Alliance Hill Days Are Coming Up. Please Participate!

The Alliance’s FY24 budget webinar series concludes today, April 14th, with Dr. Judith McMeekin, head of FDA’s Office of Regulatory Affairs, at 1:00 PM ET. Please register here. 

House Hill Days (Virtual) Scheduled for April 25 and 26. Please Participate! Each Spring the Alliance for a Stronger FDA reaches out to Hill offices to emphasize our support for robust FDA appropriated resources. Our first two days will be Tuesday, April 25 and Wednesday, April 26. So far, we have more than 30 virtual meetings scheduled with more to come! Please sign up by letting Ben Dash know of your availability.

As veterans of this process will recall, we break into teams which represent a broad cross section of our membership. This illustrates the breadth of FDA’s work and its central role in public health and our economy.

We ask Alliance members to check their calendars and let Ben Dash know your availability on those two days. This promises to be a challenging appropriations cycle and your voice is important–both for the FDA overall and for optimum funding of areas that most concern you and your membership.

Hill Days on the Senate Side Scheduled for May 2 and 3. Continuing our Hill efforts, we are planning Senate meetings on May 2nd and 3rd. The initial focus will be on appropriators as well as the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. We ask Alliance members to check their calendars and let Ben Dash know your availability on those two days.

Alliance Files Testimony in House Subcommittee for FY24.  Every year, the House and Senate Ag/FDA appropriations subcommittees request “testimony for the record,” an opportunity for the Alliance to formally deliver our “ask” to the key Congressional subcommittees. 

You can read our testimony here. This week’s Analysis and Commentary provides highlights of the testimony.

Transcript: Ms. Tracey Forfa, J.D Presents FY24 Priorities for CVM. On April 10th, the Alliance held a webinar with Ms. Tracey Forfa, J.D., Director for FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM). A summary of her remarks can be found here and a transcript can be found here.

Other Transcripts: We first heard from CDRH Director Dr. Jeff Shuren (transcript). Subsequently, we heard from:  CFSAN Director Dr. Susan Mayne (summary here; transcript here; CBER Director Dr. Peter Marks (summary here; transcript here; and CDER Director Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni (summary here; transcript here).

Commissioner Califf Discusses COVID, Accelerated Approval, Other Topics.  MedPage Today had a two-part interview (here and here) this week with Dr. Califf. Among the topics he covers are: the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, the role of FDA as a referee, advisory committees, how to improve the quality of trials, FDA’s view of foreign data, and accelerated approval.

Does the Public Trust FDA? Is the FDA Good Place to Work?  A hat-tip to AgencyIQ for pointing out survey data that explores public trust in FDA (here, from Ipsos) and whether FDA employees feel FDA is a good place to work (here, from Partnership for Public Service). 

Ipsos found that 58% of the Americans surveyed trust the information, news, or guidance from the FDA. This was first among the small sample of highly visible federal agencies that were tested. All agencies had partisan splits, with Democrats trusting them more than Republicans.

Partnership for Public Service—based on federal employee surveys-–ranked FDA 92nd of 432 subcomponent federal agencies, with an engagement and satisfaction score of 77.7 percent. As recently as 2015, this score was 66.3 percent. Apart from pay, FDA employee ratings put the agency at or near the top quartile in most areas.