There's echoes of the "defund the police" controversy in "abolish the FDA". I doubt abolishing the FDA will happen, and I'm not sure many people who argue for i

There's echoes of the "defund the police" controversy in "abolish the FDA". I doubt abolishing the FDA will happen, and I'm not sure many people who argue for it really literally mean to completely abolish it. What they mean is something closer to "radically overhaul the FDA" or "abolish it in its current form and rebuild it in a different way". These types of political positions happen because serious problems get dismissed by the status quo and nothing changes. There's a kind of false equivalence that's implicit — "arguing that X is a problem with agency B means you want all these other horrible consequences of getting rid of B" so nothing happens. After awhile, with nothing changing, it seems like the only option is to argue against eliminating the agency because valid criticisms just get spun away politically, and opponents of real change seem to frame the choices that way. Even now, I suspect discussions like this about the FDA only exist in a small bubble like Scott's readership. Most of the US doesn't have these ideas in their consciousness probably, so the problems get swept aside, and only bubble up if calls for dramatic changes like abolishment are discussed as a kind of intellectual punching bag for entertainment, and as a distraction from making real, serious reform. I would have been more impressed with this post if it had offered solutions to the problems involved. What it offers as proposals aren't bad, but sidestep the real problems and in one case just obfuscate things more. I don't think the FDA should be abolished, but I do think its role should be restricted to labeling fraud, product purity testing, and enforcing transparency in product efficacy evidence. For me, the FDA is just one problem in a litany of problems with healthcare related to regulatory capture. The US desperately needs medical deregulation — or at least reregulation. Arguments against this in the form of fear mongering without offering reform proposala are starting to feel to me like they really mean the status quo is fine and nothing really needs to change.