On Monday, venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a prominent Trump supporter and Elon Musk confidante who has extensive investments in health care startups, announced that he is funding an initiative inside the Food and Drug Administration that he says will “upend America's health bureaucracy” and enable faster approval of cures. His announcement comes after the Trump administration cut thousands of FDA jobs this year, as Musk’s DOGE team slashed capacity at federal agencies under a Trump executive order.
While Lonsdale describes the project’s mission as ensuring the U.S. does not fall behind China in biotech advances and patient outcomes, his portfolio is set up to profit from an overhaul at the FDA. The initiative he unveiled will embed personnel who he funds to “sit desk‑to‑desk with reviewers” at the FDA—with more significant funding from libertarian billionaire Charles Koch.
Lonsdale’s firm 8VC lists investments in dozens of life sciences and biotech companies, including startups developing personalized treatments, products in areas like microbiomes, and gene therapies using the CRISPR technology. Many of the companies have business before the FDA and could benefit from being advanced by friendly reviewers. For example, the 8VC portfolio company Cellino Bio recently announced it had received an FDA designation as an Advanced Manufacturing Technology, and portfolio company Synthego published a post in April discussing FDA guidance documents.
Lonsdale’s blog post said that the Utah-based Abundance Institute, a new nonprofit closely tied to a Charles Koch-funded academic center, will partner with the Koch network’s gigantic “dark money” group Stand Together to raise $4 million for the project. Koch Disruptive Technologies, the venture capital arm of Koch Industries, also lists more than a dozen healthcare startups in its portfolio developing AI-powered cell research, gene therapies, and other machine-learning data plays.
The money will be used “to place a strike team of 15-20 AI-native software engineers, data scientists, and product leaders inside the FDA to accelerate the FDA's latest AI initiatives and bring outsider perspectives on new areas to iterate on fast,” Lonsdale wrote. The new personnel will “wire modern data pipes into legacy silos,” among other things. Lonsdale wrote on X that he and his friends, whom he left unnamed, were donating to launch the project and that he will personally be sponsoring one of its engineers.
