Washington seduced Peter Barton Hutt before he even made it to his hotel.
One a beautiful day in 1960, Hutt arrived here for the first time to consider a job at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). He’d just finished his master’s of law at New York University a year after earning his law degree at Harvard. The offer from the FDA was appealing, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to move away from his hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., where his family’s been rooted since the 18th century.
Today, Hutt is seen as one of the foremost food and drug law attorneys in the country. After more than four decades in practice at Covington & Burling, his clients include the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Consumer Healthcare Products Association.
He’s also the editor of a widely used food and drug law casebook and has taught a winter course at Harvard Law School every year since 1994. Hutt sits on the boards of directors of nine companies and on advisory committees to the FDA and the National Institutes of Health.
But on that balmy day 47 years ago, he was just a young attorney with stellar credentials but no Washington experience.
As soon as he stepped out of Union Station, however, his heart set on Washington. “It was one of those days,” said Hutt. “The sun was shining, it was gleaming off the Capitol roof …”
The first thing he did was call his wife in New York City to tell her: We’re moving to Washington. “Food and drug law is a real passion with me. I came into it through sheer serendipity,” he said in recounting the trip.
His next steps were even more audacious. He had an opportunity to go to the FDA and work under his mentor, Chief Counsel William Goodrich. Even so, Hutt wanted to see what else was out there.
First, he marched into the Federal Trade Commission chairman’s office and was presented with a job offer, just like that.
Next, he went to Covington & Burling, again unannounced. “I did not realize it was the largest law firm in Washington. I had no appointment, and I knocked on the door and I was offered a job,” Hutt said.
Of course, Hutt still had the FDA job to consider. Not only had he traveled to Washington for that job in the first place, he’d forged a relationship with Goodrich. They first met when Goodrich spoke at Harvard during Hutt’s third year. Hutt introduced himself, Goodrich took him to dinner, and before they’d parted, Goodrich promised to set him up with a fellowship at NYU. That fellowship led to the opportunity at the FDA that Hutt was about to turn down.
“I called Bill Goodrich. Bill said, ‘Peter, don’t be a fool. Take the job at Covington.’” Working his way up to partner would help him get a senior position at the FDA later, Goodrich told him. He was right. In 1971, Hutt got that great FDA job: Goodrich’s. The chief counsel was retiring and urged Hutt to take his place.
“The unbelievable good luck of all that occurring — I mean, that changed my whole life,” Hutt said. “I tell my students every year, the one thing you should not waste your time doing is trying to plan your life.”
Aside from the FDA stint, Hutt’s entire Washington career has been at Covington. But Hutt said he remains most proud of his work at the FDA, where he served as chief counsel until 1975. “During my four years at FDA, it was an extraordinarily productive time,” he said.
In short, Hutt says, he, FDA Commissioner Charles Edwards and Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Elliot Richardson fundamentally changed the nature of the agency.
“FDA was a law enforcement agency until I got there. It became a modern administrative law agency as a result of the kind of approach I took, which is rulemaking, not litigation,” Hutt said.
During this short timeframe, the FDA took on many of the responsibilities we now take for granted, such as nutritional labeling and over-the-counter drug reviews. Food, drug and medical device companies also had to come to the FDA first, rather than waiting for the FDA to ferret out those breaking the law.
Hutt doubts the agency could be so bold now. “All the stars were aligned at the right time,” he said. For one thing, Washington was a bit distracted by the Watergate scandal and other things during the later years of the Nixon administration. “With the turmoil that that caused, people were not focused on what the Food and Drug Administration was doing,” Hutt said.
The FDA accomplished almost all of these changes without new legislation — something Hutt said Congress should consider.
Hutt sometimes briefs congressional staff or lawmakers on behalf of his clients. Though he is a registered lobbyist, he thinks of himself more as an expert attorney. “I can be, if you will, more objective and more neutral,” he said.
His abiding frustration is Congress’s propensity to pile new statutes on top of the underlying 1938 law that created the modern FDA. The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act “has been amended well over 200 times and now reads something worse than the Internal Revenue Code,” Hutt quipped.
Rather than continue to pass laws expanding the FDA’s authorities and responsibilities — “FDA has so much raw power that it doesn’t need any more legislation” — Congress would be better served by setting aside far more money for the agency, Hutt argued.
Hutt respects the good will and good intentions of the members and staffers working on food and drug legislation, but he believes that politics inevitably influences them.
“You don’t get any credit, if you’re a legislator, for slaving away in the mines of the appropriations [process] and trying to get sufficient funds so that FDA can keep its house in order, as contrasted with passing new legislation where you can go back to your constituents and say, ‘Look what I’ve done,’ ” Hutt said. |
