When it comes to saving taxpayer dollars, sometimes Congress has a hard time grabbing the low-hanging fruit, even when it's sitting on the bottom.

The United States Department of Agriculture is set to implement a final rule detailing how it will conduct safety inspections on catfish. While safety inspections covering all other seafood, from trout to tilapia, are undertaken by the Food and Drug Administration, the 2008 farm bill made the bottom-dwelling catfish the responsibility of the USDA. Now, unless lawmakers step in, taxpayers are about to be saddled with a $14 million-a-year bill for a duplicative and wasteful policy and potential WTO trade barrier that not even Congress nor the president want to implement.

The president of the National Fisheries Institute testified to the Government Accountability Office that there is no special safety concern related to foreign produced catfish that would require the USDA to inspect it instead of FDA. And consumers have responded. Since 2004 the amount of catfish shipped to the U.S. has soared from 7 million pounds to 215 million pounds in 2014, while domestic farm-raised catfish production has declined by nearly 50 percent. U.S. consumers now purchase more pangasius, the Asian cousin of the U.S. catfish, than domestic catfish.

Stopping this bad policy should not be difficult. The GAO has singled it out repeatedly as duplicative and wasteful. President Barack Obama's 2014 budget request sought its elimination, and members of Congress have gone on the record supporting an end to the program. During a debate over the 2013 farm bill, an amendment to strip the catfish inspection office from the Senate farm bill was so noncontroversial it was accepted by voice vote. By the time the House took up its farm bill in 2014, they didn't even need to vote. The House Agriculture Committee itself, not a committee known for saying no to parochial programs, included eliminating the catfish inspection office as part of the bill.

Yet the duplicative and wasteful catfish inspection office remains. Why? Parochialsim.

The fight over regulating catfish is a fight over protecting a domestic industry from foreign competition. In 2014, Mississippi produced 54 percent of U.S. domestic catfish. And the lead proponent first of banning foreign producers from labeling their fish as “catfish” – why you see basa and swai in the grocery store – and now of shifting inspection responsibilities to USDA is none other than the senior senator from Mississippi, Republican Thad Cochran.

When the Senate took up the farm bill again in 2014, the catfish inspection office resurfaced. The amendment to eliminate it was the only amendment agreed to on the floor in 2013 that was stripped from the underlying Senate bill. And during floor debate, supporters of eliminating the office did not get a chance to vote, once again, on the fate of the office. Who was managing the bill on the floor? Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and then-ranking member Cochran.

Taxpayers can't afford for lawmakers to continue pushing parochial interests at the expense of both the expressed will of Congress and the national interest. It's time for Congress to fillet the USDA catfish inspection office.