Food safety and quicker access to low-cost medicines top the priorities in U.S. President Barack Obama's proposed budget for the Food and Drug Administration.

Federal funding for the Silver Spring, Maryland-based agency would increase 6.2 percent to $2.51 billion in the year beginning Oct. 1 under the plan released this week. Industry fees, include new payments from food companies and generic-drug makers, would rise 65 percent to $1.52 billion, bringing the total FDA budget to $4.03 billion.

Curbing outbreaks of food-borne illness has been a focus for FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg in her first year in office after a White House task force urged more inspections of processing plants and heightened surveillance. The agency would get more power to police the food industry under legislation passed last year by the House and awaiting a vote in the Senate.

"Our ability to identify incidents of outbreaks of food- borne illness have improved substantially once people get sick," said Scott Gottlieb, a resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a former FDA deputy commissioner. "But our ability to avoid these incidents, or trace them back to the food source once they are made manifest, are still years out of date."

The budget adds $318.3 million for food safety, a 30 percent increase, led by $220.2 million in new fees on companies for inspections and facility registrations.

The White House also called for makers

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of generic drugs to pay fees to U.S. regulators for the first time to speed consumers' access to lower-cost copies of medicines that have lost patent protection.

The FDA would have an additional $38 million to support faster reviews of generic drugs if their manufacturers paid fees similar to those now required for prescription medicines, medical devices and animal drugs, according to the proposal. Almost half of generics submitted for U.S. approval are delayed in part because of a lack of resources in the FDA's Office of Generic Drugs, according to a 2008 inspector general report.

Application fees have been proposed in prior years and generic-drug companies have said they would support them if they were assured that new products would get quicker consideration by regulators.