Michael Rogers Resigns from FDA
FDA associate commissioner for inspections and investigations Michael Rogers, who has worked for the agency for more than 30 years, is retiring effective 5/14, reportedly over staff frustration with commissioner Martin Makary. “I have decided to retire,” Rogers told CBS News. “It was my decision, but it was time after 34 years.” Rogers was the agency’s lead executive overseeing both drug and food safety inspections, CBS says.
The article reports that two FDA officials who spoke anonymously said Rogers told colleagues privately that he was miserable in recent days as the agency dealt with staff layoffs ordered by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
CBS also reports that Makary intends to cut the length of foreign inspection trips, claiming it would result in more inspections.
“We’re also not going to have our inspectors hanging out for three or four weeks,” he said, “and we’re going to do more inspections with the same resources as a result.”
However, current and former FDAers who spoke with the network said the push for longer inspection trips had been seen in the past as an efficiency move intended to result in more inspections.
The officials said the idea was that instead of spending money and wearing down staff to fly in and out of a country to do each inspection, multiple inspections would be combined into a single trip.
“So they’re going to double or triple the foreign inspection flight costs and keep my people in a perpetual state of jet lag,” one agency official told the network. “No one is ‘hanging out,’” the official said. “You inspect Monday to Friday. If you’re lucky, you have the weekend to recover.”
Officials also suggested to CBS that it was not possible to increase the number of foreign inspections while also cutting down on the length of foreign trips without cutting corners on oversight. They said the question of how long it takes to complete oversight work has been closely studied by agency officials and outside auditors as part of an effort to reduce a backlog of foreign inspections and complaints.
“It’s fairly basic math,” another official said. “We know how long inspectional activities take. If they get shorter, which inspection activities are we no longer performing?”