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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

Those departments are executive branch departments, their leadership can be fired by the President and can be appointed with a simple majority in the Senate - hence how we've had 7 FDA commissioners since 2017 - not remotely comparable to the US Supreme Court.

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One example of this accountability you ensure me exists: https://www.businessinsider.com/fda-chief-approved-oxycontin...

Guy is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the addiction of millions. He wasn't elected and he wont be punished.

Seems odd to call the leadership of the FDA "an unelected permanent government" and then linking to a commissioner's job after they resigned from the FDA. Even more ironically for this particular discussion - the legality of this pretty open corruption is specifically due to decisions made by the Supreme Court, who have gutted all of the bribery, official corruption, and campaign finance laws we used to have.

Summary provided to aid in reading:

> Curtis Wright, once a director at the US Food and Drug Administration who oversaw evaluation for pain medication, got a position with a first-year compensation package of $400,000 at Purdue Pharma a year after he led the approval of OxyContin

> Wright had confessed in a sworn deposition that he "might" have written the portion of the FDA package insert that said OxyContin was "believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug."

> OxyContin was the "most prescribed brand name narcotic medication" for treating moderate to severe pain by 2001, according to a report by the US Government Accountability Office. Deaths from prescription opioid overdose quadrupled between 1999 to 2019, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 247,000 deaths from prescription opioid overdose over the last two decades.

Can they? For practical purposes they can but it is about as doable as impeachment of a sitting justice, it is more of a power that exists on paper but can not actually be utilized due to politics and traditions.

>>7 FDA commissioners since 2017

hmmm... were they fired or did they take very high paying Big Pharma Jobs further enriching themselves from the corrupt deep state?

What are you talking about? Department heads resign or are fired constantly. In any case, most have set terms and leave when their term is up -- they are absolutely nothing like the Supreme Court.

The political appointee's that go in and out with every political administration and are political figure heads

Or the actual Dept Heads, the ones that actually do the regulation and enforcement, the ones that have been there for decades and work for every administration

I try to reconcile this with the fact DEAs judge 30 years ago ruled pot should be rescheduled and here we are 30 years later and only now has the president gotten to attempt to get the executive underlings to act as they themselves ruled after their judges review.

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