A recent New York Times editorial about the Food and Drug Administration reflects a systematic weakness at the once-venerable Gray Lady: The members of the editorial board often rely on sloganeering and popular wisdom instead of substantive evidence.

The editorial was headlined, "The FDA Is in Trouble. Here's How to Fix It." The agency is in trouble. But it's due to the very kinds of "fixes" the Times recommends.

The FDA is highly bureaucratic and risk averse, leading to a slow and expensive drug approval process—at last count, more than $2.5 billion to bring a new drug to market. Yet the armchair quarterbacks at the Times want to slow it down even more and increase the cost and risks of innovating.

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Now that the Trump Administration's new FDA commissioner, Dr. Stephen Hahn, has been confirmed, he'll find he has one of the most difficult and important jobs in government. The FDA's purview is wide, regulating pharmaceutical and other medical, food, and vaping products that account for more than 25 cents of every consumer dollar, over a trillion dollars annually.

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"Your dog's food may be linked to canine heart disease," was a recent headline that could make any dog owner's heart skip a beat.

Similar stories stoked panic in the dog world this summer after the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Center for Veterinary Medicine issued an unusual warning.

It updated an investigation into a possible dietary link to a small increase in reports of dogs falling ill with a heart disease called dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM).

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just made history by announcing a plan to end wasteful taxpayer-funded animal testing by 2035. This is a huge win, but regulation-happy green groups criticizing the move have made clear that they hate the Trump administration more than they love animals and the environment.

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When there's an outbreak of deaths or illnesses from injected street drugs, do public health authorities demand diabetics and doctors stop using syringes? Of course not. Yet a host of public officials — from President Trump to Gov. Andrew Cuomo to members of the Squad — are taking just that sort of approach in responding to the spate of vaping-related illnesses and deaths around the country.

Cuomo, for example, went on a tear Sunday about vaping, calling it "a burgeoning health crisis" and threatening to declare an emergency to ban flavored nicotine e-cigarettes. That followed Trump's announcement last Wednesday of federal plans to prohibit such devices.

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