ALI SWENSON - Associated Press
•8/19/2026
Dr. Heidi Overton, a top White House aide, has been picked to lead the Food and Drug Administration, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday.
As a medical doctor and deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council who has worked on several of Trump’s second-term health initiatives, Overton has become a trusted figure in his administration and a champion of the Republican president’s goals.
Yet any new FDA commissioner will have to balance a raft of competing priorities, between Trump’s fixations, the anti-regulatory interests of traditional Republicans and the anti-corporate posture of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Those challenges dogged the tenure of the previous FDA head, Dr. Marty Makary, who resigned in May, leaving behind unfinished projects including work on ultraprocessed foods, anti-depressants and COVID-19 shots.
Referring to a “Dr. Heidi” in a Truth Social post, Trump called Overton a smart and respected “rockstar” who would deliver on his priorities of faster cures, innovation, lower drug prices and more wins for Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement.
Overton attended medical school at the University of New Mexico and has a doctorate degree in clinical investigation from Johns Hopkins University, according to her LinkedIn profile. Before joining Trump’s second administration, she served as chief policy officer at the conservative think tank America First Policy Institute.
In recent months, she has appeared with the president to unveil major projects, including some of his “most favored nation” deals with drug companies to lower prices to those of other developed countries and his recent controversial vaccine order, which sought to split the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three separate immunizations against the advice of medical groups.
At an Oval Office event to promote that order, she stood by the president as he falsely suggested the number or timing of vaccines could play a role in rising rates of autism spectrum disorder, even as scientific consensus and decades of studies have firmly concluded there is no link.
Overton has been critical of abortion pills and, if confirmed, would be positioned to roll back FDA rules that made the pills more accessible. U.S. abortion opponents have expressed frustration that the administration hasn’t moved to stem the flow of abortion pills prescribed online, a situation they view as undermining state abortion bans.
To get confirmed, Overton will have to be confirmed by a narrowly Republican-led Senate and face questions from the Senate health committee. Its chair, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, has been a vocal critic of some of Trump’s actions to sow doubt in vaccinations, including his recent order.
AP Health Writer Matthew Perrone contributed to this report.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
