• Posted March 2, 2026

FDA To Offer Cash Bonuses for Faster Drug Reviews

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) chief says the agency will begin offering bonuses to drug reviewers who complete their work ahead of schedule.

Dr. Marty Makary described the effort as a pilot program during a staff meeting last week. The first quarterly bonus payments could begin going out in August, according to presentation materials obtained by The Associated Press.

“My job as your commissioner is to be your advocate and to fight for you,” Makary told staff. He said getting approval for the payments required “some wrangling.”

“If you don’t like it, we can get rid of it, but usually everybody loves money,” he added.

The program would reward employees and teams for what officials called “weighted time savings,” along with measures of work quality and complexity.

“This program values speed, but never at the expense of quality,” one slide stated.

The plan raises several concerns, however. It is not yet clear how bonuses would be allocated among large review teams. 

Staff who are not directly involved in reviewing drugs, such as factory inspectors, would not qualify for the extra money.

Some folks worry that paying bonuses for finishing faster could create pressure to rush crucial safety steps.

Since the 1990s, the FDA has collected fees from drug companies to help pay for stepped-up staffing enable faster reviews of new prescription drugs and vaccines. 

In turn, the agency must meet certain review timelines. But workers have never before received individual bonuses for meeting those deadlines.

About 70% of the FDA’s drug program is funded by user fees paid by drug companies. 

That funding has allowed the agency to hire thousands of scientists and cut review times by more than half compared to earlier decades.

The plan to give out bonuses comes at a time when the agency is losing staff. 

The FDA’s drug and biologics centers, which oversee prescription drugs, vaccines and biotechnology treatments, have lost about 20% of their employees since President Donald Trump took office a year ago, agency records show.

Some reviewers are also unable to work on certain products because they are interviewing for jobs in the pharmaceutical industry.

Makary has recently announced other changes aimed at speeding up approvals. 

These include: One-month reviews for certain drugs that serve “national interests,” dropping the long-standing requirement for two clinical trials in some cases and creating a pathway for therapies tested in only a small number of patients.

At the same time, the agency’s chief scientist and vaccine director, Dr. Vinay Prasad, has overruled some staff decisions on several experimental drugs, saying more evidence was needed.

Earlier this month, Prasad declined to accept Moderna’s application for a new mRNA flu vaccine, calling its clinical trial insufficient. Less than a week later, the FDA agreed to review the vaccine after Moderna promised to run another study in older folks.

The FDA has sometimes faced criticism that it is too close to the drug industry in general.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the agency, has previously described FDA staff as “a sock puppet” of industry.

More inforamtion

HealthyChildren.org has more on how drugs are approved in the U.S.

SOURCE: The Associated Press, Feb. 26, 2026