[doe_eyes]

My city has extensive education and occupational licensing requirements if you want to work at a nail care salon. The assumption that bureaucracies left to their own devices always reach an optimum state and then stop expanding is pretty hard to support.

The FDA had 7,500 employees in the 1990s and 18,000 now. Has the world of food and drug gotten 2.5x more perilous? Or is it possible that, just like in tech, every departmental fiefdom wants more resources and more authority with no special regard for what the trade-offs are?

[otterley]

Another plausible (and less sinister) explanation is that pharmaceutical invention and discovery has accelerated since the 1990s and more applications are being submitted to FDA every year that requires more staff to process them in a timely fashion.