Washington ? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday created a new senior position to supervise the agency’s regulation of food safety, even as the agency disclosed that 3 million chickens raised on 38 Indiana poultry farms have been added to the growing list of animals that consumed feed tainted with a chemical used to make plastics.

FDA and Department of Agriculture officials said they chose not to issue a recall for the chickens because they were given the feed in February, and that most have already been processed and sold in the marketplace.

David Acheson, the FDA official who assumed the new post of assistant commissioner for food protection, also said that the amount of feed contaminated is minimal by the time it is fed to livestock that is eventually consumed by humans.

“The dilution factors here are enormous,” Acheson said. “We have a raw ingredient that is made, wheat gluten; only some percentage of it is the melamine compound that’s used to manufacture pet food, and only a small amount of the pet food is used to manufacture the feed to hogs and chickens.

“If you multiply all those factors in, we believe the likelihood of illness to humans is extremely small, really no likelihood of a problem,” he said.

Congressional critics dubbed the newly created FDA position as the “food safety czar” and derided it as likely to be ineffective.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said the FDA’s food safety apparatus “is broken down.” The new FDA administrative position, he said, “doesn’t really affect the core issue here. We need to have a dramatic change.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., on Tuesday introduced a bill, which Durbin plans to co-sponsor in the Senate, that would allow the FDA to order recalls of contaminated food, create an early warning system for problems with human or pet food and broaden the agency’s power over food labeling, importation and record-keeping. Under current rules, food manufacturers must issue recall notices.

“I think the FDA needs to do more than just create a food safety czar,” DeLauro said. “This is about reshuffling the management, and I think it does little to focus the agency on its mission to protect the public health.”