Dr. Marty Makary

Role status — October 2026: Makary resigned as FDA Commissioner on May 12, 2026. Kyle Diamantas, formerly deputy commissioner for human foods, serves as acting commissioner; Heidi Overton has been nominated as his successor and awaits a Senate committee vote.

Martin Adel Makary is a British-American surgical oncologist, professor, and author. He completed a surgical residency at Georgetown University and sub-specialty training at Johns Hopkins in surgical oncology and gastrointestinal surgery under legendary surgeon John Cameron, eventually joining Cameron’s faculty practice as a partner.

At Johns Hopkins Hospital, Makary practiced surgical oncology and gastrointestinal laparoscopic surgery. He held the Mark Ravitch Chair in Gastrointestinal Surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and served as chief of Islet Transplant Surgery. Alongside his clinical work, he built a parallel career as a medical commentator and author focused on systemic problems in American healthcare — hospital safety, price opacity, and the gap between what published medicine says and what patients actually experience.

His books Unaccountable (2012), The Price We Pay (2019), and Blind Spots (2024) each tackled a different facet of that gap. The Price We Pay won the 2020 Business Book of the Year Award from the American Association of Publishers. Blind Spots argued that several mainstream medical positions have been contradicted by better evidence that clinicians and regulators have been slow to absorb.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Makary became one of the most visible medical voices questioning elements of pandemic-era public-health policy — natural immunity, school closures, and the pace of booster recommendations. Those positions were controversial inside the medical establishment but lined up with much of the audience that would later become the MAHA electoral coalition.

On November 22, 2024, President-elect Trump announced Makary as his nominee for Commissioner of Food and Drugs. The Senate confirmed him in March 2025, and he was sworn in as the 27th FDA Commissioner on March 25, 2025. As Commissioner, he oversaw the agency’s regulation of food, drugs, medical devices, biologics, and tobacco, and led the FDA’s interaction with the pharmaceutical industry and with state health departments.

Publicly announced priorities since confirmation include modernizing regulatory processes, launching AI-assisted review tools, revisiting the scientific basis for long-standing food-additive approvals, and expanding pricing and clinical-data transparency. Food-dye review, infant-formula oversight, and the accelerated-approval pathway for novel therapies have been recurring themes in his early tenure.

Current battles involve absorbing political heat for any fast-moving reform at an agency whose workforce and industry-relations posture were built over decades, reconciling the Secretary’s chronic-disease framing with the FDA’s traditional product-by-product regulatory model, and managing congressional oversight from both parties.

Open questions: whether Makary’s reforms survive the transition to a new commissioner, what role he takes next, and how the Senate fight over his successor plays out.