New FDA Head: Commissioner of Food?

Does the Obama administration's choice of the former New York City health commissioner Margaret Hamburg indicate that the FDA will be split in two, with one body regulating drugs and medical devices, and the other food?

Some observers are already saying so. In a news article for the New York Times, reporter Gardiner Harris flatly declared that Hamburg's background "makes her a more obvious candidate to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention than the FDA," as it is currently constituted.

But when it comes to food safety, a reconstituted FDA could look more like the CDC, which has in recent years gotten a much bigger budget than the FDA.

"I think Dr. Hamburg will become the commissioner of food, since she's a safety and security person," Peter Pitts, a former FDA associate commissioner, told the Times. Pitts is now president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. He further predicted that Joshua Sharfstein, the nominee for chief deputy of the FDA, would become head of something he called the "Federal Drug Administration." Sharfstein is the health commissioner of Baltimore and was in charge of FDA matters for the Obama transition team.

But while such a split makes eminently good sense, there is resistance to it in Congress. Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman is against it, at least for now. So is Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas. Support for the idea is similarly bipartisan.

Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the "first goal should be to address the problems that plague this program where it currently sits. After we finish that job, we can consider whether a reorganization is necessary."

But the problems that plague both the food and drug missions of the agency are largely a result of its unwieldiness. The Obama administration, mostly with support from Congress, has tended so far to take on short- and long-term problems all at once. If we can take on both the current financial crisis and the underlying structural problems that caused it, surely we can do the same thing with food and drug regulation.