The team President-elect Donald Trump has chosen to lead federal health agencies in his second term includes a retired congressman, a surgeon and a former talk show host.
All could play a crucial role in advancing a policy agenda that could transform the way government protects Americans’ health – from health care and medicines to food safety and scientific research. Environmental lawyer and anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in line to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump’s electors have no experience running huge bureaucratic agencies, but they know how to talk about health on television.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid select Dr. Mehmet Oz, who hosted a talk show for 13 years and is a well-known wellness and lifestyle influencer. The Food and Drug Administration’s favorite, Dr. Marty Makary, and Surgeon General Dr. Janette Nesheiwat is a regular contributor to Fox News.
Many on the list were critical of COVID-19 measures such as mask requirements and booster vaccinations for teenage people. Some of them, like many of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, have ties to Florida: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention favorite 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 of Florida, whom Trump hired as national security adviser.
Here’s a look at the nominees’ potential role in carrying out what Kennedy calls a task of “reorganizing” agencies that have a combined budget of $1.7 trillion, 80,000 scientists, researchers, doctors and other officials employ and impact the daily lives of Americans:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Atlanta-based CDC, with a core budget of $9.2 billion, is tasked with protecting Americans from disease outbreaks and other public health threats.
Kennedy has long attacked vaccines and criticized the CDC, repeatedly accusing the agency of corruption. In a 2023 podcast, he said that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective” and urged people to defy CDC guidelines on whether and when children should be vaccinated. The World Health Organization estimates that vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives over the past 50 years, and that 100 million of those were infants.
Decades ago, Kennedy found common ground with the 71-year-old Weldon, who served in the Army and worked as an internal medicine doctor before representing a congressional district in central Florida from 1995 to 2009.
Beginning in the early 2000s, Weldon played a prominent role in the 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 tried to ban thimerosal from all vaccines. Kennedy, then senior counsel for 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 US market and routinely recommended for children under 6 years of age contain no or only trace amounts of thimerosal, with the exception of the inactivated influenza vaccine. Meanwhile, study after study found no evidence that thimerosal causes autism.
Weldon’s voting record in Congress suggests he may agree with Republican efforts to downsize the CDC, including dismantling the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which deals with issues such as drownings, drug overdoses and gunshot deaths. Weldon also voted to ban federal funding for needle exchange programs to reduce overdoses, and the National Rifle Association gave him an “A” rating for his voting record on gun rights.
Food and Drug Administration
Kennedy is highly critical of the FDA, which employs 18,000 people and is responsible for the safety and effectiveness of prescription drugs, vaccines and other medical products, as well as oversight of cosmetics, electronic cigarettes and most foods.
Makary, Trump’s nominee to lead the FDA, is closely aligned with Kennedy on several issues. The Johns Hopkins University professor, a trained surgeon and cancer specialist, has denounced the overprescription of medications, the utilize of pesticides in food and the undue influence of pharmaceutical and insurance companies on doctors and government regulators.
Kennedy has indicated that he would purge “entire” FDA departments and also recently threatened to fire FDA employees for “aggressive suppression” of a variety of unfounded products and therapies, including stem cells, raw milk, psychedelics and discredited treatments COVID-era ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
Makary’s contrarian views during the COVID-19 pandemic have included questions about the need for mandatory masks and the administration of booster vaccinations to teenage children.
But anything Makary and Kennedy want to do when it comes to loosening FDA regulations or revoking longstanding vaccine and drug approvals would be a challenge. The agency has lengthy requirements for removing drugs from the market based on federal laws passed by Congress.
Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services
The agency provides health insurance coverage to more than 160 million people through Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act and also sets Medicare payment rates for hospitals, physicians and other providers. With a $1.1 trillion budget and more than 6,000 employees, Oz will have a massive agency to lead if confirmed — and an agency that Kennedy hasn’t talked much about in his plans.
While Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act in his first term, Kennedy has yet to target it. However, he has criticized Medicaid and Medicare for covering costly weight-loss medications — even though they are not comprehensively covered by either.
Trump said during his campaign that he would protect Medicare, which insures older Americans. Oz criticized the expansion of Medicare Advantage — a privately run version of Medicare that is popular but also a source of widespread fraud — in an AARP questionnaire during his failed bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022 and advocated in a 2020 Forbes op-ed featuring a former CEO of Kaiser Permanente.
Oz also said in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner with three co-authors that healthier aging and longer lives could help close the U.S. budget deficit because people would work longer and contribute more to the gross domestic product.
Neither Trump nor Kennedy said much about Medicaid, the insurance program for low-income Americans. Trump’s first administration reshaped the program by allowing states to impose work requirements for recipients.
Surgeon General
Kennedy does not appear to have said much publicly about what he would expect 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 few administrative powers but can be an influential government spokesman on what is considered a public health threat and what to do about it – suggesting things like warnings for products and issuing advice. Current Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis in June.
Trump’s pick, Nesheiwat, is employed as medical director in New York City at CityMD, a group of urgent care facilities in the New York and New Jersey area, and has worked at City MD for 12 years. She has also appeared on Fox News and other television shows, written a book about the “transformative power of prayer” in her medical career, and endorses a brand of vitamin supplements.
She has advocated for COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, calling them “a gift from God” in a February 2021 Fox News segment, as well as antiviral pills like Paxlovid. In a question-and-answer session with the Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation in 2019, Nesheiwat said that she is a “strong believer in preventative medicine” and “can do a dissertation just on handwashing.”
National Institutes of Health
As of Saturday, Trump had not announced that he would take over the leadership of 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 said he would pause drug development and infectious disease research to focus on chronic diseases. He wants to withhold NIH funding from researchers with conflicts of interest and criticized the agency in 2017 for what he said was not doing enough research on 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 writer Erica Hunzinger contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Science and Educational Media Group of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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This story has been corrected to reflect that health authorities have a total budget of about $1.7 trillion, not $1.7 billion.
