Lobbyists – President Ulysses S. Grant is often credited with popularizing or coining the term in the 1860s while smoking and greeting people in the lobby of the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., though printed records of the word actually predate his presidency.

Jessica Glenza read the lobbying disclosures and named four organizations that had lobbied on the Food Traceability Rule. I spent yesterday reading further into the same database. What follows is what the filings say, with a link to every one of them, and one finding that has nothing to do with anybody’s money.

Start with the cleanest sentence in the record. The International Foodservice Distributors Association, reporting on the last quarter of 2025 and signed by its chief executive Mark S. Allen Jr. on January 20 of this year, lists its work on the Food Traceability Rule and then describes that work, in its own words, as support for the 30-month compliance date extension and targeted flexibilities. No euphemism, no talk of collaboration. The three people who did it are named on the page: Mala Parker, Kristin Spiridon and Joseph Kalmin.

The National Restaurant Association filed on the same day for the same quarter, signed by Sean Kennedy, its executive vice president of public affairs. Its food page lists the fiscal 2026 agriculture and FDA appropriations bill, H.R. 4121 and S. 2256, for provisions regarding FDA traceability. It then lists H.R. 5371, the fiscal 2026 continuing appropriations, for provisions regarding FDA traceability. It lists the Food Traceability Enhancement Act as draft legislation. H.R. 5371 is the bill that ended the November shutdown, and it carried Section 780, the provision barring the FDA from spending a dollar to administer or enforce the rule before July 20, 2028. The association named the vehicle by number in the quarter it passed. The lobbyists on that page are Matt Walker, Dan Roehl, Sean Kennedy, Laura Abshire and Aaron Frazier.

One aside, because the confusion is everywhere. The delay did not ride on the Big Beautiful Bill. The same restaurant association filing lists the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, on its tax page and H.R. 5371 on its food page. Two different bills, four months apart. The funding prohibition is in Public Law 119-37, the shutdown deal.

Now go back two years. The National Retail Federation’s report for the first quarter of 2024, signed by general counsel Stephanie Martz, says the federation requested language in the fiscal 2024 agriculture appropriations bill to require the FDA to work collaboratively with industry to address concerns with the traceability rule, and that it sought support for H.R. 7563, the Food Traceability Enhancement Act. One lobbyist is named on that page: Scott Vinson.

H.R. 7563 deserves its own paragraph. Introduced on March 6, 2024, it would have amended Section 204(d) of the Food Safety Modernization Act to relieve retail food establishments, restaurants and warehouses of the duty to keep traceability lot codes and pass them down the chain and would have required the FDA to run a series of pilot projects before enforcing any compliance date. In an interview published by the Institute of Food Technologists, a former FDA official who oversaw the agency’s outbreak response said that stripping the lot code requirement essentially guts the rule, because true public health tracebacks stop being possible without it. The Safe Food Coalition opposed the bill in 2024 on exactly the ground it wrote to congressional leadership on this month. The bill never got a vote and died with the 118th Congress.

Here is the part that requires no inference about money. H.R. 7563 was introduced by Scott Franklin of Florida and cosponsored by Sanford Bishop of Georgia and Jimmy Panetta of California. Franklin sat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies in the 118th Congress and is its vice chair in the 119th. Bishop is that subcommittee’s ranking member in both and was its chairman in the 117th. Andy Harris of Maryland chairs it. The FDA sits squarely in its jurisdiction. The sponsor and the lead cosponsor of the bill to relax the traceability rule were both sitting in the room where the FDA’s money gets written.

A word on where these men answer to. Franklin represents Florida’s 18th, the Florida Heartland, and lives in Lakeland, which the current map places inside his district. Publix Super Markets is headquartered there, and Publix is one of the four organizations the Guardian found lobbying on the rule. Bishop represents Georgia’s 2nd, the largest district in the state and the one that grows more peanuts than any other in the country. It takes in Blakely, the seat of Early County, where the Peanut Corporation of America ran the plant behind the outbreak that killed nine people, sickened hundreds and sent the company’s chief executive to federal prison. Panetta represents California’s 19th, which runs from south San Jose down the Monterey County coast. 

The bill died in Energy and Commerce. Its provisions did not. In June 2024 the Center for Science in the Public Interest reported that language from H.R. 7563 had surfaced in the House subcommittee’s fiscal 2025 bill. It surfaced again in the fiscal 2026 House bill, H.R. 4121. In November it became law as Section 780. Three bills across two appropriations cycles, carrying the same ask through the one committee where it needed no hearing, no floor debate and no vote of its own.

