I wouldn't trust startup-bros either, without regulatory oversight. That being said, the hostility towards the FDA is not without basis (see below). Though I would argue that much of that hostility it due to it doing too little, rather than too much.
Why is the FDA Funded in Part by the Companies It Regulates?
Why? Because citizens want an expert-staffed and functional regulatory body, but aren't willing to pay the tax necessary to fund it, at parity with private sector salaries.
The root of all government problems is "We trust you to make decisions that impact a large amount of monetary value, but also pay you less than the amount of money flowing through you, and also pay you less than private industry would be willing to."
Which... sets up an interesting dynamic.
There are a lot of selfless saints out there. But there are also a lot, not. And so internal processes and regulations pile on top, in an attempt to curb the worst of corruption.
Can we make the system better? Eh... maybe? But it's important to remember that a lot of features that look insane are actually reactive solutions to problems inherent in the system.
> Why? Because citizens want an expert-staffed and functional regulatory body, but aren't willing to pay the tax necessary to fund it, at parity with private sector salaries.
The FDA (and the CDC and others) and pharma sectors trade people all the time. There is a revolving door between the two. Medicine isn't the only place this happens. It happens in telecomm, military, manufacturing, and so on.
We have experts at all levels. Those same experts may or may not have patriotic tendencies. They are placed for their knowledge of their respective industries. They may also have a financial ax to grind.
Is there a conflict of interest? Only if the appointee was appointed by the other party. I argue that the apparent conflict of interest is only surface level. In the US we don't have "capitalism", we have "crony capitalism" that is verging on technocracy (rule of The Science and unelected bureaucrats).
> The root of all government problems is "We trust you to make decisions that impact a large amount of monetary value, but also pay you less than the amount of money flowing through you, and also pay you less than private industry would be willing to.
The kinds of people who make those decisions are paid very well, and if they make it out without media incident, they are nearly always guaranteed a job in the industry they used to regulate.
> Is there a conflict of interest? Only if the appointee was appointed by the other party. I argue that the apparent conflict of interest is only surface level. In the US we don't have "capitalism", we have "crony capitalism" that is verging on technocracy (rule of The Science and unelected bureaucrats).
There is no such thing as capitalism separate from democracy, with a government that performs many functions.
It's not crony capitalism or technocracy. It's just normal capitalism in a democracy. Same way it has been since the founding of the United States.
> The kinds of people who make those decisions are paid very well
That's a good salary. But it's not necessarily something I'd feel comfortable going to sleep with, knowing they had a finger on the scales of millions of dollars, if there weren't watchdog and mitigation measures in place.
> In the US we don't have "capitalism", we have "crony capitalism"
The real world system for which the term “capitalism” was coined, was, is, and always has been crony capitalism; the idea of a non-crony capitalism is a utopian fairy tale that was invented to justify real-world capitalism which has never resembled it.
The idea of "freedom" and inalienable rights are also utopian fairy tales. There's a reason the guys that wrote the Constitution called it "a more perfect union". We aren't perfect, by we may strive for that ideal.
> The idea of "freedom" and inalienable rights are also utopian fairy tales.
No, they are normative ideals, not fantastical models of how interactions do, or even could, work. Entirely different class of things, even if you disagree with them.
(It's true that people build utopian fairy tales out of them, such as the idea that a society observing certain complexes of multiple and conflicting rights without any tradeoff between them can exist. But the ideas of the rights themselves aren't the utopian fairy tales, they are just a value function.)
Why is the FDA Funded in Part by the Companies It Regulates?
https://today.uconn.edu/2021/05/why-is-the-fda-funded-in-par...
Hidden conflicts? Pharma payments to FDA advisers after drug approvals spark ethical concerns:
https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-conflicts-pha...
Gaps, tensions, and conflicts in the FDA approval process: implications for clinical practice:
https://www.jabfm.org/content/17/2/142.long
Revisiting financial conflicts of interest in FDA advisory committees:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.12073
(edit: more links)