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# Trump’s Budget for FDA Could Risk Agency Collapse
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/trumps-budget-for-fda-could-risk-agency-collapse/
- Published: 2017-03-27T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T22:13:57.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: FDA Policy/General, #legacy-id-D5138304

*\[Analysis by Jim Dickinson\]* Before there were user fees at FDA, the very idea was vigorously opposed inside and outside the agency for diverse reasons that mostly added up to the same fear: They would cause the effective collapse of the agency’s mission. Now, after almost a quarter-century of this fear not coming true, the Trump Administration’s first budget proposal raises it again, bigger than ever — and for an entirely different reason.

It may be “dead on arrival” as other administrations’ budgets have been, but the ideas behind are likely to remain.

Instead of user fees being dedicated by statute to improving the speed and efficiency of FDA product reviews in very explicit, prescribed ways, under the Trump proposal they would be doubled to help offset a huge reduction in the rest of the agency’s operational costs. And that huge reduction would be FDA’s contribution, among those of all other civilian agencies across the government, to a $54 billion military build-up.

But FDA does much more than simply review medical products with legally restricted user fees which pay for about 70% of drug-review costs and about a third of medical device review costs. As Alliance for a Stronger FDA deputy executive director **Steven Grossman** puts it, the agency’s non-user fee activities include a whole host of mission-essential activities that industry doesn’t want to pay for, such as product-oriented scientific research, regulatory enforcement, bioterrorism, much of product safety, regulatory improvements, public health, industry standards and guidances, overseas offices, liaison with other related agencies around the world and activities by which it maintains its good name (and by extension, public confidence in its approved products).

Grossman’s alliance [called 3/24 for FDA’s “entire stakeholder community”](https://strengthenfda.org/2017/03/24/agfda-appropriations-subcommittees-need-to-hear-from-entire-stakeholder-community/?ref=fdaweb.com) to make their concerns heard before the relevant Ag/FDA appropriations committees on Capitol Hill that will decide the fate of the Trump budget. As initially proposed, the budget “could result in FDA losing hundreds of millions of dollars in the FY 18 appropriations process — cuts that would dramatically reduce FDA’s ability to carry out its responsibilities for safe and effective medical products and safe foods,” it said. “Even programs that receive substantial user fee funding could wind up with significantly less resources. Food safety could be particularly hard hit.”

In a 3/17 Q&A document, the alliance said: “In the context of the President proposing $54 billion in non-defense program cuts, we can think of no other purpose for an extremely large and totally unplanned increase in user fees than to derive a roughly similar amount in savings from budget authority. $900M would represent a third of the agency’s BA \[budget authority\] appropriation. As noted in our release, the proposal is neither wise nor realistic. We would be delighted if this ill-conceived and impractical idea—to cut BA appropriations and replace it with user fees—turned out to be a trial balloon and precipitates so much opposition that OMB reconsiders by the time the full budget emerges in May.”

Although starkly different in root cause from the FDA defenders’ fears before user fees came, today’s post-Trump fear has the same specter in view: the collapse of the agency’s core mission, which has always been the protection of the public health and safety. Doubling user fees to pay FDA’s share of the defense build-up could more than sap that mission.

An FDA forced to reduce its non-user fee activities through a savage reduction in taxpayer dollars could be crippled in discharging its mission.