The Senate did not go along. In Senate Report 119-37, accompanying its own version of the agriculture and FDA bill, the Senate Appropriations Committee directed the opposite of what the House wanted: that the FDA may not use funds to delay enforcement beyond July 20, 2028, and that full compliance and enforcement begin by then. The Congressional Research Service notes that this language carries the same weight as the joint explanatory statement. The Senate subcommittee is chaired by John Hoeven of North Dakota, with Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire as ranking member, and its bill came out of committee twenty-seven to nothing. Section 780 is a House product. Among the senators on that subcommittee is Jon Ossoff of Georgia, who has been writing letters about this outbreak all summer. He is well placed to ask why his own committee’s language did not survive.

Section 780 did more than defund. It also told the FDA to work with industry on lot-level approaches, and on February 19 of this year the agency announced that the resulting stakeholder engagements would be organized by the Partnership for Food Traceability, an industry membership nonprofit founded in 2024. A client alert from Covington & Burling records the detail the agency notice leaves out: the first session, held on March 6, was open only to the partnership’s members, with later sessions open to the public. The partnership says on its own site that it will not advocate specific policy positions with the FDA as part of this process, and I have no reason to doubt that. The structure is the story. Congress ordered a federal agency to consult industry about a rule industry had asked it to postpone, the consultation is convened by industry, and the first meeting was closed to everyone else.

The industry conversation that produced the delay argument is on the record too. The Reagan-Udall Foundation ran three roundtables for the FDA in 2024 with more than two dozen participants. The Guardian named Chipotle, the Kellogg Company, Kwik Trip, the National Restaurant Association, the National Grocers Association and McDonald’s. Food Dive’s coverage of the same report adds General Mills, FMI, Subway, the International Fresh Produce Association and United Natural Foods. The published summary has industry describing significant increases in labor, equipment and space, with the costs that come with them.

None of which means all of industry asked for this. Part of industry asked for this. Kroger told its suppliers to be ready ahead of the deadline. De Ann Davis of the Western Growers Association told the Guardian that growers have been collecting this shipment data voluntarily for more than a decade and that her organization supports the rule. FMI gave the Guardian a serious answer, and it deserves to be stated rather than waved at: the rule is extraordinarily complex, it demands unprecedented coordination among growers, manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers and foodservice operators, and its member companies have four years of work invested in it. That is not frivolous. Traceability only functions when everyone in a chain is doing it, and companies that were genuinely ready did find themselves waiting on partners who were not. The associations that lobbied for delay represent the ready and the unready alike. They spoke for the unready or unwilling.

A sequence of dates to finish on. The FDA held its public meeting on lot-level traceability on June 15 of this year, with written comments due July 15. The CDC now puts the first illness in this outbreak on June 14. The meeting on how to make the rule easier to live with convened the day after the first person got sick, and the comment period closed the day before the FDA announced it was investigating Cyclospora in lettuce. Nobody in that room knew. That is the whole point of a traceability rule, and the reason fifteen and a half years of delay is not a scheduling matter.

Traceability draws a line. It says what everything else is. Without the line, fear prices the entire category and the whole category pays, which is why the associations that asked for the delay were arguing against their own members’ interests as much as against anybody’s health. An epidemiologist in Michigan asked three times where the lettuce came from. The records that would have answered her exist, in some form, in warehouses and distribution centers across the country. Congress has told the FDA it may not spend a dollar to go get them until July of 2028.

That can be undone, and two sets of people are placed to undo it. The first is the Senate. Its own appropriators wrote language directing that enforcement begin by July 2028 and not a day later, and that language did not survive. Senator Hoeven, Senator Shaheen and Senator Ossoff, whose letters this summer are already part of the record, are entitled to an answer about how the opposite provision came out of conference, and so is everyone who got sick. Nobody has asked in public. The second is the part of the industry that never wanted the delay. Western Growers says its members have been collecting this data voluntarily for more than a decade. Kroger told its suppliers to be ready. If the companies and associations that are already compliant asked Congress to unwind Section 780, the argument that industry cannot manage the rule would collapse, because it would be industry saying otherwise. Eleven consumer, public health and labor organizations have already asked. They should not be asking by themselves.