10. Department of Agriculture · Notable · Needs Congress
Allow state-inspected meat and poultry in interstate commerce
Printed page 305 10. Department of Agriculture
“Promote legislation that would allow state-inspected meat to be sold in interstate commerce. These barriers to the sale of meat and poultry from USDA-approved state-inspected facilities should be removed.”
What has happened
- Attempted
An executive workaround, logged as attempted under the requires-Congress rule. Section 3 of Executive Order 14424, Promoting Fair Competition in Livestock Markets and Expanding Market Access for American Meat Producers, directs the Secretary of Agriculture to expand interstate shipment of meat by increasing state participation in the Cooperative Interstate Shipment program and the state inspection programs, and to report within 60 days on "remaining statutory or regulatory barriers to greater interstate market access for State-inspected products" and on the federal provisions that "restrict or prohibit State-inspected or custom exempt meat products from entering interstate commerce". The bar the Quote's bill would lift is statutory; the order works inside it and asks for a list of what would have to change. S. 1496 has still had no action and no administration request for it has been made.
- Executive Order: Promoting Fair Competition in Livestock Markets and Expanding Market Access for American Meat Producers (White House, September 4, 2026), section 3, Expanding Interstate Market Access for Eligible Meat Products
- Executive Order 14424 — Promoting Fair Competition in Livestock Markets and Expanding Market Access for American Meat Producers (91 FR 57761, published 2026-09-10)
- Not started
The bill the Quote names by title exists in this Congress and has gone nowhere. S. 1496, the New Markets for State-Inspected Meat and Poultry Act of 2025, was read twice and referred to the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee on 2025-04-10 and has taken no further action; under playbook §3b referral is `not-started`. No House companion appears in the 119th-Congress Corpus, the House-passed farm bill contains no state-inspected interstate-shipment provision (a text search of the engrossed bill for "state-inspected" returns nothing), and the administration has made no formal request for the legislation.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- FSIS did act on the adjacent administrative question: FR 2025-11816 (2025-06-26) removes from the regulations the printed lists of states with and without their own meat and poultry inspection programs, moving them to the agency web site. That is a publication-method change; it does not touch the interstate-commerce bar the Quote is about.
- The existing Cooperative Interstate Shipment program (9 CFR part 321) is unchanged.
- 2026-09-04 (reviewed 2026-09-06): the order was signed 2026-09-04 and had not been published in the Federal Register by 2026-09-06. The 60-day reports fall due 2026-11-03. Section 3(a)(i) works through the existing CIS program (9 CFR part 321), which is unchanged.
- 2026-09-10: published as Executive Order 14424, 91 FR 57761 (FR 2026-18567), and added to the 2026-09-04 event as its Federal Register citation. The Federal Register record’s title, number and signing date match the whitehouse.gov text read on 2026-09-06, and on 2026-09-11 we opened the Federal Register text and found section 3 as quoted above.
- Action
- expand
- Object
- New Markets for State-Inspected Meat and Poultry Act of 2021
- ID
- 790