A tight budget can be a good tool for fiscal discipline, but when you’re talking about safe food and medicines, a little more funding can help.  Still, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach is coming down on the side of economy.  Both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate committee that approves funding for the FDA agreed yesterday that the agency needs $375 million or 20 percent more funding than it’s currently receiving.

But as the New York Times’ Gardiner Harris reports, Eschenbach told the committee yesterday that the agency couldn’t appropriately respond to that scale of funding increase. Eschenbach is requesting additional funding for more employees and overseas inspectors in China.  But he doesn’t agree with the assessments by Congress and the agency’s own Scientific Advisory Panel that the FDA is too strapped of cash to perform its basic regulatory mandate.  Read Harris here.  MB

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