Advantages
This tested and successful model is on a comparable area of national importance and with a similar size and breadth of relevant involved departments and agencies. ONDFN would build on ICHNR, but with a much stronger platform to create effective coordination and synergies. ONDFN would deliver relevant harmonized information to the President, Cabinet, other executive branch leadership, senior military commanders, and Congress for developing policy, programmatic, and budget initiatives. A clear Congressional mandate would provide cross-agency coordination of strategic planning, programmatic review, annual reporting and quadrennial assessments to the President, Congress, and other key stakeholders, budgetary needs, and external research and cooperation. There could also be additional Congressional oversight as needed and interests arise. ONDFN would also provide dedicated leadership and staff in the executive branch cabinet for federal nutrition research and policy, providing a crucial bridge between research and implementation. These activities and personnel would more efficiently and effectively help identify topics of strategic interest across multiple departments and agencies with significant impact and feasibility, and advance emerging opportunities to accelerate progress across new fundamental and transactional scientific topics. A broad focus would increase synergies, shared priorities, and effectiveness and efficiency of different departments and agencies engaged in activities related to innovation in nutrition, agriculture, and food systems.
Like ODNI, a meaningful number of staff would be drawn from existing departments and agencies, creating budgetary efficiencies while maximizing cross-fertilization of ideas and innovations. ONDFN would have the infrastructure and authority necessary for true cross-department/agency coordination—for example, to develop a modernized approach to the nexus between the agriculture-food-health value chain—including research, policy, and practice from farm inputs and food processing/production to consumer behavior to human health. ONDFN would also advance the coordination for communication of trusted nutrition information to the American public, which occurs across separate departments and agencies including CMS and VHA (health care providers), USDA (DGAs, SNAP-Ed, WIC education, food safety for meat and poultry), FDA (food safety for other foods, Nutrition Facts, health claims, package warning labels, restaurant menu labeling), NIH (scientific studies), DoE (nutrition and STEM curricula), CDC (school, community, and public health nutrition education), and more. This would help meet the almost explosive growth in public demand for better information on the science of diet-related health. ONDFN would combine a national food strategy with coordinated new science, considered crucial to better harmonize law and policymaking around food and agriculture, food safety and nutrition research, and establishing, prioritizing, and pursuing common goals (292). Such a strategic plan would create transparency and accountability, including tasks of identifying and monitoring budgets and metrics of success across its purview. A high-level, cross-governmental structure like ONDFN would also be crucial for effective and timely responses on urgent nutrition and food challenges during complex situations like COVID-19, which require immediate and ongoing leadership and coordination at the highest levels of the government (9, 293).