Fmr. FDA Commissioner Gottlieb: It'll Be 'Very Hard' to Fix CDC Since They're Still Remote, Congress Also Needs to Act

On Thursday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb reacted to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky saying the agency needs to be overhauled by stating it will be “very hard” to fix the culture of the organization because CDC employees are still working remotely and not coming into the office, and that fixing the agency will require action by Congress.

Gottlieb said what Walensky “is trying to do is drive a cultural change inside the organization, and her biggest challenge, quite frankly, right now, now that she’s done the first part, the hard part of acknowledging what the mistakes are, being very public about it, is driving that change. And people are remote. People are not in the halls of the CDC. They’re not working there physically. They’re still a remote agency, and so long as people aren’t coming into the office, it’s going to be very hard to drive cultural change in that organization. I also think it’s going to require Congress. Congress is going to have to come in and legislate and successively legislate, like it did with FDA to reform FDA two decades ago, where it legislated on a regular basis through the user fee reauthorization. So, every five years, Congress passed legislation that not just provided the agency more resources, but also reforms.”

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