Downtrodden FDA staff

FDA staff are sick and tired, Lizzy Lawrence reports. They're sick of the agency's politicization, and tired of losing experienced staff while trying to maintain the quality of product reviews and facility inspections.

For this story, Lizzy spoke to 15 employees in the agency's drug, device, biologics, and food centers, plus a bunch of observers who are outside of the agency. She walks through causes, starting with health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s demonization of FDA employees in October and moving through the mass layoffs, the leaders who have been forced out, and the policy decisions that have left career staff feeling ignored.

The upshot: staff are leaving, morale is falling, and the gold-standard of the agency might be starting to tarnish.

vaccine policy

Doctors sue RFK Jr.

There might be consequences to ignoring career staff on major decisions.

Six major medical groups, and a pregnant physician, are suing health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over changes he made to Covid-19 vaccine recommendations that they say were unlawful and undermine public trust in health care, Chelsea Cirruzzo reports.

The new vaccination policies were made without involvement of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the panel of vaccine experts that advises federal officials on whom should get which vaccine. The CDC has no acting director.

research funding

DOGE cuts to NIH grants backfire

When the Trump HHS terminated large swaths of NIH research grants, many state attorneys general sued. Mostly, they were Democrats.

So when a U.S. district judge ruled that the termination of hundreds of grants was illegal, that decision applied only to a subset of grants that Democratic AGs challenged, Anil Oza reports. Researchers in Republican states are mostly out-of-luck.

Anil analyzed the reinstated grants. Read more to learn how much research funding Democratic AGs got back compared to what has been recovered in Republican states.

hhs

Trump HHS regroups on NIH grant terminations

After those AGs won, NIH hit pause on its grant termination campaign, and HHS lawyers began devising a more legally sound strategy for canceling research, Anil reports.

Anil obtained guidance from the HHS general counsel on a new legal advisory process and advice to staffers on the justifications for terminations that could make them less susceptible to court challenges.

Anil has been all over this story for months. Read more of his great reporting.

Congress

Hospital lobbyists got a shellacking

Nothing worked. Their arguments mostly fell on deaf ears, their champions mostly caved, and the game was over fast.

Daniel Payne examines how health care providers failed to fend off major cuts to federal Medicaid funding. Health care providers often operate well in business-friendly administrations that cut regulations and boost payment rates, and in populist administrations that expand public programs from which they benefit.

This time, they got neither. Instead, they were blindsided by a movement that is skeptical of health institutions and in need of big offsets for Trump's tax cuts.

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