Slaughtering Reasoned Decision-Making

Key Takeaways

• FSIS proposes higher poultry line speeds, removes swine speed caps
• Agency claims worker safety falls outside its statutory authority
• Seven County decision limited to NEPA, not broader agency analyses
• Ignoring worker safety may violate APA reasoned decision‑making requirements
• Animal welfare impacts also omitted despite existing USDA guidance and law

Pulse Analysis

The Food Safety and Inspection Service has long used line‑speed limits as a tool to protect workers in meat‑packing plants, where rapid conveyor belts create hazardous conditions. By proposing to lift those limits for poultry and scrap the caps for swine, FSIS is signaling a shift toward greater production efficiency, but it also raises the specter of more frequent musculoskeletal injuries and accidents among a workforce already vulnerable to low wages and limited protections.

FSIS’s legal justification leans on the 2025 Supreme Court ruling in Seven County, which held that agencies need not consider indirect environmental effects outside their direct regulatory authority when conducting NEPA analyses. Critics argue that the decision’s scope is narrow—confined to environmental impact statements—and does not excuse an agency from the broader reasoned‑decisionmaking duties imposed by the Administrative Procedure Act, Executive Order 12866, and longstanding benefit‑cost guidance. By excluding worker‑safety and animal‑welfare factors from its analyses, the agency appears to sidestep statutory obligations to assess all material impacts.

If finalized, the rules could reshape the meat‑processing landscape: higher line speeds promise lower per‑unit costs for producers, yet they risk escalating injury rates and compromising humane slaughter standards. The omission of these costs may invite litigation from labor groups, animal‑rights advocates, and states seeking to enforce worker‑safety statutes. Moreover, the precedent of allowing agencies to disregard non‑statutory considerations could reverberate across other regulatory domains, prompting a broader debate about the balance between deregulation and the protection of public health and safety.