The second Trump administration continues to be a heavily used revolving door. Just today, Marty Makary officially resigned his position as head of the Food and Drug Administration.
Politico was the first to report on the development this afternoon. Makary’s resignation ends a short tenure marred by controversy, misleading health-related claims from the federal government, and infighting among different camps of the GOP.
The Makary era
Prior to becoming the 27th commissioner of the FDA, Makary was a surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine.
Though he’s been praised for his work as a surgeon, pioneering the use of several procedures, he’s also garnered plenty of enmity for his outspoken views on a variety of topics related to health and medicine. In 2016, for instance, he co-authored a paper arguing that medical errors were the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—a now widely repeated statistic that many other scientists have criticized as poorly supported by the data.
Makary also regularly downplayed the dangers of the covid-19 pandemic and criticized public health efforts to curtail it, particularly mandates for the vaccines that arrived in early 2021. In a February 2021 editorial for The Wall Street Journal, he infamously predicted the pandemic would be mostly over by that April. Of course, the later emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants went on to ensure that 2021 became the deadliest year of the pandemic in the U.S., with over 450,000 official deaths.
Since taking over the helm of the FDA in March 2025, Makary has often carried out the agenda of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccination advocate turned head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And though the FDA under Makary hasn’t been quite as chaotic as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is still missing an official leader, it’s been a mess nonetheless.
Many people, including those aligned with the Republican Party, have criticized Makary’s FDA for not approving several potential treatments for rare diseases, for instance, even as the agency promised to streamline the approval of these drugs in general. The FDA also initially refused to even consider Moderna’s application for a new seasonal flu vaccine before later changing its mind.
These decisions were reportedly made at the behest of senior FDA official Vinay Prasad, a similarly controversial figure who was fired and rehired over the span of two weeks last summer, before once again leaving the agency this past March. Makary reportedly fought for Prasad to be reinstated, a move that would later seemingly burn some of his credibility with President Donald Trump himself, who was reportedly upset with how the FDA was handling vaccine issues, Politico reported in February.
Makary has also tried to use the FDA to burnish unproven treatments. Last September, as part of a grand announcement concerning autism by Trump and RFK Jr., he claimed the drug leucovorin could help “hundreds of thousands of kids” with autism. The FDA would later only expand the use of leucovorin for children with a rare type of folate deficiency, ruling that not enough data supported its use for autism.
On the positive side of things, the FDA under Makary did remove a black box warning from most hormonal treatments for menopause. Many experts have long supported such a decision, arguing that studies since the warning was added have failed to find an added risk of cardiovascular disease or other serious conditions from the treatment for most eligible women (such as those under 60). The agency has also approved many drugs without any controversy, including treatments for obesity, cancer, and infectious diseases.
What comes next
In the interim, Kyle Diamantas, the current deputy commissioner of food at the FDA, will reportedly take over as the acting FDA chief. And though many people might feel schadenfreude over Makary’s departure, it seems unlikely any future FDA head under the Trump administration will be significantly better for the country’s public health.
Another reason Makary was likely pushed out, for example, was over the agency’s delay in trying to restrict the use of mifepristone, an abortion medication. And anti-abortion advocates are already hoping that his successor will step up these efforts, according to a report out today by The 19th.
Makary might have been despised by all corners. But what comes next for the FDA and everyone else could somehow even be worse.
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