The Obama Administration has submitted its budget request for the FDA for FY 2011. Highlights of the request include:

- A 6 percent jump to $2.51 billion
- The agency's total resources would reach about $4 billion because of user fees it expects to collect from food, tobacco and drug industries.
-The agency would hire 1,251 additional full-time employees, bringing the workforce total to 13,586.

A large chunk of the additional funds would be spent on food safety, which has been flagged by Obama as a domestic priority. The FDA is reorganizing the way it monitors the production of food, with plans to step up inspections of domestic and foreign food suppliers, expand its laboratory capacity, and improve its ability to trace the source of an outbreak of food illness, among other things.

Some say the budget is overly optimistic because it depends on $250 million in user fees from food producers that have not yet been approved by Congress.

Read the related Washington Post article here