Whither FDA?

In the coming weeks and months, decisions by FDA’s new leadership and the Donald Trump administration will determine whether the agency continues a bipartisan, 15-year glide path of regulatory reform, stalls, or plummets into a chaotic mess.

The next FDA commissioner and a handful of political appointees will have to steer the agency through the same populist, deregulatory, America First winds that are buffeting every other branch of government. She or he will come under pressure to expand FDA’s mission to include restraining the prices and costs of medical products, and to bringing manufacturing jobs home...