The government is in shutdown mode and there’s no end in sight. You might be wondering how this affects the USDA organic program, a federally administered system.
While organic certification is always handled by state departments of agriculture or private certification entities like OneCert, certifying agents administering the organic program are impacted by the shutdown.
During a government shutdown, the USDA’s National Organic Program staff are furloughed. This means:
- Investigations and Complaint Follow-up: Federal-level investigations and complaint follow-up have stopped, causing delays in fraud oversight. Organic certifying bodies will continue this work, but without the ability to issue final decisions against bad actors.
- Reinstatement Request Processing: Processing of reinstatement requests has stopped, leading to open-ended delays for entities seeking re-certification.
- Appeals: Appeals related to proposed suspensions, revocations, or certification denials are not being received or processed, resulting in indefinite delays in the resolution of these adverse actions.
These issues weaken the organic brand and allow potential bad actors to continue operating, while honest organic farmers and handlers may suffer economic impacts.
Other critical functions may also be affected. For instance, if the Organic Integrity Database (OID) experiences an outage, there will be no staff available to fix it. This would prevent organic certifiers from issuing organic certificates from the OID. In such a scenario, certifier-issued documents would be needed to verify the status of organic goods until the OID becomes operational again.
Crucially, if the OID goes down, organic operations will not be able to use it to vet suppliers. Fortunately, OneCert provides an alternative version of the OID, called “MyOID,” which will remain operational even if the OID loses functionality. You can continue to monitor suppliers during the shutdown by visiting https://myoid.net/. Although MyOID pulls its data directly from the Organic Integrity Database, and data would not be entirely up to date if the OID went down, MyOID would resume updating its data as soon as OID functionality is restored. Learn more about MyOID data freshness here.
Members of the organic community participating in the Transition to Organic Partnership Program (TOPP) and recipients of Organic Market Development grants will continue their work, but reimbursements could be delayed until the shutdown concludes.
Finally, the OID is vital for issuing NOP Import Certificates, which are required to export goods into the U.S. Any outage or degradation in the NOP Import Certificate issuance system could quickly impact trade. While the USDA has a contingency plan allowing certifiers to issue paper import certificates if the system goes down, this may cause delays or confusion for importers and exporters.
OneCert is closely monitoring critical USDA infrastructure during the shutdown to ensure uninterrupted service to our clients. However, those with appeals or reinstatement requests in process may experience indefinite delays while we await the government’s reopening. In the meantime, if you have questions or concerns about how the shutdown could affect your operation, please call 402-420-6080 or email us at info@onecert.com.