Commissioner Hamburg Describes How Federal Budget Uncertainty Hurts FDA and more

Advocacy at a Glance offers you the bullet point summary of current advocacy issues associated with the goals of the Alliance for a Stronger FDA.

• Commissioner Hamburg Describes How Federal Budget Uncertainty Hurts FDA.  At a conference this week Commissioner Hamburg talked about how lower appropriations and funding uncertainty affects FDA.  She  observed:

You can't run an agency as important as the FDA if you don't have predictability, if you don't know what budget you'll be given during the year, or if you don't know whether you can draw from certain resources or not.

• Budget Conference Committee to Meet Again November 13. The House-Senate negotiators will meet again on November 13.  There is no indication that they are making progress, but we would expect that any deal would emerge from behind-the-scene discussions rather than public meetings.  In today’s Analysis and Commentary, the Alliance’s Steven Grossman looks at what outcomes would be in the best interest of FDA.

• OMB Analyzes Cost of Government Shutdown. A report recently released by the White House attempts to catalogue and quantify the consequences of the shutdown. Given that FDA is an extremely small portion of the federal budget, it received outsized attention in the OMB report. For example, under “Economic Disruption,” it states that the shutdown delayed Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of medical products, devices, and drugs. This delayed businesses in moving products to market.

  Under “Impacts on Programs and Services,” the report finds that the shutdown

  led the FDA to delay nearly 500 food and feed domestic inspections and roughly 355 food safety inspections under State contracts. These routine inspections enable FDA to determine compliance with law and ensure that unsanitary conditions and practices that may result in foodborne illness are addressed.