SINGAPORE — Sentosa Island boasts the luxurious five-star Ola and Michael Hotels, with palm-lined pools, lobbies lined with luxury shops, and gambling-filled casinos adjacent to both hotels. The Singapore resort is also where a group of federal employees from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration were sent on a business trip during the final hours of the government shutdown.
The palm tree-lined pool at Hotel Ola on Sentosa Island, Singapore.
CNBC
Internal FDA records obtained by CNBC show that 31 employees traveled to Singapore in mid-November for a meeting of the International Council for Harmonization of Technical Standards for Human Use. The trip cost more than $250,000, or more than $8,000 per person, according to documents. The trip was approved at a time when the company was operating with reduced staffing and limited resources due in part to the government shutdown.
The FDA is under tremendous pressure. The Trump administration has proposed cutting this year’s FDA budget by 11.5%. About 1,900 employees were laid off and about 1,200 others received early retirement packages, according to May testimony from FDA Commissioner Marty McCulley. Additionally, senior leadership is in turmoil, with former FDA commissioners publicly questioning the agency’s response to key issues such as vaccine policy.
President Donald Trump’s nominee for head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Marty McCulley, attends a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing at the Capitol on March 6, 2025 in Washington.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
Records show FDA attendees at the Singapore meeting ranged from deputy commissioners to program coordinators. Their trip was approved about a week before the end of the government shutdown, which lasted 43 days, the longest in U.S. history. Most of the staff departed on Nov. 12, the same day the U.S. House of Representatives voted to lift the shutdown, and the remaining travelers departed on Nov. 13 and 14, according to the documents.
ICH is registered as a non-profit organization under Swiss law and says it aims to harmonize global standards for the development and approval of medicines. The meeting, held on November 18th and 19th, was held in a series of conference rooms on the grounds of the island resort.
ICH told CNBC in an email that “approximately 500 people attended in person,” including regulators and pharmaceutical industry experts from around the world. It also notes that “FDA is one of the founding members of ICH” and helps develop requirements for “safe, effective, high-quality medicines.”
According to ICH, three guidelines aimed at streamlining global drug development and safety monitoring were adopted as part of the November General Assembly. The group said in a follow-up email that the original guidelines eliminate “inconsistent formatting” in clinical trial protocols and provide templates to facilitate electronic data sharing. Second, it said it aims to ensure post-approval safety reporting is “complete, accurate and timely” by adjusting definitions and reporting practices. The third set of guidelines adopted sets international standards for non-intrusive, real-world data research and ensures that data research is “scientifically sound” and comparable across regulators.
FDA officials contributed to all three guidelines, according to meeting documents.
In a statement to CNBC, the FDA said its staffing to the conference is “mission critical” and its purpose is to “support global collaboration on drug development, approval standards, and regulatory science.” An agency spokesperson said the meeting requires approval from FDA leadership, including Chief Operating Officer Barclay Butler. Over the past two years, FDA representative attendance has ranged from 47 to 49 people, a spokesperson said, noting that this year there were 31 FDA representatives.
Dylan Hedler-Gaudette, acting vice president for policy and government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government accountability watchdog group, said it’s a bad idea to send dozens of FDA employees to meetings overseas during a government shutdown.
Dylan Hedler Gaudette is acting vice president for policy and government affairs at the Government Oversight Project.
CNBC
“The FDA is an important organization that does really important work with our health care system, our food system, and our medical device system,” said Hedler-Gaudette. “We hope that FDA leadership and the administration will prioritize ensuring that the organization and FDA have sufficient resources over the need to attend specific meetings or events.”
Hedler-Gaudet said that even though the meetings are important, they do little to calm questions about the agency’s priorities.
“At least it’s kind of ugly and the optics are poor quality,” Hedler-Gaudet said. “In the worst case scenario, it could amount to a form of dereliction of duty or misuse of public resources.”
Singapore’s tropical island Sentosa island at sunset.
Tobiajo | E+ | Getty Images
The FDA told CNBC that the trip is not dependent on taxpayer funds, and is funded by the agency’s carryover fees, money it collects from companies that make drugs, medical devices and other medical products to pay for regulatory services such as product reviews and testing.
“Those dollars are still public funds,” Hedler-Gaudet said. “They still need to be treated with the same respect and protected as direct taxes.”
Butler’s Oct. 1 internal email said fees should only be applied to work eligible for fee deferral funding and “activities necessary to address an immediate threat to the safety of life or protection of property.”
The FDA itself appears to have recognized that travel during the shutdown may be less acceptable.
“Due to the optics of travel occurring during the shutdown, approval for meetings will be handled by FDA senior leadership on a case-by-case basis,” the FDA said in a document posted on its website in mid-November. The document was no longer available on the website on Dec. 3, a day after CNBC reached out to the agency for comment on the document.
An FDA spokesperson told CNBC that the agency “regularly updates the webpage to ensure the information is accurate and consistent with current policy.”
In a series of internal emails between FDA Commissioner and Chief Financial Officer Benjamin Moncars obtained by CNBC, Commissioner Michelle Tarver asked them to “reach an agreement to maintain legal and optical consistency on how travel will be handled during appropriations lapses.” Tarver suggested “cancelling conference attendance and associated domestic, national, and international travel.” She went on to say that the FDA “will only permit virtual lectures on exempt (i.e., user fee) topics.”
In a Nov. 6 email exchange regarding the ICH meeting, a discussion about whether to send staff to Singapore reached the top of the FDA. FDA Deputy Chief Financial Officer Sahara Torres Rivera wrote in an email that the agency “agreed to limit in-person participation in the meeting,” but said “the final decision ultimately rests with … leadership.”
Next year, two annual conferences will be held in Rio de Janeiro and Prague.
