Preface

United States Government Accountability Office

Why GAO Did This Study

Veterinarians are essential for controlling zoonotic diseases—which spread between animals and humans—such as avian influenza.

What GAO Recommends

GAO is making recommendations to help ensure sufficient veterinarian capacity to protect public and animal health. In commenting on a draft of this report USDA, DOD, OPM, DHS, and Interior generally agreed with our

recommendations. HHS generally concurred with the 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.

What GAO Found

The federal government lacks a comprehensive understanding of the sufficiency of its veterinarian workforce. More specifically, four of five component agencies GAO reviewed have assessed the sufficiency of their veterinarian workforce to perform routine activities and have identified current or future concerns. This includes USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services (APHIS), Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), and Agricultural Research Service (ARS); and DOD's Army.

Efforts to identify the veterinarian workforce needed for a catastrophic event are insufficient.Specifically, agencies' plans lack important elements necessary for continuing essential veterinarian functions during a pandemic, such as identifying which functions must be performed on-site and how they will be carried out if absenteeism reaches 40 percent—the rate predicted at the height of the pandemic and used for planning purposes. In addition, one federal effort to prepare for the intentional introduction of a foreign animal disease is based on the unrealistic assumption that all affected animals will be slaughtered, as the United States has done for smaller outbreaks, making the resulting veterinarian workforce estimates irrelevant. A second effort lacks crucial data, including data on how the disease would spread in wildlife. If wildlife became infected, as they have in the past, response would be greatly complicated and could require more veterinarians and different expertise.

Officials from federal and state agencies involved in four recent zoonotic disease outbreaks commonly cited insufficient veterinarian capacity as a workforce challenge.

Abbreviations

APHIS Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service

ARS Agricultural Research Service

CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

CSREES Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service

CVM Center for Veterinary Medicine

DHS Department of Homeland Security

DOD Department of Defense

FDA Food and Drug Administration

FEMA Federal Emergency Management Agency

FSIS Food Safety and Inspection Service

HHS Department of Health and Human Services

HSPD Homeland Security Presidential Directive

Interior Department of the Interior

NADC National Animal Disease Center

NAFV National Association of Federal Veterinarians

NIH National Institutes of Health

OIG Office of Inspector General

OPM Office of Personnel Management

SES Senior Executive Service

USDA Department of Agriculture

USGS U.S. Geological Survey

February 4, 2009 February 4, 2009 The Honorable Daniel K. Akaka

Chairman

Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia

Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

Dear Mr. Chairman

Veterinarians play a vital role in the defense against animal diseases— whether naturally or intentionally introduced—and these diseases can cause serious harm to human health and the economy. For example, veterinarians were at the forefront of the response to the 2001 United Kingdom outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, which resulted in the slaughter of more than 4 million animals to control the outbreak, losses of over $5 billion to the food and agriculture sectors, and comparable losses to the tourism industry.

However, there is a growing shortage of veterinarians nationwide, particularly of veterinarians who care for animals raised for food, serve in rural communities, and have training in public health, according to several professional associations. This shortage has, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association, placed the nation's food supply at risk and could hinder efforts to protect humans from zoonotic diseases. The veterinarian shortage is expected to worsen, partly as a result of space constraints at the country's 28 veterinary colleges, which can graduate only about 2,500 students a year combined, according to the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges. The demand for veterinarians is expected to increase, however. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that demand will increase by 35 percent from 2006 to 2016—from 62,000 full-time jobs to 84,000. Subsequently, the Congress enacted two pieces of legislation that address these concerns. In 2003, it enacted the National Veterinary Medical Services Act directing the Secretary of Agriculture to carry out a program to help repay school loans for veterinarians who agree to work in areas of need.

The federal government employs more than 3,000 veterinarians. Although this number represents a small portion of the federal workforce, these veterinarians play a crucial role in helping to protect people and the economy from animal diseases. More than 2,900 federal veterinarians work for component agencies within the Departments of Agriculture (USDA), Defense (DOD), and Health and Human Services (HHS). The 1,771 veterinarians at USDA have numerous functions, including the following:

• Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) veterinarians help protect and maintain the health of American livestock and poultry during production, and monitor wildlife populations for critical endemic and foreign animal diseases;

• Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) veterinarians inspect animals at slaughter plants to help ensure the safety of meat and poultry products, and they also oversee the humane treatment of livestock during slaughter; and

• Agricultural Research Service (ARS) veterinarians research critical endemic and foreign animal diseases.

DOD employs 841 veterinarians, the majority of whom work for the Army as active duty veterinarians or as part of the Army's veterinary reserve corps. These veterinarians are responsible for caring for service and research animals, ensuring food safety at military installations, and conducting intelligence work related to bioterrorism, among other things.

