ROBERT W MALONE MD, MS
Dec 02, 2023 Interview
The Chevron deference was put in place with a Supreme Court case in 1984 which basically established that the administrative agencies were presumed to have definitive expertise, to be the experts in their areas of operation.
This Supreme Court opinion allowed this expansion of unilateral non-legislative lawmaking by the administrative state and the SES. But it also is what enables the logic that when the FDA says that this is safe and effective, they get away with just saying it. They don’t have to document what constitutes “safe and effective”, they don’t have to be subjected to outside review, et cetera. The 1984 Chevron deference Supreme Court decision is a core problem throughout the entire federal bureaucracy.
Functionally, what has really happened since that 1984 decision is that both the legislature and the judiciary have delegated authority to the executive branch, within which the Administrative State resides. That is why we now have this hyper developed executive branch on steroids which is dominating everything- because the legislature and the judiciary basically backed off and let them take power. That’s not the proper balance of government that was originally built into the Constitution. There is supposed to be a dynamic tension all the time between the three branches of government. They’re co-equal branches. So the Chevron deference decision must be revisited.
The employment rules also must be revisited, such as with Schedule F, to bring an end to these perverse incentives. The nature of funding for the FDA by Pharma is not working, and Congress has got to insist on performing its audit and oversight function. Is the money being well spent? Are the work products consistent with what the intent was in the legislation that enabled the FDA in the first place? We also have to really look at this whole emergency use authorization process (EUA). It clearly is a setup for corruption, and it also is not serving the public well. Consequent to the flexibility and lack of accountability provided to FDA and DoD under the EUA, the public did not have informed consent.
A lot of things were bypassed under the logic that we had a public health emergency, which in retrospect was not really a public health emergency. And that was then used to justify what in retrospect are clearly authoritarian policies: unilateral, arbitrary, and capricious behavior. And so that’s another one that’s really got to be revisited.
And the FDA has to operate autonomously in an apolitical fashion and not be infiltrated by the intelligence community with its agendas or the Department of Defense with its agendas. FDA has to operate and exist as an independent entity and provide an autonomous oversight function to ensure the purity, identity, potency of drugs, biologics, and food.
And so there’s a short list of FDA things.