Federal Advisory Committees

FAC, which may also be designated as commissions, councils, or task forces ¿ are created as provisional advisory bodies that can circumvent bureaucratic constraints to collect a variety of viewpoints on specific policy issues. FAC have been created to address a host of issues, ranging from policies on organ donation to the design and implementation of the Dept. of Homeland Security. These FAC are often created to help the gov¿t. manage and solve complex or divisive issues. Contents of this report: (1) Intro.: History; The Dept. of Justice; Congress. Action; The Pres. and the Exec. Branch; Congress. Reaction; (2) The Fed. Advisory Committee Act (FACA); (3) Creating a FACA Committee; (4) Analysis. This is a print on demand report.

Federal advisory committees are frequently chartered by the Chief Executive, Congress, and agency heads to render independent advice and to make recommendations. This report sets forth definitions and requirements for creating commissions as required by the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Twelve commissions were created by the Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for FY1999, and are used here to illustrate the various options that are available for creating independent study bodies.

Federal guidance on nutrition and diet is intended to reflect the state of the science and deliver the most reliable recommendations possible according to the best available evidence. This guidance, updated and presented every 5 years in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), serves as the basis for all federal nutrition policies and nutrition assistance programs, as well as nutrition education programs. Despite the use of the guidelines over the past 30 years, recent challenges prompted Congress to question the process by which food and nutrition guidance is developed. This report assesses the process used to develop the guidelines; it does not evaluate the substance or use of the guidelines. As part of an overall, comprehensive review of the process to update the DGA, this first report seeks to discover how the advisory committee selection process can be improved to provide more transparency, eliminate bias, and include committee members with a range of viewpoints for the purpose of informing the 2020 cycle.