Sponsors (3)
Official title: To direct the Secretary of Agriculture to remove nonambulatory pigs from the United States food system, to establish an online portal for confidential complaints, and for other purposes.
Introduced July 25, 2025 by Veronica Escobar · Last progress July 25, 2025
The bill prioritizes public health, animal welfare, and clearer worker protections by excluding nonambulatory pigs from the food chain and strengthening standards and reporting — but it does so at the cost of higher compliance and production costs, potential supply disruption, increased regulatory burdens, and added legal exposure for small businesses.
Consumers and public health officials: the bill bars processing of nonambulatory pigs and requires humane euthanasia, testing, and condemnation rules so fewer potentially diseased animals enter the food supply, lowering foodborne illness risk.
Farm and slaughter workers: clearer workplace safety standards (OSHA rules, training, handling/transport standards) reduce injury and zoonotic-disease exposure for people who handle pigs.
Workers and whistleblowers: explicit legal protections, a centralized confidential reporting portal, and clearer 'covered individual' status make it easier and safer to report animal-welfare, safety, and labor violations and to seek remedies.
Producers and consumers: new testing, condemnation, euthanasia, transport/holding, and recordkeeping requirements — plus a ban on certain growth-promoting drugs — raise production costs that are likely to increase consumer pork prices.
Small slaughterhouses, transporters, and dealers: tight temperature/space/equipment standards and recordkeeping within short compliance timelines risk business disruption, closures, or consolidation favoring larger operators.
Producers and supply chains: mandatory disease testing, condemnation labeling, and excluding nonambulatory pigs from processing could reduce marketable hog supply and create short-term shortages or price volatility.
Based on analysis of 8 sections of legislative text.
Restricts certain pig drugs, bans nonambulatory pigs from the food supply, mandates humane handling, OSHA standards, recordkeeping, a complaint portal, whistleblower protections, and a USDA/CDC pathogen study.
Requires covered livestock businesses to prevent nonambulatory (unable-to-walk) pigs from entering the food supply, restricts use of certain beta-adrenergic agonist drugs except to treat disease, and creates new handling, transport, euthanasia, inspection, recordkeeping, training, and enforcement rules. It directs USDA/FSIS to issue rules, requires OSHA to adopt workplace safety standards for handling nonambulatory pigs, creates an online confidential complaint portal and whistleblower protections, and directs a public-health study on pathogens linked to nonambulatory pigs. Most substantive rules and employer obligations take effect one year after enactment; OSHA must propose standards within one year and finalize them within two years. The bill amends multiple animal- and food-safety statutes to bar nonambulatory pigs/carcasses from inspection-passed food, requires condemnation labeling, and mandates record retention and agency rulemaking and reporting.