The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a federal healthcare agency in the USA. The agency’s mission is to protect the Americans’ public health by making sure that foods they consume are wholesome, properly labeled, safe, and sanitary (“FDA fundamentals,” 2018). Additionally, the FDA supervises human and veterinary vaccines’, drugs’, and medical devices’ safety and effectiveness (“FDA fundamentals,” 2018). The agency pursuits such goals as the protection of people from electronic goods’ radiation, monitoring tobacco products, and promoting public health by introducing innovative technologies and approaches.
The agency operates in the fifty states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and the other U.S. The structure of the FDA is composed of the following branches:
- the Office of the Commissioner
- four directorates supervising the key functions of the agency:
- Medical Products and Tobacco;
- Foods and Veterinary Medicine;
- Global Regulatory Operations and Policy;
- Operations (“FDA fundamentals,” 2018).
The day-to-day operations of the FDA are versatile and highly responsible. First of all, the agency controls over $2.6 trillion in the consumption of medical products, food, and tobacco. FDA-regulated products form nearly twenty cents of every dollar paid out by Americans (“Fact sheet,” 2019). Additionally, the FDA governs 77% of the country’s food supply, which encompasses all products except poultry, meat, and some egg foods (“Fact sheet,” 2019). The agency also controls prescription drugs that are in circulation. The number of such medicines exceeds 20,000 products, so the FDA takes care of their quality and issues approvals for their release to the markets.
Another function of the agency presupposes controlling the quality of medical devices. More than 6,500 products in this category are under constant supervision of the agency (“Fact sheet,” 2019). The FDA takes care of the quality of animal drugs, the number of which reaches 1,600. Furthermore, the agency takes care of licensing various biologics products. Currently, there are nearly 400 such items (“Fact sheet,” 2019).
Finally, the FDA constantly evaluates the estimated number of tobacco products for reliability and accuracy. At present, the number of such items exceeds 85,000 (“Fact sheet,” 2019). Therefore, the agency performs a variety of day-to-day operations, serving as the guarantee of the country’s public health and its citizens’ safety.
The agency’s ability to fulfill all of its activities promptly and efficiently depends on its financial possibilities. The fiscal year 2020 budget request of the FDA constituted $6.1 billion, which means a 12% increase ($643.1 million) in comparison with the fiscal year 2019 (Department of Health and Human Services [DHHS], n.d.). Out of the requested sum, $3.3 billion were meant for budget authority, and $2.8 billion – for user fees (DHHS, n.d.).
The realignment of funds is aimed at shifting service provider dollars from the agency’s headquarters to programs. Such an amount of money seems sufficient to accomplish the purpose of the agency. Recently, however, the President’s administration suggested changing the regulation of tobacco products dramatically by moving this area out of the FDA authority (Christensen, 2020). Such changes, if adopted, can undermine the agency’s stability and cause difficulties in planning and implementing the necessary policies directed at improving the public health of the whole nation. Currently, the FDA performs several highly crucial functions, and it is essential to finance this agency appropriately so that it could continue taking good care of all public health dimensions.
References
Christensen, J. (2020). Trump budget plan could push tobacco oversight out of the FDA. CNN. Web.
Department of Health and Human Services. (n.d.). Fiscal year 2020: Food and Drug Administration: Justification of estimates for appropriations committees. Web.
Fact sheet: FDA at a glance. (2019). Web.
FDA fundamentals. (2018). Web.