President Donald Trump picked Heidi Overton, a physician who currently works as a White House aide focused on health policy, to serve as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
Overton is currently deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy and a former chief policy officer at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank; before that, she worked in the first Trump administration in the Office of American Innovation and Domestic Policy Council. She has an MD from the University of New Mexico and a PhD in clinical investigation from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
She has received praise from Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for her work advocating for tighter oversight over pharmaceutical ads and chemical additives in food. She recently appeared alongside the president as he issued an executive order to reduce the number of recommended childhood vaccines.
