FDA's Center for Tobacco Products Sees Staff Cuts
SILVER SPRING, Md. — Movement on tobacco regulation could be up in the air as layoffs hit the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The staff changes include Brian King, the director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products (CTP), who was appointed to the position in July 2022. As director, King was "responsible for assuring that CTP accomplishes its public health goals and for operationalizing the center's vision and mission as it implements the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act," according the agency's website.
King notified his staff that he was leaving the position in an email, reported The Associated Press. "It is with a heavy heart and profound disappointment that I share I have been placed on administrative leave," he wrote Tuesday.
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In addition to King, dozens of other CTP employees received dismissal notices on April 1, including two entire offices responsible for drafting new tobacco regulations and setting policy, the news outlet added.
"If you make it virtually impossible to create and draft policy, then you are eviscerating the role of the center," Mitch Zeller, the former CTP director, said in an interview. "From a public health perspective it makes absolutely no sense."
Zeller led the center from 2013 to 2022. During his tenure, the CTP grew from 426 employees to more than 1,100 employees.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was also hit with layoffs on April 1 as part of broader cuts to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
"The mass layoffs announced today at the FDA, the CDC and other health agencies, including at the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products and the CDC's Office of Smoking and Health, will cause enormous harm to the nation's health and set back efforts to protect kids and save lives from tobacco use, which remains the number one cause of preventable death in the United States. The CDC's Office of Smoking and Health may have been eliminated entirely," said Yolonda C. Richardson, president and CEO, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
"It is inexplicable and especially harmful that these cuts are coming at a time when the FDA should be redoubling its enforcement efforts against the many illegal, flavored e-cigarette products that have entered our country from overseas and put kids at risk," Richardson added later in the same statement.