FDA’s drug center continues to operate with a staffing shortage at a time of tremendous pressure to implement new authorities. Janet Woodcock is left scrambling to find senior managers to lead top initiatives. Direct hiring authority has helped but doesn’t fully address FDA’s recruiting challenges: too much red tape and too little money.
FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Director Janet Woodcock sums up the agency’s recruitment and hiring challenge in a single sentence: “It’s really hard to talk people into taking a couple hundred thousand dollar pay cut to come work for the government, even though what we do is fascinating.”
That is the uphill battle that Woodcock faces in filling the 600 open spots within CDER: It pays less than the private sector to work at FDA
At a House subcommittee hearing, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rebutted lawmaker concerns that NIH cuts will drive research and scientists to other countries and said he does not want to advise parents on vaccinating children for measles, chickenpox or polio.
With an FDA review ongoing, Kennedy’s admission, made during a Senate hearing on the Health and Human Services Department’s budget request, suggests political officials could supersede scientific decisions.
At the Bank of America health care conference, pharma leaders speculated on the impact of Trump’s most favored nation pricing executive order on US and European markets.
Policy experts and pharma executives react to President Trump’s executive order on “equalizing” drug prices between the US and comparable nations at the ISPOR 2025 conference.
