Records show the FDA approved a work trip to Singapore during the government shutdown

SINGAPORE – Sentosa Island is home to the luxurious five-star Ora and Michael hotels, with palm-fringed pools, lobbies lined with luxury shops and a casino adjacent to both hotels that is packed with gamblers. The Singapore resort is also where a group of federal employees of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration were sent on a work trip in the final hours of the government shutdown.

The palm-fringed pool of Hotel Ora on Sentosa Island in Singapore.

CNBC

Internal FDA records obtained by CNBC show that 31 agency employees traveled to Singapore in mid-November for an International Council for Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) conference – a trip that the documents show cost more than a quarter of a million dollars, or more than $8,000 per person. The trip was approved as the agency was operating with reduced staff and limited resources in part due to the shutdown.

The FDA is under significant pressure. The Trump administration has proposed an 11.5% cut to the FDA’s budget this year. Nearly 1,900 employees were laid off and about 1,200 others took early retirement packages, according to FDA Commissioner Marty Makary’s testimony in May. There was also turmoil among senior leadership, with former FDA chiefs publicly questioning the agency’s handling of key issues such as vaccine policy.

Marty Makary, President Donald Trump’s nominee for commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, attends a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 6, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Reuters

FDA attendees at the Singapore conference ranged from deputy directors to a program coordinator, records show. Their trip was approved about a week before the end of the government shutdown — the longest in U.S. history at 43 days. Most employees left on Nov. 12, the same day the U.S. House of Representatives voted to end the shutdown, and the remaining travelers left on Nov. 13 and 14, according to the documents.

ICH, which is registered as a non-profit organization under Swiss law, says it wants to standardize global standards for the development and approval of medicines. The conference took place November 18-19 in several meeting rooms on the island resort grounds.

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 states that the “FDA is one of the founding members of ICH” and helps develop the requirements for “safe, effective, and high-quality medicines.”

The November meeting adopted three guidelines aimed at streamlining global drug development and safety monitoring, according to ICH. In a follow-up email, the organization said the first policy provides a template to eliminate “inconsistent formats” in clinical trial protocols and simplify electronic data exchange. The second measure aims to ensure that post-approval safety reports are “complete, accurate and timely” by aligning definitions and reporting practices, it said. The third adopted directive sets international standards for non-interventional, real-world data studies to ensure they are “scientifically sound” and comparable across regulators.

According to conference documents, FDA staff contributed to all three of these guidelines.

The FDA said in a statement to CNBC that sending staff to the meeting was “mission critical” and that the purpose of the conference was to “support global alignment on drug development, approval standards and regulatory science.” An agency spokesman said the conference would require approval from leadership, including FDA Chief Operating Officer Barclay Butler. The attendance of FDA delegates over the past two years has fluctuated between 47 and 49, the spokesman said, noting that the agency sent 31 people this year.

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, acting vice president for policy and government affairs at the Project On Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group that advocates for government accountability, said the prospect of sending dozens of FDA employees to a conference abroad during a government shutdown is not good.

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, acting vice president for policy and government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight.

CNBC

“The FDA is an important organization that does really important work related to our health care system, our food system and our medical device system,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “I would like to see FDA leadership and administration place more emphasis on ensuring that the organization and the agency are fully resourced, rather than having to attend certain conferences or events.”

Hedtler-Gaudette said that even if the conference was important, it did little to resolve questions about the agency’s priorities.

“At least it’s a bad look and a bad optic,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “In the worst case scenario, it could be some kind of dereliction of duty and misuse of public resources.”

The tropical island of Sentosa in Singapore at sunset.

Tobiasjo | E+ | Getty Images

The FDA told CNBC that the trip did not rely on taxpayer money but was funded by the agency’s transferred user fees – money collected from companies that make drugs, devices and other medical products to fund regulatory work such as product evaluations and inspections.

“These dollars are still public dollars,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “They still need to be treated with the same respect and protection as direct tax dollars.”

An internal email from Butler dated Oct. 1 said royalties should only be charged for work that is permitted to be funded through the transfer of royalties and for “activities necessary to address imminent threats to the safety of human life or protect property.”

The FDA itself seemed to be aware that traveling during the shutdown could be negatively received.

“Due to the optics of business travel conducted during a shutdown, conference approval will be handled on a case-by-case basis by FDA leadership,” the FDA said in a document posted on its website as recently as mid-November. On Dec. 3, a day after CNBC reached out to the agency for comment on the document, it was no longer available on the site.

“The agency regularly updates its websites to ensure that information remains accurate and consistent with current guidance,” an FDA spokesperson told CNBC.

In an internal email chain between FDA directors and Chief Financial Officer Benjamin Moncarz, obtained by CNBC, Director Michelle Tarver attempted to “reach agreement to ensure legal and visual consistency on how we handle travel during the expiration of funds.” Tarver suggested “cancelling conference participation and associated local, domestic and international travel.” She went on to say that the FDA would allow “virtual speaking only on exempt (i.e. user fees) topics.”

In an email exchange about the ICH conference on November 6, discussion about whether to send employees to Singapore reached the highest levels of the FDA. In the email, FDA Deputy Chief Financial Officer Sahra Torres-Rivera wrote that the agency “agreed to limit in-person attendance at conferences” but noted that “the final decision ultimately rests with… leadership.”

Next year the biennial conference will take place in Rio de Janeiro and Prague.