FDA chief of staff: Hiring is up, but so are resignations

While the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has seen a net increase in staff since it received a substantial boost in user fees over the past few years, it is still struggling with staff retiring and leaving the agency to take opportunities in the private sector, according to FDA Chief of Staff Julie Tierney.

Tierney spoke about FDA’s struggles to recruit and retain staff, an issue the agency has been dealing with for years, during an Alliance for a Stronger FDA webinar on 5 June. During the pandemic, she said many FDA staff held off on retiring out of a sense of civic duty but now are starting to leave as the pandemic has become more manageable.

Despite these concerns, Tierney noted the agency’s full time equivalent (FTE) headcount has grown from approximately 17,000 in FY 2017 to more than 19,000 today.

“We’ve gained about 2,000 employees already this year, [but] we have about another 2,000 vacancies to fill,” said Tierney. “We’ve grown about 9%, since 2019 to 2022. Future growth is difficult to predict but there’s been steady growth over the past few years.”

Tierney noted that the agency’s average turnover rate is about 8%, in large part due to the its aging workforce. In FY 2023, she said that 634 people have left the agency, of which 239 retired; 184 left for the private sector; and 105 transferred to another agency. She didn’t clarify why the remaining 106 people left. (RELATED: ORA head says attrition is outpacing hiring, decries flat funding for inspections, Regulatory Focus 17 April 2023)

“I know personally that a lot of people hung in through the pandemic,” said Tierney. “We had folks who were very mission-driven and felt like they couldn’t leave the agency during that important moment in time and now have started to reflect and think about retirement and other plans.”

Tierney also talked about the nine pay authorities the agency uses to recruit staff discussed its authorities under Title 21, which refer to the agency’s 21^st Century Cures hiring authorities. She also talked about hiring incentives the agency is using such as recruitment and relocation incentives, student loan repayment, and giving credit for annual leave.

“We do have challenges recruiting highly trained scientific, medical and technical so staff,” said Tierney “We are regularly competing with industry that can pay more and provide more flexibility.”

FDA’s recruiting challenges aren’t limited to hiring highly skilled scientific and technical staff, she said the agency is having a hard time hiring other positions, including communications, human resources and to bring in managers to oversee other people’s work. Even with recent mass layoffs in the information technology sector, she said the agency is still struggling to hire IT staff.

“It’s really challenging to recruit someone when you tell them not only do they need to take a pay cut, but they need to wait about six months to figure out whether they're going to get an offer,” said Tierney.

While the agency is trying to streamline their hiring process to give future employees more certainty about their hiring, Tierney said the authorities under Title 21 have really helped the agency cut through a lot of red tape to quickly hire people with specialized skills. She noted that there is some confusion at FDA about what Title 21 means for the agency’s ability to swiftly hire people.

“Sometimes people think that those positions are specifically funded by the innovation account that FDA was authorized as part of Cures and it actually stands alone as a hiring authority that FDA can use ... but one of the biggest benefits to FDA is the streamlined hiring authority,” said Tierney.

She said the process means FDA can announce a position and present it directly to potential candidates without having to post it on USAJobs.gov and the candidate doesn’t need to go through the same layers of bureaucracy as the traditional hiring process, though there is an internal review board that participates in the process.

“It streamlines [the hiring process] so incredibly it's hard to hard to quantify,” said Tierney. “It removes some of those intermediate steps.

“There are also salary flexibilities … in terms of competing with the private sector,” she added.

While most of FDA’s staff worked remotely during the pandemic, a majority are coming into the office on a regular basis, according to Tierney, and the agency is tweaking its policies on who should have to come into the office and for what reason.

“We've transitioned in recent months to a business-driven hybrid workplace model that incorporates a range of on-site work and telework,” said Tierney. “I think has allowed us to be more nimble, competitive and flexible and at the same time maintaining our productivity and fulfilling our public health mission.”

Tierney added that the agency is still assessing its work model and how it addresses the needs of industry as well as FDA employees, and that the agency plans on adjusting the model to adapt to stakeholder and employee feedback. She said that FDA is also training managers to ensure staff come in for meaningful face-to-face meetings, instead of coming into the office to sit in on Zoom meetings all day. Similarly, they are assessing when they need to interact face-to-face with stakeholders such as industry and patient groups, and when they can interact virtually.

“I think you're likely to see more meetings taking place on campus, but we're also going to use technology to make meetings as accessible as possible,” said Tierney.

FDA chief of staff: Hiring is up, but so are resignations

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