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FDA refuses to disclose how it spends industry "user fees" – are funds being secretly used on LOBBYING?

By ethanh // 2024-03-20

It is routine for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to collect "user fees" from the industries it regulates to fund testing and regulation of said industries' products, but is that actually where the money is going? A new investigation speculates that the FDA might just be spending that user fee cash on something other than what the law stipulates, seeing as how the agency refuses to answer questions about the matter. Last summer, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request was filed seeking basic information about the agency's user fee spending habits. When the FDA refused to honor the request, the group Protect the Public's Trust (PPT) was forced to take the agency to court. "Remarkably, it took roughly five months for the FDA to wrap their heads around our request," reported Real Clear Wire's Michael Chamberlain. "Two months later, we still await the first production of what FDA reports is 1,685 documents that respond to our search criteria." (Related: We still want to know how the FDA was able to justify granting "emergency use authorization" to Wuhan coronavirus [COVID-19] "vaccines" when there was no real emergency.)

FDA dragging its feet

By law, and by a specific judicial order related to the matter, the FDA has to produce said documents outlining how it spends the user fees it collects. One big question on many people's minds has to do with the FDA's lobbying activities, and whether or not the agency uses collected user fees on those endeavors. To this day, the FDA is still dragging its feet on the FOIA request. The latest update showed the agency claiming that it would just be two-to-four more weeks for the document procuration process to be completed, but six weeks have since passed with no further updates. The documents being requested are simple to obtain for the FDA. It is not as though the FOIA request required extensive digging – just pull up the information and share it, right? The reason for the FDA's stonewalling probably has to do with secret activities the agency does not want the public to know about that are more than likely related to FDA lobbying. We have been reporting for years here at Natural News about the FDA's crusades on raw milk, or on CBD, or on raw almonds, or on any number of other healing foods and natural substances that threaten the industries the FDA supposedly regulates, mainly Big Pharma. We have also warned that the FDA's user fees are more of a pay-for-play operation where cash-rich industries like Big Pharma furnish the FDA with lots of money in exchange for lobbying, which is at the heart of this FOIA request. The fact that the FDA clearly does not want to share any information publicly about how it spends these user fees points towards the answer we long speculated: that the FDA is using the money illicitly to push the agendas of its industry clients, in violation of the law. Concerning the FDA's research and regulations into the tobacco industry, this is another red flag as the agency appears to be sending user fees from tobacco companies to organizations whose entire goal is to put the tobacco industry out of business. "Access to user fee data may be the key to unlocking the agency's true motivations – and whether prohibitionist special interests, such as those funded by billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, are in fact, the real decision-makers driving the agency's policy agenda," Chamberlain writes about the importance of getting to the bottom of this important matter as soon as possible in the interest of public trust. The latest news about the corrupt FDA can be found at FDA.news. Sources for this article include: RealClearWire.com NaturalNews.com

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