Sunscreen on my shoulder is not the FDA’s business

On Monday, Congress passed the Sunscreen Innovation Act (HR 4250). This act is designed to reduce the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s backlog of applications for approval of new sunscreen ingredients. The bill requires the FDA to make a final decision on the existing sunscreen applications within 8 months, and imposes an 11 month deadline on future applications for approval of new sunscreen ingredients.

Of course this assumes that agencies will meet the new deadlines or that Congress will have the will to impose serious consequences on the agency–such as restrictions on their funding– if they do not meet the deadlines.

Still it is nice to see Congress take to ease the regulatory burden. However, the fact that Congress is spending time worrying about the FDA’s approval of various types of sunscreen shows how out of control the federal bureaucracy has become. It would be nice if instead of debating ways to “improve” the regulatory process, Congress debated whether the Federal Government should have any role in controlling the types of sunscreen available to the American people. (SPOILER ALERT: The answer is NO the federal government should not have any role in the types of sunscreen available to the American people.)