National Food Safety and Public Health Agencies: Grant for Developing Rapid Response Teams for Food Safety

The purpose of this FOA is to develop and maintain Rapid Response Teams (RRTs) to facilitate long-term improvements and innovation to the national integrated food safety system by unifying and coordinating federal/state/local human and animal food (HAF) emergency response efforts including:

1) Strengthening the link among epidemiology, lab and environmental health/regulatory components;

2) Improving States’ regulatory and surveillance HAF protection programs to include using Incident Command System (ICS)/National Incident Management System (NIMS) principles and a Unified Command structure to conduct integrated responses to all-hazards HAF emergencies, rapidly identifying and removing tainted food from commerce, and conducting root cause investigations to inform future prevention efforts; and

3) Addressing supporting components, such as training, data sharing, data analysis, communications, continuous process improvement, and development of best practices and other resources to support national response capacity/capability development.

Manufactured food regulatory programs, retail food regulatory programs, produce regulatory programs, and animal food regulatory programs that meet the eligibility criteria below may apply for funding under this cooperative agreement. Competition is limited to these programs. Only one application is allowed per state/territory. Jurisdictions interested in involving multiple state/territory entities (within their jurisdiction) should internally coordinate and choose one (1) entity to apply. Eligible state human and animal food regulatory programs should discuss who is best suited to lead development of new RRTs. States that have existing RRTs should continue to maintain their RRTs using the existing manufactured food program lead team and infrastructure developed through prior RRT cooperative agreement investments.

Applicants will be categorized under one of two (2) funding tracks: RRT Development or RRT Maintenance (see eligibility criteria and funding ceilings (maximum amount that may be requested). Within each funding track the applicant may apply for $20,000 in additional funding to subaward to RRT partners. Applicant may apply for up to 3 subawards ($60,000 total) for RRT partners. Applicants applying for subawards for RRT partners must provide within their application how RRT partner recipients will document how the subawards will be used to assist the RRT in meeting program milestones/objectives. This includes information related to the overall RRT budget and Capability Assessment submissions. Progress updates on subaward funded activities must be included in mid-year and end-of-year progress reports.

Applications should reflect a jurisdiction’s needs both in terms of amounts of funding and number of project years.

The purpose of this FOA is to develop and maintain Rapid Response Teams (RRTs) to facilitate long-term improvements and innovation to the national integrated food safety system by unifying and coordinating federal/state/local human and animal food (HAF) emergency response efforts including:

1) Strengthening the link among epidemiology, lab and environmental health/regulatory components;

2) Improving States’ regulatory and surveillance HAF protection programs to include using Incident Command System (ICS)/National Incident Management System (NIMS) principles and a Unified Command structure to conduct integrated responses to all-hazards HAF emergencies, rapidly identifying and removing tainted food from commerce, and conducting root cause investigations to inform future prevention efforts; and

3) Addressing supporting components, such as training, data sharing, data analysis, communications, continuous process improvement, and development of best practices and other resources to support national response capacity/capability development.