Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies rallied around removing industry influence from the Food and Drug Administration as part of their quest to Make America Healthy Again, which Kennedy has used in his early days in office to sound the alarm over food industry lobbying and pharma’s influence in D.C.
But they’ve also, less explicitly, suggested plans to target a more unassuming but long-standing program that funds nearly half of the FDA’s budget: the user fees that industry pays to the FDA in exchange for reviewing their product applications.
A 1992 law called the Prescription Drug User Fee Act was primarily intended to fast-track the time between applying for approval and receiving a decision. Before that law was passed, researchers at Tufts University had documented a delay between the time new pharmaceuticals were getting approved in the United Kingdom compared with the United States.
