Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

President-elect Barack Obama has made no formal announcement as yet, but it appears likely that Sen. Tom Daschle will be appointed Obama’s choice for Health and Human Services secretary, according to The Federal Times.

If so, Dashle will inherit a department that oversees the FDA, an agency that is rife with issues. The agency has been the subject of criticism over its handling of the tainted heparin scandal earlier this year in which more than 80 Americans were killed and hundreds more sickened after receiving injections of heparin from China.

The FDA, struggling with low staff levels, is gradually hiring more employees. It recently began placing food and drug inspectors and opening foreign offices – the first of which was in Beijing, China – in an attempt to oversee quality control of food and drugs imported into the U.S. However, hiring enough staffers to fully inspect those foreign manufacturing plants could take years.

“The people who have been doing the hiring say it will take three years to get those folks up and running and fully trained to carry out any work,” said Marcia Crosse, GAO’s director of health care, in the Federal Times story. “They’ve had to shift away from the traditional model of having other countries oversee their own pharmaceuticals. Where we may have trusted Germany to oversee its companies, the same can’t be said for China and India.”

The National Treasury Employees Union president says she is hopeful that the Obama administration will make hiring more inspectors, scientists and chemists for the agency a priority.

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