Last week I wrote that adding tobacco regulation to FDA would overwhelm an already overworked FDA Commissioner, currently the talented Dr. Margaret Hamburg. This morning’s Washington Post reports that:
Hamburg’s days are jammed; she conducted an interview while being driven from Health and Human Services headquarters across town to the Brookings Institution. She says she is determined not to let the work overwhelm her life and makes it a point to try to eat dinner with her husband and two teenage children, toting home a briefcase filled with 10 pounds of work each night. She falls asleep reading briefing books.
How many pounds will that briefcase weigh once she has tobacco regulation to deal with as well?
—Tevi Troy is the former deputy secretary of health and human services, a senior visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, and author of Intellectuals and the American Presidency.