Starting a committee is public. Renewing isn't.

FDA cannot quietly create an advisory committee. The Federal Advisory Committee Act and its implementing rules require a public notice before one exists at all. FDA can, under the same statute, quietly keep one alive past the date it was due to disappear — and nothing requires the second step to be announced the way the first one was.

The clock every committee runs on

5 U.S.C. § 1013(a)(2) — the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s termination provision, recodified into positive law in 2022 — gives a committee created after January 5, 1973 a default lifespan of two years from its date of establishment. Subsection (c) lets that committee continue, but only in additional two-year blocks, and only if the renewal happens before the committee would otherwise expire. Subsection (b) attaches a condition to every one of those renewals: a new charter has to be filed each time. 41 CFR 102-3.55, the General Services Administration’s implementing regulation, restates the same two-year default and the same renewal mechanics for every federal agency, FDA included.

What has to be loud, and what doesn’t

FDA established the Digital Health Advisory Committee on October 11, 2023, and the public learned about it the way the statute requires: a Federal Register notice the next day, 88 FR 70679, under docket FDA-2023-N-3941. That notice states the committee’s duration in the statute’s own terms — two years from the date the Charter is filed, unless the Commissioner formally determines that renewal is in the public interest. A second notice, a final rule at 89 FR 13268 (Feb. 22, 2024), added the committee by name to FDA’s list of standing advisory committees. Neither of those documents is the renewal step; both predate it. Nothing in § 1013 or in FDA’s own regulation requires a second Federal Register notice merely to file a renewed charter — some agencies choose to publish one as a courtesy when they renew a committee, and some don’t, and the choice is theirs to make either way.

Being born requires a public notice. Staying alive, past the date that would otherwise have ended it, doesn’t.

A committee past its own first deadline

Run the clock from the Digital Health Advisory Committee’s October 11, 2023 establishment date, and its first two-year term would have ended around October 11, 2025, absent a renewed charter. The committee met on November 6, 2025 — past that mark — on generative AI-enabled digital mental health medical devices, under a meeting notice and public docket FDA opened by its own Federal Register filing on September 12, 2025. Holding that meeting lawfully required a charter that was still in force, which means a renewal had to have happened. No Federal Register document titled anything like a charter renewal for this committee turns up in that search. That absence doesn’t mean the charter lapsed and the meeting was irregular — it means the renewal, if filed on schedule the way § 1013(b) requires, simply isn’t the kind of event this statute makes anyone publish.

The practice

Don’t read a standing committee’s continued existence off the Federal Register alone, in either direction. A notice establishing one is required and will be there; a notice renewing one is optional and, for this committee, isn’t. The authoritative answer to “is this committee’s charter still live” is the charter document itself, which FDA dates and posts on the committee’s own page — not an inference from how long it’s been since the last Federal Register item mentioned it. Federal Register notices are one of the four sources FDA Radar ingests, which means the loud half of this cycle — establishment, standing-list rules, meeting announcements — reaches the feed the way any other notice would. The quiet half, by its nature, doesn’t generate a document for any feed to miss. Whether a specific committee’s current charter is live, and what that means for a specific meeting’s standing, is a question for whoever is reading that charter, not a status any database carries. This is regulatory intelligence and method, never regulatory advice about the legal standing of a specific committee action.