s plan does not identify which functions its veterinarians must perform on site, which can be performed remotely, or how the agency will conduct essential functions if a pandemic renders its leadership and essential staff unavailable. FDA officials told us they are updating their plan and will consider such gaps. The Army is still in the process of getting its pandemic plan approved and, therefore, we have not evaluated it.
• DHS has two efforts under way that involve identifying the workforce needed during a catastrophic outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, which would require veterinarians to quickly diagnose and control the fast-moving disease in a large number of animals.
The first effort is hindered by an infeasible planning assumption. Specifically, DHS is coordinating a long-term national effort that is based on the assumption, set forth by a White House Homeland Security Council working group, that the United States would slaughter all potentially exposed animals, as it has during smaller outbreaks of foreign animal diseases. However, DHS and USDA officials consider this approach infeasible for such a large outbreak and told us that although the planning effort is a valuable exercise for understanding the enormity of the resources needed to respond to such an event, any workforce estimates produced from this effort are not relevant.The second effort is hindered by a lack of information. Specifically, DHS is modeling various foot-and-mouth disease outbreak scenarios in order to estimate the number and type of personnel needed for responding to foot-and- mouth disease by using vaccines, among other things. Vaccinating animals instead of slaughtering them to control the outbreak is a new strategy, which DHS and USDA officials believe may play an important role in controlling a catastrophic outbreak. However, the details of how this vaccine-based strategy would be implemented are not yet formalized, reducing the likelihood that workforce estimates will be accurate. In addition, the models do not yet factor in the potential for the disease to spread between livestock and wildlife. If wildlife became infected, as they have in some past outbreaks, control and eradication strategies would be greatly complicated and could require more veterinarians and different expertise. Agency officials recognize the importance of including wildlife for controlling and eradicating foot-and- mouth disease but told us that the data on how wildlife and livestock interact are limited.
We are making recommendations to improve the federal government’s ability to identify the veterinarian workforce needed during a pandemic and to respond to a large-scale outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.
The veterinarian workforce challenge most commonly cited by federal and state agencies involved in the four recent zoonotic outbreaks we reviewed was insufficient veterinarian capacity. Specifically, officials we interviewed at 12 of the 17 agencies involved in the recent outbreaks told us they did not have enough veterinarians to address these outbreaks while continuing to carry out their routine activities. Officials at numerous state agencies attribute this insufficient capacity to difficulty recruiting and retaining veterinarians because, among other things, the salaries they are able to offer are lower than those offered in the federal or private sectors. In addition, to control a demanding outbreak of exotic Newcastle disease in poultry in California in 2003, APHIS had to borrow more than 1,000 veterinarians from federal and state agencies around the country, as well as the private sector. This reduced the number of veterinarians available to respond to outbreaks of bovine tuberculosis in Michigan, monkeypox in Wisconsin, and West Nile virus in Colorado. Despite reports of insufficient veterinarian capacity during the four outbreaks, the agencies have not taken full advantage of two key opportunities to learn from past experience. First, 10 of the 17 agencies have not assessed their own veterinarian workforce’s response to individual outbreaks, which our prior work has identified as a useful tool for improving response.1 Second, none of the agencies have looked across outbreaks to identify common challenges. Consequently, the agencies are missing the opportunity to identify workforce challenges that have arisen during outbreaks and ways to address them in the future. Federal and state agency officials we spoke with generally agreed that it would be beneficial to conduct postoutbreak assessments. However, some agency officials told us that they are already having difficulty meeting their responsibilities and have not had time to do so. We are making recommendations to improve the ability of the federal government to help ensure the efficient and effective use of the veterinarian workforce during future zoonotic disease outbreaks.
In commenting on a draft of this report, USDA, DOD, OPM, DHS, and Interior generally concurred with the report’s recommendations. However, DHS did not agree that veterinarian workforce estimates produced from one of its planning efforts are not relevant. HHS generally concurred with our report but disagreed with a 2007 FDA Advisory Committee report GAO cited, which said that FDA’s Center of Veterinary Medicine is in a state of crisis. USDA, DOD, HHS, OPM, DHS, and Interior also provided additional information, comments, and clarifications on the report’s findings that we have addressed, as appropriate, throughout the report.
End Notes
1 GAO, Emergency Preparedness and Response: Some Issues and Challenges Associated with Major Emergency Incidents, GAO-06-467T (Washington, D.C.: Feb. 23, 2006).