The reason you can’t is that US food regulation is a web of anachronistic distinctions. The USDA, created explicitly to spread improvements through the agriculture industry, inspects most meat, raw (but not processed) fruits and vegetables, and processed (but not raw) eggs. The FDA, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, supervises fish (except catfish), venison, and genetically modified animals—the current bone of contention. To implement regulations, the agencies often rely on decades-old laws whose authors never imagined genetic search-and-replace technology.

Strangely, even 40 years into the biotech age, there still no consensus on what a better regulatory system would like. BIO, a trade group in Washington, DC, is commissioning a white paper to look at the issue, say people who have been briefed on the plans.

Companies say they want each animal judged on its inherent risk—not how it was made. Regulate “the product, not the process” goes the industry refrain. Specifically, they don’t believe genetic manipulation of animals should automatically trigger safety regulations, as it does now.

Again, they have a point. Some dairy cattle naturally don’t have horns, and you’d have difficulty telling them apart from Recombinetics’s genetically tailored animals—of which there are as yet only a handful, living at a research facility.

Recombinetics has been pushing to ease the rules on gene editing for a while. In 2016, it petitioned the FDA to consider its hornless animals as GRAS—that is, made up of known ingredients “generally recognized as safe,” like salt, calcium, or DNA itself. Since its edited cattle contain only slightly revised cattle genes, the company argued, there is “no scientific or other logical reason” to impose special safety regulations.

The FDA decided otherwise, however. Two days before President Barack Obama left office, the agency said it planned to treat edits made to animals as new drugs. To the agency, genetic tinkering is “intended to affect the structure [or] function” of an animal. Therefore, gene editing, just like any veterinary drug, falls under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, the law from which that phrase comes.

Counting on Trump

To barnyard entrepreneurs, the FDA decision was “insane” and bad for business. Recombinetics hopes to create a business whereby anyone with a blue-ribbon steer could send the company some skin cells and, a year later, get a cloned copy with the no-horns gene instructions added, or with some other valuable change to its genome.

The economics don’t make sense if every designer bull needs to go through years of safety testing. The most valuable Angus ever sold cost about $800,000. That’s a fraction of what a five-year regulatory journey would cost, and most bulls are of course worth much less.