Departing Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson attracted attention last week when he said he couldn’t understand why terrorists hadn’t attacked the nation’s food supply “because it is so easy to do. We are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that.” But anyone surprised by the statement hasn’t been paying attention, and for Mr. Thompson to say it suggests a conflict within the administration of which he was on the losing end.

The use of food imports as a weapon makes for good pulp fiction and for disturbing nonfiction. The Government Accountability Office, perhaps fed up with doing food-safety assessments that go nowhere, wrote last March, “As we have stated in numerous reports and testimonies, the federal food safety system is not the product of strategic design. … In short, which agency has jurisdiction to regulate various food products, the regulatory authorities they have available to them, and how frequently they inspect food facilities is determined by disparate statutes or by administrative agreement between the two agencies [Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture], without strategic design as how to best protect the public.”

Five years ago, the GAO wrote a report called, “Food Safety: U.S. Needs a Single Agency to Administer a Unified, Risk-Based Inspection System.” You can tell where the report goes by its title. Just after it was released, in 1999, Sen. Susan Collins asked the GAO to assess the vulnerability of the nation’s food supply to attack through a biological agent. A year ago she held hearings on a RAND study on agroterrorism, and pointed out, “Hundreds of pages of U.S. agricultural documents recovered from al-Qaida caves in Afghanistan early last year are a strong indication that terrorists recognize that our agriculture and food industry provides tempting targets.”

Federal overseers for years have urged more testing, clearer authority and a single agency or a strong lead agency to tackle the problem of food safety. Secretary Thompson, the former governor of Wisconsin, would have been well aware of these recommendations, of the risks that remained and the inactivity within the federal government to carry out needed reforms. He would not have raised the issue at his departure if he believed adequate progress had been made. He would not have placed his boss, President Bush, in the position of responding to the comment unless the situation was serious.

The administration and Congress have at hand numerous studies that provide details about the kinds of threats, the likelihood of the threats being realized and the scale of possible harm. What they have not had is adequate action. As a departing reminder, Secretary Thompson provided an important service.