The agency recently hired more than 1,300 professional staffers in a move that officials hope will help it better protect the public health amid rapid technological and scientific change. But skeptics say the effort simply replenishes diminished ranks and the ability to retain the new hires is uncertain.

“Every pay period, we have had more than 100 people walking through our doors,” Kimberly Holden, the senior manager directing the recruitment initiative, tells the Associated Press. “We have had some people who left to go into industry and ended up wanting to come back. The revolving door swings this way every once in a while.”

The staffing drive will result in an estimated 10 percent increase in the FDA’s work force, and Holden maintains the new hires will provide critical expertise after years of losing valuable medical and scientific people who took industry jobs, the AP writes. But independent observers say the staffing increase is only a first step, albeit a much needed one.

“This is really just bringing them back to where they were in earlier years,” William Hubbard, a former FDA associate commissioner now leading a lobbying effort for sustained increases in the agency’s budget, tells the AP. “It restores losses that they have incurred, but they still have along way to go to where they can make improvements.”

FDA officials say about 1,000 of the new hires have already started, with another 158 due to report later this month. An additional 160 have accepted offers, and are going through background checks. Of those on the job already, more than 850 are professionals, including chemists, biologists, pharmacologists, statisticians, medical officers, microbiologists and field inspectors, the AP writes.

Of the total 1,317 positions, 770 are new jobs and 547 are posts that were left vacant by people leaving the agency for other jobs or due to retirement, according to the AP.

Within the FDA, the biggest number of jobs will go to the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, with 663 new staffers. The smaller food safety program will get just 104, although that amounts to a 10 percent increase. The FDA’s enforcement branch, which has lost many field inspectors in recent years, will get 245 new staffers, the AP reports.

The FDA’s budget is about $2.2 billion a year, with some $1.7 billion coming from taxpayers and the rest from industry user fees, the AP notes. About 40 percent of the total number of positions are being paid for with industry user fees, meaning that the new hires will mainly be evaluating new drugs or medical devices and, in some cases, monitoring safety issues.

Certain positions, such as cancer specialists, were hard to fill. The FDA hired nine, but another 20 rejected offers. “They could not make the money they would be making on the outside if they came into public service,” Holden acknowledges to the AP. The agency could offer as much as $275,000 a year, she says, but oncologists can make $400,000 annually elsewhere.

Congress approved the hiring drive and the Bush administration gave the FDA special authority to make on-the-spot offers. The drive was launched in the spring, with a goal of hiring 1,300 staffers by Sept. 30.

The campaign’s apparent success shows that public service is still attractive for highly specialized professionals, Arthur Levin, director of the Center for Medical Consumers in New York, tells the AP. But he cautioned that the FDA has a history of letting such gains slip away.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the agency hired food inspectors to guard against the threat of bioterrorism, but gradually cut the program back. As a result, the FDA was caught flat-footed by outbreaks of foodborne illness.

“Historically, one of the millstones regarding the FDA has been resources,” Levin tells the AP. “Cost-of-living increases don’t ever seem to be part of the funding from Congress. It may be that they hire all these people now, but they can’t afford them down the line.”