On March 26, the U.S. Senate confirmed Marty Makary, MD, as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Both votes were largely along party lines, with no democrats backing Bhattacharya in a 53-47 vote, and three democrats, Senators Dick Durbin, Maggie Hassan, and Jeanne Shaheen, backed Makary in a vote of 56-44.

Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon and researcher, was critical of how federal and state agencies handled the COVID-19 pandemic at its height. He has written several books critiquing transparency and accountability issues within the healthcare industry, including the most recent, “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets it Wrong, and What it Means for Our Health.”

Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University, and holds multiple academic appointments. Bhattacharya was an early opponent of the lockdowns and other mandates imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. He questioned the severity of the disease, and joined other physicians in co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, a proposal that called for protecting the most vulnerable people from COVID-19 with the aim of achieving “herd immunity” in low-risk groups of young, healthy people. He has published 135 articles in scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, and more.

“I congratulate Jay on this extremely important appointment,” said Neale Mahoney, the Trione Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “SIEPR has always had a strong bridge between the worlds of academia and policy and I’m proud to see that continue.”

By and large, leaders of dietary supplement industry trade associations have expressed optimism about the Trump Administration’s various HHS appointments, and how receptive they might be to the industry’s needs and goals.  

“CHPA congratulates Dr. Makary on his confirmation by the Senate today as FDA commissioner. His leadership comes at a pivotal time for public health, with opportunities to advance self-care innovation, safety, and access to trusted over-the-counter medicines, dietary supplements, and OTC medical devices,” said Scott Melville, president and CEO of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA), after the confirmation.

HHS to Lay Off 10,000 Workers

Each of these confirmations came just before the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees several agencies including FDA and NIH, announced major staffing cuts as part of a restructuring plan.

The department announced it will eliminate 10,000 more jobs as part of a major restructuring plan; another 10,000 workers will be taking early retirements or buyout offers the Trump Administration made to nearly all federal employees. These firings are in addition to the firing of probationary employees across nearly all federal agencies by the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

As a result, HHS will reportedly reduce its workforce from 82,000 to 62,000 employees, reducing the budget by a projected $1.8 billion per year, HHS estimates. FDA will lose 3,500 workers, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will see 2,400 positions terminated. NIH will see 1,200 jobs cut, while the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS) will be down 300 workers.

HHS will cut its number of divisions from 28 to 15 to reduce reported redundancy while centralizing core functions, and regional offices will be reduced from 10 to five. The overhaul will “implement the new HHS priority of ending America’s epidemic of chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins.

“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are aligning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of HHS. “This department will do more, a lot more, at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”

“Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” Kennedy continued. “This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves. That’s the entire American public, because our goal is to Make America Healthy Again.”

HHS will also eliminate an “entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA,” Kennedy said in a post on X.

Under AHA, HHS will merge the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, Health Resources and Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

More information on the planned restructuring can be found here.