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# FDA Officials Describe Staffing Challenges
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/fda-officials-describe-staffing-challenges/
- Published: 2020-01-08T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T15:57:50.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: FDA Policy/General, #legacy-id-D5145793

FDA officials in recent months have said that the agency is being challenged to recruit and hire the scientific staff needed to accomplish its mission. In an online [post](https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/fda-faces-challenges-recruiting-scientists-analysts?ref=fdaweb.com), the Heartland Institute says the latest to raise the issue was new FDA commissioner **Stephen Hahn** in his 11/20/19 Senate confirmation hearing. At that time Hahn said FDA must put “the right people in place” to modernize the federal drug approval process because “science is moving so quickly.”

In October, CDER director **Janet Woodcock** expressed concern that the agency is rapidly losing medical experts to the private sector, the post says. “The Advisory Committees just have so many rules and lawyers,” Woodcock was quoted as saying. “It’s really difficult to get people with the greatest expertise.”

Heartland Institute research director **Ed Hudgins** is quoted as saying that the staffing challenge is another reason for FDA to modernize its approval process. “The fact that FDA has 15,000 employees but finds itself unequal to the task of expediting certification of medications to meet patient demands points to the fact that its regulatory system is woefully out of date,” he says. “This is especially true because innovative approaches don’t fit nicely into the testing regime mandated almost half a century ago. The best and brightest are attracted more to discovering and developing those treatments and cures rather than to sit in a government bureaucracy to review what they didn’t create.”

Hudgins and Heartland call on FDA to adopt a Free to Choose Medicine track that would allow drug sponsors to offer treatments deemed to be safe but still being tested for efficacy.