HHS employs 316 veterinarians, whose functions include the following:

• Food and Drug Administration (FDA) veterinarians are responsible for ensuring that animal drugs are safe and effective, that animal feed is safe, and that food from medically treated animals is safe to eat. They also help ensure the safety of food, drugs, and cosmetics, among other things;

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) veterinarians help promote human health by conducting research and investigating human disease outbreaks of animal origin.

Veterinarians work in other departments, such as the Department of the Interior (Interior), whose 24 veterinarians play a role in researching, diagnosing, and responding to wildlife diseases. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also employs veterinarians to, among other things, help develop national policy for defending the nation's agriculture and food supply against terrorist attacks and other emergencies. See appendix I for a list of veterinarian roles and responsibilities within the federal government.

As this list of responsibilities indicates, the federal veterinarian workforce plays a critical role in ensuring the safety of the U.S. food supply. However, we testified in 2008 that the staffing levels at FSIS—where veterinarians play an important role in helping to ensure the safety of our food supply and the humane treatment of animals during slaughter—have declined since 1995 despite an increasing budget, and some districts have experienced high vacancy rates among inspectors. This could impair enforcement of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1978 and of food safety regulations generally.¹ In addition, we have designated the federal oversight of food safety as a high-risk area of government operations because the current system is fragmented, causing inconsistent oversight, ineffective coordination, and inefficient use of resources.²

As with all professions in the federal government, departments and their component agencies are responsible for hiring and maintaining a veterinarian workforce sufficient to meet their missions. High-performing public organizations have found that maintaining a quality workforce requires them to systematically assess current and future workforce needs and formulate a long-term strategy to attract, retain, develop, and motivate employees.³ The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) provides guidance and leadership intended to help build a high-quality and diverse federal workforce. Our prior work has identified the need for OPM to use its leadership position to help departments and agencies recruit and retain a capable and committed workforce.⁴

In this context, you asked us to determine the extent to which (1) the federal government has assessed the sufficiency of its veterinarian workforce for routine program activities, (2) the federal government has identified the veterinarian workforce needed during a catastrophic event, and (3) federal and state agencies encountered veterinarian workforce challenges during four recent zoonotic outbreaks.

To address the first objective, we identified and surveyed departments, component agencies, and other federal entities employing veterinarians to determine, among other things, the number, salaries, and roles and responsibilities of veterinarians, as well as the sufficiency of this workforce. We then selected component agencies within three departments for further analysis to determine the extent to which they assessed the sufficiency of their veterinarian workforce. We selected USDA, DOD, and HHS because these departments employ about 96 percent of federal veterinarians. Within these departments, we focused our veterinarian workforce assessment review on APHIS, FSIS, Army, and FDA, because these component agencies employ the most veterinarians. We also selected ARS for further review because it is USDA's chief scientific research agency and conducts research to solve agricultural problems of high national priority. We interviewed officials involved in workforce planning, as well as those that carry out program activities such as veterinarians working in slaughter plants. To address the second objective, we analyzed agency plans for continuing essential functions during a pandemic, and compared them with DHS national planning guidance, which identifies essential elements that federal departments and agencies should consider. We also reviewed veterinarian workforce outcomes from DHS's nationwide effort to assess the nation's preparedness for multiple, intentional introductions of foot-and-mouth disease. We selected a pandemic and intentional foot-and-mouth disease outbreak because these are two potential catastrophic events the White House Homeland Security Council has deemed critical for planning purposes. To address the third objective, we conducted semistructured interviews with selected officials from 17 federal and state agencies involved in responding to the following four recent zoonotic outbreaks:

• bovine tuberculosis in Michigan: a bacterial disease that spreads from deer to cattle;

• exotic Newcastle disease in California: a highly infectious virus that spread rapidly throughout poultry;

• monkeypox in Wisconsin: a virus not seen in the United States until 2003, when there was an outbreak in exotic pets and humans; and

• West Nile virus in Colorado: a disease that spread rapidly across the United States, infecting numerous species.

We focused our review on these outbreaks because they were most frequently recommended by federal officials as examples of zoonotic diseases, are still occurring or occurred since 2001, and affected various types of animals, among other things. Additional details about our scope and methodology are presented in appendix II.

We conducted this performance audit from September 2007 to February 2009, in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.

End Notes

¹ GAO, Humane Methods of Handling and Slaughter: Public Reporting on Violations Can

Identify; Enforcement Challenges and Enhance Transparency, GAO-08-686T (Washington, D.C.: April 17, 2008).

² GAO, High-Risk Series: An Update, GAO-09-271 (Washington, D.C.: January 2009).

³ GAO, Human Capital: Key Principles for Effective Strategic Workforce Planning, GAO-04-39

(Washington, D.C.: Dec. 11, 2003).

⁴ GAO, Human Capital: Transforming Federal Recruiting and Hiring Efforts, GAO-08-762T

(Washington, D.C.: May 8, 2008).