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# More Furloughs, ‘Discretionary’ Cuts Expected: Gottlieb
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/more-furloughs-discretionary-cuts-expected-gottlieb/
- Published: 2019-01-18T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-15T00:55:34.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: FDA Policy/General, #legacy-id-D5143181

FDA commissioner **Scott Gottlieb** says the agency is curbing “discretionary activities” and looking to order furloughs in areas where the workload has dropped during the partial government shutdown to preserve resources for drug reviews. In a 1/17 interview with the [*Washington Post*](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fda-directs-dwindling-resources-toward-reviewing-new-drugs/2019/01/17/cdad8496-1a91-11e9-9ebf-c5fed1b7a081%5Fstory.html?noredirect=on&utm%5Fterm=.49c5ddb46577&ref=fdaweb.com), he said “What we are trying to do is to keep the review process continuing because of important drugs in the pipeline.” But as he has earlier said in numerous tweets this month, all of the resource juggling and creative accounting will buy just a few more weeks before drug user fee money runs out.

The 2018 user fees carryover are expected to run out about 2/8, Gottlieb told the *Post*. User fees owed with new submissions this year cannot be collected during the shutdown. The agency can shift some of the remaining 2018 fees from ancillary activities to current drug reviews, which include products to treat epilepsy, triple-negative breast cancer and spinal muscular atrophy, he said. FDA watchers are concerned that the shutdown will hinder reviews for the rest of the year and cause an unnecessary backlog of review activities.

Policy initiatives such as modernizing FDA’s drug-review office will be put on hold, Gottlieb said. So will work on some guidance documents, and contracts with outside businesses will be deferred. And as the resources run out, the agency will stop holding advisory committee meetings, he said.  
  
“Drug user fees must be spent on review related work by law,” Gottlieb explained on Twitter. “As review workload declines, because we’re not receiving new applications, we’ll have to furlough more people who are in user-fee slots.”  
  
“I’ve been covering this area for 11 years and I have never seen anything like this,” **Vamil Divan**, a senior research analyst at Credit Suisse, told the *Post*. He said he thought big pharmaceutical companies could easily weather the increased uncertainty in the process but was worried about the impact on small companies with one or two products. Still, he didn’t think consumers would be affected much if any particular drug approval were to be delayed by a month or two. “Very few patients get new drugs in the first month or two, and some are already getting them in clinical trials,” he said.