[azinman2]

A contextless number doesn’t mean much. Maybe that’s enough? Too much? Too little? The FDA doesn’t need to buy billion dollar aircraft carriers, they need to pay people salaries and equip them to investigate, test, read papers, and set standards.

[ineedasername]

You make a strong argument for the FDA to get its own fleet of aircraft carriers and probably ground support as well. I bet they'd have many fewer enforcement issues. Then again the optics of the FDA sending a nuke to a company that is non-compliant in it's handling of medical grade radioactive isotopes might be a little bad.

[totalZero]

We have serious problems with pharmaceutical pricing, access, and regulation in the United States. Let's not pretend that we have saturated the costs of all necessary pharmaceutical regulation, nor that all of our aircraft carriers are necessary.

Here's a list of words to google next to "FDA" as a search term if you want to know where some of the deficiencies lie:

  Sackler
  Epi-pen
  Insulin
  Shkreli
  Kickbacks
  Vioxx
  Lobbying

[ineedasername]

Absolutely, agreed.

[NaturalPhallacy]

It means our government prioritizes spending on war over two orders of magnitude more than the safety of its own citizens.

[kar5pt]

No it doesn't. I spend more on coffee than I do on water. That doesn't mean I "prioritize coffee over water". It means that I don't need to spend as much on water to get what I need.

[totalZero]

If you spend over a hundred times as much on coffee than on water every month, and you find yourself chronically under-hydrated, then you may indeed prioritize coffee over water.

Coffee contains water, which makes this a strange analogy. Just saying.

The observation that you are trying to refute is that the FDA falls short of accomplishing its mission and receives remarkably less funding than other agencies of the government that also intend to ensure the safety and well-being of Americans.

In fact, about half of the FDA's funding comes from drug companies. That seems strange considering how the FDA is supposed to regulate those very companies.