My Chemical Story: Why I left the FDA and fear for its future

For staff at the US Food and Drug Administration, 2025 was a tumultuous year. Early on,we were all finally called back into the office full-time after [COVID-19 telework]. Everyone was feeling social: my office was between two kitchenettes, and people would be chatting there or in the hallways. You couldn’t book conference rooms because there just wasn’t enough space. My office was adjacent to one of the conference rooms, and I could literally hear meetings word for word because the walls were so thin.

Then, by April or May—after Marty Makary began as the FDA commissioner and thousands of FDA employees were laid off because of the presidential administration’s reduction in force (RIF)—my building felt like a ghost town. You’d walk through the hallways and know that the remaining staff were in their offices. Their lights were on, but their doors were shut. People wanted to come in, get their work done, and go home. You could just tell that morale was so low.

Over the course of the next several months, that sentiment didn’t change. I ultimately decided to leave the FDA for another job at the end of 2025.

At the FDA, I had been one of the chemistry, manufacturing, and controls (CMC) reviewers, which meant I evaluated the safety of various pharmaceutical ingredients for new drugs. I strongly believe in the Office of Pharmaceutical Quality’s mission: that everyone deserves to know exactly what is in their medication and that they will always have an accurate and safe dose.

The administration said that the review staff wasn’t getting RIF’d, that our jobs wouldn’t be affected. But we lost support staff, like timekeepers who kept records of how much time reviewers like me spent on specific applications. We had to self-report our hours to them. So when they are suddenly missing and there’s no plan to replace them, you’re reminded of this loss every 2 weeks when you fill out your time sheet.

Earlier in the year, when people had left the FDA, upper management indicated that they did not approve of having in-office celebrations to see anyone off, which put a damper on things. So when people started leaving on their own volition, they did it quietly and didn’t make a fuss. You’d hear about folks leaving by word-of-mouth or by emailing them and getting an automated bounce-back message. There used to be this one person, who, if I had a question about nitrosamine impurities, I’d message on Microsoft Teams. Then, one day, he wasn’t there anymore. I’d email so many folks, not knowing who would respond or if I’d get a response at all. I felt abandoned, adrift, and demoralized. It felt like someone had sucked the life out of the place.

We had already lost so many senior people before the administration change. I used to see Janet Woodcock, former acting commissioner of the FDA, in the cafeteria in the morning getting coffee, and she would always say hi. I’d see Robert Califf, former commissioner, in the parking lot after work, and he’d say goodnight. The sense of decorum and collegiality that had once characterized the agency disappeared.

Last summer, my boss’s boss decided to leave. I remember pulling up the organizational chart in Teams and saw that her departure would break the formal reporting relationship between our group and the rest of the organization. Soon, my boss also decided to retire, after 30-some years at the FDA. I don’t think anyone was surprised when she told our team she had seen a lot and said the last year was the worst in her entire FDA career. I saw that as a sign to consider my other options.

I grew up in the Washington, DC area and spent my childhood going to places like the Goddard Space Flight Center. In high school, we took a field trip to the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). We visited the fire lab, where they were lighting things on fire. We toured another lab where they cured polymers with ultraviolet light to make teeth enamel. I was impressed by how enterprising they were. In college, I interned at NIST. My adviser was great and made sure I learned a lot; I published my first paper on a project involving organic chemistry and materials science. My experience there set the tone for my career and how I envisioned what it meant to be a federal scientist.

I worked in the pharmaceutical industry for over 12 years before I became a patent examiner at the US Patent and Trademark Office, reviewing applications for new compounds and therapeutics. In late 2022, I joined the FDA and worked for 2 years before the new administration came in.

Layoffs are traumatic for everyone, but what happened at the FDA last year was next level. People joke: What if my badge stops working? That’s what literally happened to a lot of people on April 1. It was gut wrenching, and there has been such a loss of institutional knowledge: It’s impossible for everyone to put the sum of their knowledge into a slide deck for others to follow. I’m not sure how the FDA will continue its mission, given how many people have left. And whether I was an intern at NIST, or a reviewer for the FDA, I was always encouraged to grow. It’s one of the things that makes me so emotional about the loss of staff and expertise at the FDA and other agencies: we’re missing out on the relationships and mentorship opportunities that have historically helped people develop the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed as scientists at federal agencies.

This January, I started a new job. I still have mixed feelings about leaving the FDA. I really hope it will be able to get back on track soon. I still feel very strongly about the FDA’s mission. As a consumer, I want to make sure the food I’m eating is safe and the drugs I’m taking are also safe as well as effective and accurately labeled.

We need to think about the consequences of a weakened FDA. It really feels like there’s no adult in the room anymore to stop and think about what the consequences of all this will be.

Stephanie Springer worked at the US Food and Drug Administration from 2022 to 2025.