Palantir founder's plans for the FDA
Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the large government contractor Palantir, wants to embed a team of 15 to 20 'elite engineers' inside the Food and Drug Administration who would 'accelerate the FDA's latest AI initiatives,' according to a post he wrote on Substack.
The FDA recently announced that it has deployed an AI chatbot that will help staff speed up medical device and drug reviews.
Lonsdale is working with two organizations, the Abundance Institute, a year-old Utah-based nonprofit that hopes to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence, and Stand Together, a philanthropic organization founded by billionaire Charles Koch, to raise $4 million and train fellows who would be deployed at federal agencies.
'I'm sponsoring one of these AI-native engineers to help push this forward,' Lonsdale said on social media platform X.com.
But, but, but … How can billionaires just drop a team of engineers and product managers into a government agency? Through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, a 1970 law that allows the government to forgo typical hiring practices to bring on experts from academia and nonprofits; those fellows 'can sit desk‑to‑desk with reviewers,' according to Lonsdale.
There's just one problem: 'This is not true,' said Andrew Nixon, spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency has no plans to take on fellows from Abundance Institute and Stand Together, he said.
Christopher Koopman, CEO of the Abundance Institute, told Future Pulse his organization has had discussions about bringing on its fellows with the FDA. And he said that in speaking with former FDA officials, he's under the impression that slow review times are a technical problem.
'They're problems of capability, not authority. That's what sparked the idea: What if we could forward-deploy high-impact, AI-native engineers into the agency, not as outside critics but as inside contributors, to help build modern systems and workflows that empower the FDA to do what it's already allowed to do, only better and faster?' he said.
Even so: The FDA has been hiring AI talent and rolled out an AI chatbot agencywide that Commissioner Marty Makary says will speed up review times. But agency staff have previously told POLITICO that the FDA's chatbot likely doesn't have the ability to do that. The challenges at the agency, they said, are more complicated than simply hiring more tech talent.
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EXAM ROOM
The National Institutes of Health will cap the amount that publishers of scientific journals can charge government-backed researchers to make their work publicly available starting in fiscal 2026, the agency said Tuesday.
'I am gravely concerned about the overall financial burden placed on the public — who may fund the original research, then pay again to access the resulting data, publications, or commercial products,' NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said in a statement.
'In effect, taxpayers may bear multiple costs for innovations their contributions helped enable.'
By the numbers: According to the NIH, some major publishers charge upward of $13,000 per article for immediate open access. The charges are in addition to subscription fees that the government pays. High publishing costs are a double hit to taxpayers who already fund underlying NIH research, the statement said.
The NIH said one publisher receives $2 million in subscription fees from the agency and tens of millions in processing charges.
The move is the latest in a series of changes related to the distribution of NIH research under Bhattacharya, who's criticized the scientific publishing ecosystem for a lack of transparency and for favoring risk-averse studies.
In April, the agency moved up the timeline for making peer-reviewed NIH-funded research publicly available immediately without an embargo. The policy went into effect on July 1.
Big picture: Bhattacharya's boss, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is not a fan of major scientific journals.
During a conversation on the 'Ultimate Human' podcast in May, Kennedy accused The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and The Lancet of being 'corrupt' and publishing studies funded and approved by pharmaceutical companies.
'Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing in them, and we're going to create our own journals in-house,' Kennedy said.
At the time, a JAMA spokesperson said the journal had nothing to add when asked about Kennedy's remarks, while NEJM and The Lancet did not respond to requests for comment. HHS also did not respond to requests for comment.
Earlier this year, Bhattacharya and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary helped launch a publication, the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, to help promote open conversation among scientists. Both officials are on leave from the journal's editorial board.
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