Among the people President-elect Donald Trump has chosen to lead federal health agencies during his second administration are a retired…
Among the people President-elect Donald Trump has picked to lead federal health agencies in his second administration are a retired congressman, a surgeon and a former talk show host.
They could all play a critical role in fulfilling a new political agenda that could change the way the government protects American health — from health care and medicine to food safety and scientific research. And if Congress approves, leading the team as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services will be prominent environmental attorney and anti-vaccine organizer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to stand.
In general, the nominees have no experience running large bureaucratic agencies, but they do know how to talk about health on TV. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid choose Dr. Mehmet Oz hosted a talk show for 13 years and is a well-known influencer on wellness and lifestyle. Food and Drug Administration pick Dr. Marty Makary and surgeon general Dr. Janette Nesheiwat are frequent Fox News contributors.
Many on the list were critical of COVID-19 measures such as masking and booster vaccinations for young people. Some of them have ties to Florida, as do many of Trump’s other Cabinet nominees: CDC pick Dr. Dave Weldon represented the state in Congress for 14 years and is affiliated with a medical group on the state’s Atlantic Coast. Nesheiwat’s brother-in-law is Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., whom Trump has appointed as national security adviser.
Here’s a look at the nominees’ potential role in carrying out what Kennedy says is the task of “reorganizing” agencies, which have a total budget of $1.7 billion; employ 80,000 scientists, researchers, physicians and other officials; and impact the lives of all Americans.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Atlanta-based CDC, with a core budget of $9.2 billion, is charged with protecting Americans from disease outbreaks and other public health threats.
Kennedy has long attacked vaccines and criticized the CDC, repeatedly alleging corruption at the agency. He said on a 2023 podcast that there is “no vaccine that is safe and effective,” and urged people to resist CDC guidance on whether and when children should be vaccinated.
Decades ago, Kennedy found common ground with Weldon, the 71-year-old candidate to lead the CDC who served in the Army and worked as an internist before representing a central Florida congressional district from 1995 to 2009.
Beginning in the early 2000s, Weldon played a prominent role in a debate over whether there was a link between a vaccine preservative called thimerosal and autism. He was a founding member of the Congressional Autism Caucus and sought to ban thimerosal from all vaccines. Kennedy, then a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, believed there was a link between thimerosal and autism and also accused the government of hiding documents showing the danger.
Since 2001, all vaccines manufactured for the U.S. market and routinely recommended for children six years of age or younger have contained no thimerosal or only trace amounts, with the exception of the inactivated influenza vaccine. Meanwhile, study after study after study found no evidence that thimerosal caused autism.
Weldon’s congressional election results indicate he could join Republican efforts to shrink the CDC, including by eliminating the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which deals with issues such as drownings, drug overdoses and shootings . Weldon also voted to ban federal funding for needle exchange programs as an approach to reducing overdoses, and the National Rifle Association gave him an ‘A’ rating for his voting record in favor of gun rights.
Food and Drug Administration
Kennedy is highly critical of the FDA, which has 18,000 employees and is responsible for the safety and effectiveness of prescription drugs, vaccines and other medical products — and also oversees cosmetics, electronic cigarettes and most foods.
Makary, Trump’s choice to lead the FDA, aligns closely with Kennedy on several issues. The Johns Hopkins University professor, a trained surgeon and cancer specialist, has criticized overprescribing of drugs, the use of pesticides on food and the outsized influence of pharmaceutical and insurance companies over doctors and government agencies.
Kennedy has suggested he will purge our “entire” FDA departments and has also recently threatened to fire FDA employees for “aggressively suppressing” a host of unsubstantiated products and therapies, including stem cells, raw milk, psychedelics and discredited treatments from the COVID era, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
Makary’s opposing views during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the need to mask and give young children a COVID vaccine booster.
But anything Makary and Kennedy would want to do in terms of eliminating FDA regulations or rescinding long-standing approvals of vaccines and drugs would be a challenge. The agency has longstanding requirements for removing drugs from the market, which are based on federal laws passed by Congress.
Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services
The agency provides health care coverage for more than 160 million people through Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, and also sets Medicare payment rates for hospitals, physicians and other health care providers. With a budget of $1.1 trillion and more than 6,000 employees, Oz will have a huge agency to run if confirmed — and one that Kennedy hasn’t talked about much when it comes to his plans.
While Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act during his first term, Kennedy has not yet set a goal for that. But he has been critical of Medicaid and Medicare for covering expensive weight-loss medications, even though they are also not widely covered.
Trump said during his campaign that he would protect Medicare, an insurance policy for older Americans. Oz endorsed expanding Medicare Advantage — a private version of Medicare that is popular but also a source of widespread fraud — in an AARP questionnaire during his failed 2022 bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania and in a Forbes op-ed 2020 with a former CEO of Kaiser Permanente.
Oz also said in a Washington Examiner op-ed with three co-writers that aging healthier and living longer could help solve the U.S. budget deficit because people would work longer and add more to the gross domestic product.
Neither Trump nor Kennedy have said much about Medicaid, the insurance program for low-income Americans. Trump’s first administration reshaped the program by allowing states to implement work requirements for recipients.
Surgeon General
Kennedy does not appear to have said much publicly about what he would like to see from the position of surgeon general, who is the nation’s top doctor and oversees 6,000 members of the U.S. Public Health Service Corps.
The surgeon general has little administrative power, but can be an influential spokesperson for the government on what counts as a public health hazard and what to do about it — proposing things like warning labels on products and issuing advisories. The current surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, declared gun violence a public health crisis in June.
Trump’s pick, Nesheiwat, serves as medical director in New York City at CityMD, a group of urgent care facilities in the New York and New Jersey region, and has been with City MD for 12 years. She has also appeared on Fox News and other TV shows, written a book about the “transformative power of prayer” in her medical career, and endorses a brand of vitamin supplements.
She encouraged COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, calling them “a gift from God” in a February 2021 Fox News op-ed, as well as antiviral pills like Paxlovid. In a 2019 Q&A with the Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation, Nesheiwat said she is “a big believer in preventative medicine” and “could write a thesis on just handwashing.”
National Institutes of Health
As of Saturday, Trump had not yet made a choice to lead the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research through grants to researchers across the country and conducts its own research. It has a budget of $48 billion.
Kennedy has said he would pause drug development and infectious disease research to shift the focus to chronic diseases. He is keen to keep NIH funding away from researchers with conflicts of interest, and criticized the agency in 2017 for what he said was not doing enough research into the role of vaccines in autism — an idea that has long been debunked.
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Associated Press writers Amanda Seitz and Matt Perrone and AP editor Erica Hunzinger contributed to this report.
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