The Food and Drug Administration’s top official overseeing drug and food safety inspections told staff on Monday he has decided to leave the agency, and multiple federal health officials told CBS News it comes amid frustration from inspectors with the FDA’s new commissioner.
Michael Rogers had worked for the FDA for more than three decades, culminating in a role as the agency’s associate commissioner for inspections and investigations. Colleagues said they were surprised to learn that his final day in the office will be May 14.
“I have decided to retire. It was my decision, but it was time after 34 years,” Rogers told CBS News in an email on Monday.
Rogers has had a challenging tenure atop the agency’s inspections workforce. He was the top official overseeing food inspections during the infant formula crisis in 2022, when the agency mishandled whistleblower complaints about a troubled formula plant linked to a deadly recall. He also oversaw a resulting reorganization of the FDA’s inspections office in 2024.
Two FDA officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Rogers had told colleagues privately that he was miserable in recent days, as the agency’s inspections office has reeled from sweeping cuts to its ranks ordered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The cuts have come as FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary has publicly touted plans to expand foreign surprise inspections, despite the agency privately struggling to keep up with inspections due to layoffs, early retirements and resignations.
Makary also announced Monday at the White House that he was planning to cut the length of foreign inspection trips, claiming the move would result in more inspections.
“We’re also not going to have our inspectors hanging out for three or four weeks. They’re going to get in and out, and we’re going to do more inspections with the same resources as a result,” Makary said.
Multiple current and former FDA officials said they were perplexed by Makary’s claim, given the push for longer trips in the past had been an efficiency measure intended to result in the agency being able to complete more inspections.
Instead of spending money and wearing down staff to fly in and out of a country to do each inspection, officials said, the agency would combine multiple inspections into a single trip.
“So they’re going to double or triple the foreign inspection flight costs and keep my people in a perpetual state of jet lag,” one FDA official told CBS News.
Multiple officials warned of a drain on morale for the agency’s workforce, given long-running challenges with hiring and retaining investigators.
“No one is ‘hanging out.’ You inspect Monday to Friday. If you’re lucky you have the weekend to recover,” the official said.
Officials also said it was not possible to increase the number of foreign inspections while also cutting down on the length of foreign trips without cutting corners on oversight.
FDA officials and outside auditors have closely studied how long the agency takes to complete its oversight work, as it has struggled to cut down on a backlog of foreign inspections and complaints.
“It’s fairly basic math. We know how long inspectional activities take. If they get shorter, which inspections activities are we no longer performing,” another FDA official said.
