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# FDA Leaders’ Financial Ties to Drug Industry Probed
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/fda-leaders-financial-ties-to-drug-industry-probed/
- Published: 2024-05-09T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T14:30:27.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: FDA Policy/General, #legacy-id-D5156951

A *BMJ* investigation says that while FDA says it takes conflicts of interest seriously, “financial entanglements with the drug industry are common among its leaders.” The [article](https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q975?ref=fdaweb.com) discusses current FDA commissioner **Robert Califf** and former commissioners **Lester Crawford**, **Margaret Hamburg**, and **Scott Gottlieb**.

It notes that when Califf was confirmed, he committed to selling his pharmaceutical stocks and severing financial relationships with biotech companies, including Verily Life Sciences, where he was a senior advisor.

The report indicates that Crawford was sentenced to three years of supervised probation and fined $89,377 for false reports about stocks that he and his wife owned in four FDA-regulated companies.

The Trump administration, the report says, rescinded on his last day in office a requirement that appointees sign an ethics pledge, committing not to lobby the agencies they worked in for five years after public service. Gottlieb, who led FDA for two years under Trump, was nominated to Pfizer’s board shortly after he left the administration.

The article devotes the greatest attention to Hamburg’s situation since she was allowed to hold financial interests in an exclusive hedge fund managed by her husband’s company. It says that a *BMJ* analysis found the hedge fund consistently invested in FDA-regulated companies during Hamburg’s tenure with the agency.

Public Citizen’s **Craig Holman** told *BMJ* that the Office of Governmental Ethics (OGE) should be strengthened. OGE is an independent agency that reviews the financial disclosures of senior executive branch nominees to identify potential conflicts of interest.

“Currently, the agency is small,” he said, “with around 70 employees and is focused on issuing advice, for example, about divestiture, with limited ability to enforce its recommendations.”