FDA Does Enforce, Doesn't Enforce

The FDA can't decide if it should enforce or not enforce it's own rules. One one hand, the FDA set up a sting operation to bust Amish farmers who have customers who voluntarily buy their unpasteurized milk.

A yearlong sting operation, including aliases, a 5 a.m. surprise inspection and surreptitious purchases from an Amish farm in Pennsylvania, culminated in the federal government announcing this week that it has gone to court to stop Rainbow Acres Farm from selling its contraband to willing customers in the Washington area.
The product in question: unpasteurized milk.

On the other hand, the FDA has refused to enforce it's own regulation about using low doses of antibiotics on livestock to allow the livestock to more readily be raised in unsanitary environments. While this practice has long been criticized for reducing the effectiveness of the antibiotics on humans, the practice has been ignored by the FDA for years.

In 2001, the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that greater than 70% of the antibiotics used in the US are given to food animals (for example, chickens, pigs and cattle) in the absence of disease

The AMA also spoke out in 2001:

In an effort to slow the development of resistance, the American Medical Assn. (AMA) went on record last week in opposition to non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics in agriculture, particularly for those antibiotics also used to treat human illnesses.

The NRDC sued the FDA:

NRDC and our allies filed a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration to finally end the use of antibiotics in animal feed—a practice that’s contributing to the rise in drug-resistant superbugs and endangering the health of our families.

Roughly 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are given to healthy farm animals to promote faster growth and compensate for unsanitary conditions. These cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys receive doses too low to actually treat disease, but high enough to allow bacteria resistant to antibiotic treatment to survive and thrive.

Those bacteria don’t stay on the farm. They spread to humans and can lead to superbugs that are difficult or impossible to cure. ...

It is clear the FDA attacks threats to mega-corporate farming, even if the threat is a small Amish farm. At the same time, the FDA refuses to enforce regulations against the mega-corporate farms. Is the FDA for the people or for the corporations?