>The meat industry treats much of its practices and the ingredients in ground beef as trade secrets. While the Department of Agriculture has inspectors posted in plants and has access to production records, it also guards those secrets. Federal records released by the department through the Freedom of Information Act blacked out details of Cargill’s grinding operation that could be learned only through copies of the documents obtained from other sources. Those documents illustrate the restrained approach to enforcement by a department whose missions include ensuring meat safety and promoting agriculture markets.
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>(emphasis mine at end)

The latest escherichia scare that I remember was about seven years ago, and it turned out that the number of inspectors is miserably low, and they don't even have the authority to do random checks - they just can't go and pick a sample from a vat, not even when they announce. The meat grinders' industry is just too strong and capable of paying to prevent any such law.

Accidentally, I have family members who were on both sides of the fence (one in meat processing, one in inspection), so I know a bit more of how it worked back home, at least in the last century. Every larger meat processing plant had to have an inspector present at all times; every animal was checked and couldn't be processed without a veterinary's stamp (and you can still see the ink on the skin of a, say, ham if you bought it whole), and the inspector had the authority to order any amount of meat destroyed - it would go into fertilizers or chicken feed, once it was thoroughly dried and ground, or would be buried and covered with lime. But that was the inhumane socialism, we wouldn't want that, would we?