Foodborne illnesses sicken and kill thousands of Americans each year, but the threat is still taken lightly by Washington’s law- and policymakers. One in six Americans suffer from a foodborne illness, each year, with 128,000 resulting in hospitalization and 3,000 in death. The federal government, however, has outsourced much of its food inspection responsibilities to third-party companies that aren’t transparent and have no accountability or oversight.

The Food and Drug Administration inspected just 6 percent of the nation’s food producers in 2011, and it has no rules governing third-party inspectors or how often producers should be inspected, according to Bloomberg News. For-profit inspection services often examine “only those areas their clients ask them to review,” and as a result, they often miss sickening and potentially deadly pathogens that infect food that will hit supermarket shelves:

What for-hire auditors do is cloaked in secrecy; they don’t have to make their findings public. Bloomberg Markets obtained four audit reports and three audit certificates through court cases, congressional investigations and company websites.

Six audits gave sterling marks to the cantaloupe farm, an egg producer, a peanut processor and a ground-turkey plant — either before or right after they supplied toxic food.

Collectively, these growers and processors were responsible for tainted food that sickened 2,936 people and killed 43 in 50 states.

Despite these facts, food safety and inspection continues to be a relatively ignored issue in Washington and beyond. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has proposed a rule that could privatize much of its poultry inspection — poultry companies would reap huge profits — even as salmonella outbreaks have hammered parts of the country. Both President Obama’s and the House Republican budgets included cuts to the Food Safety Inspection Service.

The GOP has fought efforts to fully fund an overhaul of the nation’s food safety laws, signed by Obama in 2011, cutting funding to the FDA, USDA, and other programs even as food safety outbreaks hit meat, poultry, and produce industries across the country. Foodborne illness rates are on the rise, according to the CDC, but Republicans cut $700 million from Obama’s requested FDA budget, which included funding for the Food Safety Modernization Act. The House GOP’s farm bill, which never passed, also included cuts to food safety.

“You need to be in a culture that takes food safety seriously,” Doug Powell, who authored a study on third-party food monitors, told Bloomberg. “Right now, what we have is hidden. The third-party auditor stickers and certificates are meaningless.”

Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel Tarullo called for placing limits on bank size in a speech yesterday, making him one of the highest ranking economic officials to propose a remedy to reduce big bank dominance of the economy. Tarullo said that, in order to keep big banks from growing so large that they threaten the entire financial system, they should be limited in size to a certain percentage of the overall economy:

The idea along these lines that seems to have the most promise would limit the non-deposit liabilities of financial firms to a specified percentage of U.S. gross domestic product, as calculated on a lagged, averaged basis. In addition to the virtue of simplicity, this approach has the advantage of tying the limitation on growth of financial firms to the growth of the national economy and its capacity to absorb losses, as well as to the extent of a firm’s dependence on funding from sources other than the stable base of deposits. While Section 622 of [the Dodd-Frank financial reform law] contains a financial sector concentration limit, it is based on a somewhat awkward and potentially shifting metric of the aggregated consolidated liabilities of all “financial companies.”

Tarullo also said that “the Fed should block any merger or acquisition this group of big banks attempts to make,” which it is allowed to do under Dodd-Frank.

Last month, former Bank of America executive Sallie Krawcheck said that the complexity of today’s Wall Street banks “makes you weep blood out of your eyes.“ She joined a parade of former Wall Street bankers calling for limiting the size and systemic importance of the nation’s biggest financial firms. Even former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, who is credited with creating the superbank, said, “What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not too big to fail.”