I was surprised to see someone with such experience in the pharmaceutical industry say this, because it goes against how I understood the FDA to work.

My model goes:

1. FDA procedures require certain bureaucratic tasks to be completed before approving drugs. Let's abstract this into "processing 1,000 forms".
2. Suppose they have 100 bureaucrats, and each bureaucrat can process 10 forms per year.
3. Seems like they can approve 1 drug per year.
4. If you fire half the bureaucrats, now they can only approve one drug every 2 years.
5. That's worse!

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats