FDA commissioner asks Congress for additional $275 million

WASHINGTON Food and Drug Administration commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach has written to Congress, asking for an additional $275 million in funding immediately to help ensure that imported foods, drugs and medical devices are safe, according to The New York Times.

The request was made in a letter to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., that offers a detailed spending plan for such things as opening new foreign offices, increasing inspections and constructing new databases to track drug hazards.

Since the president announced the budget for the FDA in February, which was only an increase of $50.7 million from the prior year, the commissioner has been targeted by both Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate asking how much it would take for the agency to operate in the coming year.

Matters got worse when reports kept popping up regarding tainted drugs and food entering the country.

Before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Investigations in April, von Eschenbach barely got a word in edgewise as Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., who is the chairman of the commerce committee, asked him again and again to state a figure that would allow the FDA to inspect adequately imported food and drugs. Von Eschenbach never gave a figure.

In the Senate a week earlier, Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, also tried to get von Eschenbach to specify how much more the agency needed. Von Eschenbach refused to give a number, but he did say that the agency could not efficiently absorb a $375 million increase in its budget next year.

In his letter to Specter, however, von Eschenbach said the agency could absorb an additional $275 million in just the next few months.

Last week, Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the FDA, sponsored a measure that would provide the FDA an additional $275 million this year as part of an emergency supplemental appropriations bill largely intended to finance the war in Iraq, according to published reports.

The supplemental bill seems to be the only way to provide additional financing to the FDA, since appropriations bills for next year are likely to stall.

Kohl’s measure resembles von Eschenbach’s letter to Specter. Both call for $125 million to finance food safety activities; $100 million for medical product and drug safety activities; $40 million for modernizing FDA’s science and work force; and $10 million to upgrade agency facilities and laboratories. Nonetheless, all parties now seem to be happy about von Eschenbach’s move, the Times reported.