Special Edition: Alliance Responds to President’s FY25 Budget
March 13, 2024 Silver Spring, MD -- Following Monday’s release of the President’s FY 25 Budget Request, the Alliance for a Stronger FDA issued the following statement to the media, stakeholders, and the public.
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The Alliance for a Stronger FDA supports the President’s request for an increase in FDA’s FY25 budget authority (taxpayer) funding. The request is for an increase of $168 million, not quite 5% over the FY 2024 appropriated amount.
However, $115 million of the increase would be for mandated salary increases, leaving very little to cover growing demands on the agency.
We will be asking Congress for additional FY 25 FDA funding so that the agency can make essential investments in:
modernizing its information technology and data management infrastructure to support better informed decisionmaking, and
programs that will keep the agency on pace with increasingly-sophisticated technologies and societal needs.
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Additional information: The Alliance’s focus is the $3.682 billion in budget authority (taxpayer) funding requested for FDA’s food and medical product programs. We have linked a table showing 1/ how the requested FY 25 monies would be distributed across the FDA’s centers and offices and 2/ compared to the final FY 24 appropriations levels enacted last week.
Note 1: Salaries and expenses (S&E). If Buildings and Facilities (B&F) is included, $3.695 billion
Note 2: This does not include $55 million (a $5 million increase) proposed to continue medical product safety activities across the agency supported by the 21st Century Cures Act. These funds are appropriated separately from FDA’s BA-supported programs
Note 3: Because FDA had only the FY 24 CR annualized base numbers to work with, our updated FY 24 final numbers will differ from theirs.
The Alliance’s Friday Update will be published later this week and contain additional analysis. If you aren’t on the list to receive our Update, contact Ben Dash.
Proposed increases in the President’s Request are for:
Enhancing food safety and nutrition. This includes a $15 million increase to strengthen and modernize FDA’s capacity to protect and promote a safe, nutritious U.S. food supply. Funds will be used to prevent or mitigate foodborne illness outbreaks by:
investing to strengthen necessary tools and processes within root-cause investigations, and
ensuring compliance with the requirements outlined in the Requirements for Additional Traceability Records for Certain Foods (Food Traceability Final Rule).
Investing in cross-cutting, agency-wide efforts, including public health employee paycosts; shortages and supply chain; enterprise.
The Budget Request includes an increase of $114.8 million to address approximately 72 percent of FDA’s estimated inflationary pay costs associated with the FY 2024 and FY 2025 Cost-of-Living Adjustments.
Other increases included under this theme are:
continue building FDA’s centralized enterprise data modernization capabilities and strengthen its common data infrastructure; data exchange; and IT analytic services, talent, and tools. +$8.3 million
investment to strengthen FDA’s oversight of imported products by expanding the Agency’s foreign office footprint and deployed personnel. + $1 million
increase to, amongst other initiatives, hire additional investigators to fulfill inspectional needs associated with increased supply chain disruptions and consequent human food and medical product shortages in recent years. +$12.3 million
continue developing a modernized cosmetics regulatory program to enhance the Agency’s efforts to protect consumers from unsafe cosmetics. +$8 million
support modernization activities by centralizing planning, implementation, and governance of high priority business process improvement efforts. +$2 million
FDA also proposes several legislative changes which can be found at FY 2025 FDA Legislative Proposals.
In order of increasing detail, the relevant budget documents are:
FY-2025-budget-in-brief.pdf (hhs.gov)(FDA beginning page 24 of the pdf/page 18 of the text), and
FDA Fiscal Year 2025 Justification of Estimates for Appropriations Committees
The Alliance for a Stronger FDA is a multi-stakeholder organization with 150+ members devoted to advocating for increased appropriations for the FDA and educating policymakers and the public about the FDA's mission and responsibilities. The Alliance’s unique coalition of patient and consumer groups and industry mirrors FDA’s unique role in public health, safety, and commerce.
For more information, please contact Alliance Executive Director Steven Grossman by e-mail or at 301-257-9660.