Its corrupt, just look at there position with the electronic cigarette, they put loads of BS and doesn't take into account the many studies on them. Its more of an organization bend on making money now.

Legal power was never really much of an issue with the FDA since they could pretty much do what they wanted to for the purpose they were assigned for ... 

If people don't feel like the FDA are doing enough then maybe the FDA does need to hire more workers in ALL areas. I certainly don't have info for the specifics to make a more precise judgement ...

The first was exactly my point. I think the FDA aren't efficient at their goals for a multitude of reasons. They are a monopoly. They are partly inefficient because command control regulations are inefficient. They have conflicting goals. They are corruptible, as are all authorities. So on, so on. I don't think feeding them more money will fix their problems. It will likely be wasted to hire the wrong people. Meanwhile, for as much "good" the FDA does there is plenty of harm to science and the advancement of medicine in general. 

There's way too much fluff in your response ... No need to focus on the politics.

Hiring Wrong people ? The only people that they do ever hire for their technical staff are a minimum of undergraduate biologists and chemists. 

The FDA does practically only one thing and it is the regulation of health products so what exactly do they have to do with the advancement of medicine ? 

The FDA is much more than just the technical staff.

http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/WorkingatFDA/CareerDescriptions/default.htm

Anyway, people are much more than the degrees they hold. Having a working knowledge of science and regulating the economic activities of individuals using that knowledge are two different things. 

What is a subset of health products? Medicine. There are plenty of people who die every year because the medicine that could save their lives has not yet been pre-approved by the FDA, for whatever ridiculous reason (most likely cronyism.) But on the less emotional side of things, recently 23andme (a personal genotyping company) could no longer provide its health data to people who purchased their product, because apparently the FDA felt it was a diagnosistic device rather than a resource that looks at your SNP's and attaches peer-reviewed studies to the SNP's. Anybody who purchased this product after a certain date, were no longer able to access this "health data." Certainly that is impeding the application of science. 

Yes, the FDA might do some good, but it does it in the most inefficient way possible, with plenty of bad things along the way which take from our lives. But what do you expect from a monopoly. 

Uh..."FOOD and Drug Administration" lol...the former is kind of a big deal lol. One of the major problems with the FDA is that it is underfunded and understaffed. It's not really that corrupt, to be honest. They just have no teeth, and the lobbyists run congress, and congress makes the laws. They can't enforce what they are incapabale or legally disallowed from enforcing. I say this from experience with their approvals process: they just review what they're given (when they have the people available) and follow their guidelines to a tee. if you work with them for a while, you see how limited they really are and how much big corporations have wrested from their oversight.

In which areas are they understaffed? Anyway, all I see is an FDA that supports these large corporations by devastating their competition (smaller, cheaper drug companies.) An FDA that spends a lot of its supposedly understaffed time to go after people selling raw milk or genetic companies, or telling blood clinics that homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to give blood, when it really could use such valuable time doing the countless other more crucial jobs it was supposedly tasked with, like I don't know - targetting fraud. 

Their budget has been cut YoY, ever since their last big "success" (denying approval to some dangerous EU drig or something). Remem that they need people to do what you're suggesting (all great points, by the way) AND congressional apporval (in the pockets of big corporations). They just process requests, by and large, and don't care whom they come from, so long as they meet their submission requirements. A lot of their more valuable oversight has either been taken away or requires staff that is nonexistent. 

If you cut the FDA budget, we're gonna have...a bad time.

Beginning with the paragraph that starts with "FDA and state bottled water programs are seriously underfunded." http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/exesum.asp

My point is that despite this supposedy budget problem, the FDA is still able to hire a person to write the bullshit literature about homosexuality and blood donation. The FDA is still able to spend resources and time to confront benign companies like 23andme while allowing rampantly fraudelent companies free pass. The FDA is capable of targetting small Amish farmers about selling raw milk over state lines to people who will get the raw milk regardless. The FDA is supposedly constrained on time and resources, yet it can fund all of these silly projects. The problem isn't a small budget, the problem is inefficiency. If the FDA weren't a public institution on the tax payer teat it wouldn't have budget problems like this. It would've learned how to spend money wisely. As it is now, it acts like any other monopoly.