It’s probably not very often, if ever, that a Republican nomination to head a federal agency is compared to a Democratic mayor’s race in Baltimore, but that’s where I’m going here. It’s not crazy; I swear it makes sense. Just stick with me, and you’ll see.
When I lived in Baltimore in 2016, then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake decided not to run for reelection. She was an accidental mayor, the city council president who ascended to the top job when a criminal scandal forced the mayor to resign. Rawlings-Blake served the second half of Sheila Dixon’s term, then won her own in 2011. She was never really good or comfortable in the job she found herself in, so she announced she wouldn’t seek reelection.
This led to a feeding frenzy of Baltimore politicians scrambling for the gig. Half the city council announced they would be running in the mayoral primary, meaning there would be an incredibly high turnover rate in the city’s power structure the following year, simply because half the power players were all running for one job that only one of them would win.
I viewed this as a great opportunity for the city to reset. It’s not often that there are so many open seats in government. Baltimore was in a bad place; the power of incumbency and the Democrat machine didn’t allow for many changes by voters, but this was voluntary — every council member running for mayor was out. New blood had to happen.
Rather than pull up from the decades of Democrat ruination of the city, voters doubled down and filled those vacant seats with people just as bad, if not worse, than the Democrats they replaced. “New blood” doesn’t matter if it courses through the veins of the same failed philosophy — new people doing the same old corrupt things leads to the same results.
That’s how I view President Trump’s selection of Heidi Overton to head the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The former FDA Director, Dr. Marty Makary, was someone with whom I had issues I regularly documented, including how the agency under him was undermining MAHA. Makary’s insistence on empowering Dr. Vinay Prasad, who was once fired by the president for obscuring new drug development and the “right to try” for the terminally ill, then rehired at Makary’s insistence, makes Overton being so closely aligned with Makary all the more suspect.
A Google search finds her academic work largely co-authored with Makary, and her current position is Deputy Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. While health policy falls into that category, its inclusion in a portfolio is not a qualification.
I don’t know Dr. Overton. To the best of my knowledge, I've never met her, and she wasn’t even around when I was a health policy analyst. But in my following of the issue in the intervening years, she’s never come up. I’m sure she’s a fine person, but being a fine person is a quality you want in a friend, not someone ensuring the safety of the food we eat and the drugs we take. In those important areas, the very essence of the job for which she is being considered, she doesn’t seem to have any experience.
The health and welfare of the American people is not the field of play for on-the-job training. According to a food industry publication, “Dr. Overton does not have a background in food policy or food safety.”
You can argue that the position is that of a bureaucrat, so it’s really just a manager, but she has no experience in managing large numbers of people either.
None of this is necessarily disqualifying, but it should be concerning. I’m all in favor of rewarding loyalty, as President Trump regularly does, just not at this high of a price.
Healthcare and its costs are going to be a major part of the midterm election and beyond. It’s quite possible that it will be the deciding factor in the 2028 presidential election. You can’t trust something so important to a hobbyist looking for an impressive title on their CV. Serious people with a track record of accomplishments and out-of-the-box thinking on health policy are needed in these positions if we’re going to win.
One of the things that stuck with me from my health policy days was that Republicans largely ceded the issue to Democrats. When we were briefing them, they really only wanted to know just enough to get by — to be able to talk about it to a room full of voters and answer questions well enough to give the impression they knew more.
That was 20 years ago. The stakes are higher now. Democrats are closing in on taking over the entire industry. Health can’t be an afterthought; it has to be out front if Republicans are going to protect the system from which the vast majority of the world’s health innovations have come. A different person with the same flawed philosophy didn’t make the needed changes in Baltimore, and it won’t make the needed difference at the FDA.
The real Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, D.C., and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, "Outrage, INC.," which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F***ing Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on X at @DerekAHunter.