More than HALF of CDC staff leave to work for Big Pharma and ‘revolving door’ at public agency makes it vulnerable to corruption, report warns

More than half of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) staff will go on to work for major pharmaceutical companies, a first report of its kind has found.

The survey shows that 54 percent of CDC government workers moved to the private sector between 2004 and 2020.

More than a third of those hired by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leave to take jobs in the private health care sector, as do 53 percent of employees at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The HHS is the branch of the United States government that deals with health, and the CDC is one of its most important components.

Researchers at the University of Southern California and Harvard University have called for the expansion of federal “cooling-off” laws — which prohibit former government employees from immediately lobbying on behalf of private organizations.

They said the “revolving door” between federal employees and private healthcare companies has left government agencies vulnerable to corruption.

Currently, former employees must wait a year after leaving the CDC before making “any communication to or appearing before an officer or employee of their former agency on behalf of anyone seeking official action.”

This was set up to prevent people from ‘switching sides’ on an issue they worked on during their government role.

But the new report says the laws don’t go far enough.

The researchers looked at the career histories of 766 people appointed to HHS between 2004 and 2020 who held political appointments, including chiefs of agencies, senior administrators and their assistants.

They found that 15 percent had been employed in the private sector immediately prior to their government appointment.

Nearly a third (32 percent) left their HHS role for industry.

Industry was the most common next destination after working at HHS, rather than other jobs in government, nonprofits, and academia.

Republican presidents were more likely to appoint people directly from the industry.

The authors said, “The mere existence of a revolving door is not surprising or necessarily problematic.”

Workers may receive higher salaries in the biopharmaceutical industry than in government jobs, and government regulators who previously worked in the industries they regulate may have useful insights.

But Genevieve Kanter, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, said she was “really concerned” about “whether the workforce flow could lead to bias in government decision-making.”

She explained that current cooling-off laws typically don’t last more than two years and are limited in scope because they “don’t include a lot of lobbying related to agency decision-making, such as regulation and drug licensing — so they don’t necessarily deter that behavior.” off. .’

Ms Kanter added: ‘The direction one could take is to extend the cooling laws. But that’s a blunt tool for a lot of subtle things that might be going on when it comes to the effects of the revolving door.”

The research was published in the journal Health matters.

In 2015, former Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner was hired as the new CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) — a national trade organization of health insurance companies.

Ms. Tavenner served as a principal administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services between 2013 and 2015.

Her appointment to AHIP in 2015 came just months after the health insurance industry also hired former Congressman Allyson Schwartz, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, to lead the Better Medicare Alliance — a research group that supports private health insurance Medicare Advantage.