The United States Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is the government agency responsible for ensuring the safety of America's supply of meat, poultry, and egg products. In an effort to improve its inspection system, FSIS has proposed to modify the allocation of its inspection resources by establishing criteria to rank, based on public health risk, slaughtering and processing establishments. Before implementing the proposed inspection system, FSIS asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to evaluate the system, particularly the criteria for ranking slaughtering and processing establishments. In its 2009 letter report Review of the Use of Process Control Indicators in the FSIS Public Health Risk-Based Inspection System, the IOM committee concurs with the use of the risk-based inspection system but makes several recommendations to improve the process.