Robert Garcia
speaker
1,657 appearances
63 recordings
10 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 12 Sep
Robert Garcia’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 43 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 19.
Appearances
Well, I'll be interested in what your main questions are that you think might be of greatest use to the audience, but a brief. overview, I think as almost everybody knows now, there was a massive purge of the federal workforce within Health and Human Services, including the FDA.
Remember that we had already lost a number of people if they had diversity, equity, or inclusion in their job description. They were basically fired on the first day. And then there were a series of firings if you were a Federal terms means that you're less than two years into either your first employment with the government or you've been promoted.
And you're less than two years into that promotion. And basically, if you're in that category, then there was a significant number of people let go. But then this week, 3,500 FDA employees were fired. It was done, as the first two were, in an almost brutal way that really shows lack of concern for the human beings who were involved.
In this case, it sounds like the message went out at 5 to 15 a.m., but many people... had their privileges disconnected, so they didn't get the message, and people showed up for work and then couldn't get in. So you end up with a very public scene where you have some people in a line of people who have been fired and other people in a line that's trying to get through.
So there are sort of two big aspects to this. One is the way we treat our fellow human beings in a situation of employment. For most people in the public, though, nothing they can do about that. The question is, what's the impact? Many of us are extremely worried that we now don't have enough people with enough institutional knowledge to conduct a business that we all rely on.
The development and evaluation of medical products, the inspections that keep our food safe, the success we've had in reducing deaths from tobacco, which is... still underway, all the things that the FDA does. But in addition to that, this is happening all across health and human services.
So if we take a problem like the H5N1 pandemic potential with that bird flu virus, that requires a lot of coordination between the FDA, which regulates the milk, the USDA that regulates the cows and the chickens and the CDC that regulates the farm workers who are most primarily affected. And many of the people that were working on that problem were fired.
And it was done in a way which gave them no chance to hand off their responsibilities. It's sort of like you're a basketball coach. I'm a big basketball fan, as you know, and it's March Madness. I am a blue devil, I have to say. But can you imagine that you put in a substitution and you don't have an assignment for the new guy coming in?
And the guy coming out doesn't relay what was going on on the court. It just makes no sense.
Well, I think there are many analogies that are all kind of similar for something like this. And maybe pothole repair is an easy example to grasp. If you decide I want to cut the city budget, the expenses, you could say we're not going to fix any potholes for the next couple of years. And right away, you don't notice anything different.
But then over time, the risk of something bad happening goes up incrementally over time, and eventually someone's going to hit a pothole and something bad is going to happen. And so, I mean, we have industries in America and globally that supply America that produce pretty good products.
And so you wouldn't see something right away for the average person, but there will be harm done by products that are deficient that didn't get inspected on time. or safety reports that go out. One place that was cut substantially was the communications part of government. Someone's got to actually notify people when there's a safety problem.
The company has a role, but I don't think we want the companies taking full accountability for that. That's problems there is part of what led to the FDA being in place in the first place. But a place, just to mention one group I'm particularly worried about where who could see really big losses from expectations would be people with rare disease.
You're very aware, Vin, that we're on the threshold of treatments and cures for hundreds of thousands of diseases that were previously completely untreatable because of gene editing and other ways to affect the human genome. This is not possible until just now. But it's very complicated and it's a risky development process that needs a lot of interaction with the FDA.
And we're already seeing, for example, investors backing off because of the uncertainty as to whether there's enough staff left at FDA to work with the industry to develop these treatments. So I mean, this is not a matter like many of the diseases you and I deal with. I'm a cardiologist. We have a lot of treatments already. We're talking about people with no other treatment.
It's just one extreme example.
I think you're probably a better judge of that than I am. But my perception is it's just hard to connect the dots here for the average person. It's got a lot of other things to worry about in life. And this is not the kind of thing, at least not right now, where, you know, like your garbage is not picked up. You're going to know that right away.
Or, you know, your Social Security check doesn't come. That's been in the – that's a – you know, those are immediate things. This is really the infrastructure that's built an environment where we have access to safe and effective products and safe food. And we're seeing a reduction in the toll of tobacco. This is being undercut as we speak.
And I worry that the lingo that's being used makes it even more difficult because I can say for sure anyone who's worked in federal government can think of a lot of ways to make it better. And it was certainly my experience in my two terms as commissioner that the workforce wanted to make it better.
And so you can say waste, fraud, and abuse, but that's not what we're talking about here for the most part. We're really talking about the core functions of the government that enable the ecosystem to produce these products that we all depend on.
Showing 1501–1520 of 1,657 · page 76 of 83
← Previous
Next →