Don't be silly. The job of the USDA is to promote U.S. agriculture and cattle ranchers at all costs and to even engage in a massive political cover-up to hide mad cow disease from the world, if necessary. And the agency is doing that job quite well.
But it's not fooling the Japanese. Japan buys a lot of beef from the U.S., and the nation doesn't want its citizens dropping dead from BSE (U.S. regulators couldn't care less, apparently), so it wants to make sure beef imported from the U.S. is free of mad cow disease.
And that noble goal could be easily accomplished by simply testing the cows, right? But the USDA threatens to sue U.S. beef exporters who want to test their own cows for mad cow disease! In other words, the USDA doesn't want anybody testing for the disease. And why? Well, because it would reveal just how widespread mad cow disease really is in this country, and that would hurt beef sales worldwide.
So instead of actually testing the cows, the USDA insists that Japan and other countries should just buy the beef anyway, "because we said so." And that's how the USDA continues to pull the wool over the eyes of nearly everyone when it comes to mad cow disease.
At what point are we going to raid the USDA with FBI agents and arrest the criminals responsible for all this?