http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=who_strangled_the_fda
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Charting the phases of the FDA's decline lays bare the responsibility borne by movement conservatism. The first phase was the two terms of the Reagan presidency, when the FDA's staff declined by 30 percent. After a reprieve from 1988 to 1994, when more moderate presidents and a Democratic Congress provided ample boosts in the agency's budget and staffing, the FDA's garroting resumed with a vengeance in the wake of the 1994 Republican landslide that catapulted Gingrich to the House Speaker's chair. He led a highly effective jihad against the agency, pushing to privatize many of its activities. The onslaught continued under George W. Bush and the Republican Congress. From 1994 to 2007, according to former FDA chief counsel Hutt, the agency's appropriated personnel declined from 9,167 to 7,856, while its funding increased by only two-thirds of the amount that would have been needed to keep up with inflation.
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What does it look like when an agency assigned to protect public health and safety drowns in a bathtub? Some snippets from the report:
* IT systems fail frequently, and even e-mail systems are unstable -- most recently during an E. coli food contamination investigation. More importantly, reports of product dangers are not rapidly compared and analyzed, inspectors' reports are still hand written and slow to work their way through the compliance system, and the systems for managing imported products can not communicate with Customs and other governmental systems (and often miss significant product arrivals because the system cannot even distinguish, for example, between road salt and table salt).
* During the past 35 years, the decrease in FDA funding for inspection of our food supply has forced FDA to impose a 78 percent reduction in food inspections, at a time when the food industry has been rapidly expanding and food importation has exponentially increased. FDA estimates that, at most, it inspects food manufacturers once every 10 years.
* Even as the number of "adverse events" from prescription drugs has increased by 146 percent from 1996 to 2006 -- to 471,679 last year -- there has been no increase in FDA personnel to review those reports.
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