Politics & Power Quote by Rosa DeLauro

“High quality” here is a political claim wearing a lab coat. DeLauro is trying to do two things at once: reassure consumers that American beef is safe and corner the administration for treating safety like a discretionary expense. The phrase “best proof” is doing heavy lifting. Instead of leaning on taste, tradition, or market success, she frames beef quality as something validated by absence: no positive BSE tests. That’s smart rhetoric in a food-safety debate, where confidence lives and dies on what you can document, not what you can promise.

The subtext is a warning about how fragile that documentation really is. “Continued negative BSE findings” sounds definitive until you notice the dependency clause: it’s “supported by the highest surveillance possible.” In other words, the clean bill of health is only as credible as the testing regime behind it. Cut surveillance and you don’t just reduce oversight; you erode the very evidence used to defend the industry.

Context matters: BSE (“mad cow disease”) is one of those rare issues that collapses partisan talking points. It mixes public health, trade politics, and rural economics into a single pressure cooker. DeLauro’s emphasis on surveillance also nods to international scrutiny, because export markets and trading partners tend to trust systems more than slogans.

Her closing jab - “not scaling it back” - is less technocratic than it looks. It’s a moral argument about governance: a competent state proves safety through vigilance, not optimism. She’s positioning testing as both consumer protection and brand protection, and implying that the administration is jeopardizing both.