Allow baby formula meeting EU standards into the U.S. market

Research notes

• Contested Recommendation from “The Case for Free Trade”. The boundary is flagged for the consistency pass: the alternative reading is attempted, on the ground that Operation Stork Speed’s nutrient review expressly takes international standards into account and so is a step toward admitting EU-standard product. It was rejected under §3b’s “progress is measured on this ask” — the Quote is about labeling requirements, the RFI is about nutrient content requirements, and a request for information changes nothing either way.
• Correction, 2026-09-03 (read-queue ticket 04): the 404 was a move, not a deletion. The earlier note recorded that “FDA’s Biden-era transition plan page for imported formula now returns HTTP 404”. The guidance still exists; it relocated to https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/guidance-industry-infant-formula-transition-plan-exercise-enforcement-discretion and is unchanged, still stamped September 2022. Reading it settles what the 404 left open: it is a transition, not a standing alternative pathway. FDA “intends to temporarily exercise enforcement discretion for certain manufacturers … that continue to introduce into interstate commerce (including through importation) infant formula products that may not comply with certain statutory and regulatory requirements if … such manufacturers take specific actions to achieve compliance”. A runway to compliance, and pre-window, so it is cited here and not in frontmatter. Recorded so the next pass does not re-derive the 404.
• The route past the search box is the sitemap, not the search box. fda.gov is readable with a browser User-Agent, but fda.gov/search?s=<anything> answers 200 with 1,521 identical bytes for a real term and for nonsense, so a negative taken from it would be worthless. On 2026-09-03 https://www.fda.gov/sitemap.xml was walked instead — 43 child sitemaps, 85,721 URLs, control- tested with a nonsense grep returning 0 against 60+ descriptive infant-formula slugs. That makes this negative one over FDA’s whole published site rather than over a search box. Answering the ask directly: no, no EU-standard product can enter U.S. commerce without meeting 21 CFR 107.10 labeling, and there is no permanent pathway. The Long-Term National Strategy page (current as of 2026-01-10) speaks of “incentivizing new infant formula manufacturers to enter the U.S. market” through the ordinary § 412 / 21 CFR 106–107 route.
• Same subject as #2099 on printed p. 800, which takes the general supply-chain-restrictions half of the same argument; the two were leveled together.