FDA Can’t Hire Workers, Despite Six-Figure Salaries
Would a starting salary of over $160,000 turn you off? Well, maybe if you had a scientific PhD and had to wait four months before the employer could decide whether to hire you or not, you would find a spot elsewhere.
This is the situation the Food and Drug Administration finds itself in, according to the Washington Post:
The Food and Drug Administration has more than 700 job vacancies in its division that approves new drugs, and top officials say the agency is struggling to hire and retain staff because pharmaceutical companies lure them away.
“They can pay them roughly twice as much as we can,” Janet Woodcock, who directs the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), said at a rare-diseases summit recently in Arlington, Va.
(Sidney Lupkin & Sarah Jane Tribble, “Despite ramped-up hiring, FDA continues to grapple with hundreds of vacancies,” Washington Post, November 1, 2016.)
As I’ve discussed before, the FDA is not short of money. On the contrary, its budget for drug approvals has increased significantly over the years. However, one reason it cannot hire enough staff to review applications is that it is too slow to process hiring.
If it cannot hire regulatory staff efficiently, how will it ever process drug approvals efficiently?
The fundamental problem is that the FDA is a monopoly, protected by government. Its staff do not suffer if new medicines and devices are not approved in a timely manner. Rather, patients, investors, and innovators suffer. The FDA has lots of reason to complain, because that is how it increases its budget.
However, it has no incentive to become more productive or efficient in approving new therapies. A bigger budget just makes the FDA bigger, but not better. Patients need more freedom to use new therapies without having their access strangled by the FDA.
We need more government employees.
Government employment grew from 22,216,000 in September to 22,235,000 in October, according to BLS, while manufacturing jobs dropped from 12,267,000 to 12,258,000.
The 22,235,000 employed by government in the United States now outnumber the 12,258,000 employed in manufacturing by 9,977,000.
Over the past year—from October 2015 to October 2016—manufacturing employment fell by 53,000, declining from 12,311,000 to 12,258,000. During the same period, government employment climbed 208,000, rising from 22,027,000 to 22,235,000.
The good news is that drunk Janet Reno has died yesterday and her vote for Hillary can’t be counted today in Florida.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/government-workers-now-outnumber-manufacturing-workers-9977000
This transfer of human capital from FDA to private industry is a form of regulatory capture. Former FDA employees leave the agency for greener pastures. Once in industry, they are pressured to use their knowledge not to keep the drug maker in full compliance (which is costly), but to see how far they can skirt the rules. When the firm gets into trouble, its (former FDA) quality compliance managers call their contacts within the FDA and ask for favors. Over time an unwritten rule becomes understood that FDA employees who “rock the boat” for industry won’t be among those who are hired away at twice their former salary (which will rise to three times their former salary within five years).