The Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory affairs office appears intent on closing from seven to nine of its 13 labs and consolidating the rest, the National Treasury Employees Union has said.
The union, which represents about 600 FDA employees who work in the labs, said that details of the “purely budget driven plan” are unclear, but that well functioning facilities would likely close and many valuable employees who would refuse being involuntarily reassigned to another lab would leave government service.
FDA’s associate commissioner for regulatory affairs told employees in December that consecutive years of flat budgets necessitated the consolidation for the sake of efficiency, according to NTEU.
It cited a GAO report critical of a similar plan ten years earlier where GAO said large labs could not be shown to be more efficient than smaller ones.
The agency will announce how the labs are to be realigned in April, the union said.
