Makary and Bhattacharya Confirmed to Head FDA, NIH

The US Senate voted Tuesday to confirm Martin Makary, MD, PhD, and Jayanta Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, to lead the US Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), respectively.

Makary, who is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and chief of islet transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, and previously served as the editor-in-chief of MedPage Today, received a 56-to-44 vote, picking up support from three Democratic senators, to serve as commissioner of the FDA.

Bhattacharya, a health economist and emeritus professor of health policy at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, was voted in as director of the NIH along strict party lines 53-to-47.

Aligned with US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda to “make America healthy again,” Makary and Bhattacharya made promises during their respective hearings to improve the lives of people with chronic disease.

Both men are taking control of organizations that have been wrought by layoffs recently and are at the center of much national debate about research funding and the roles and responsibilities of governmental organizations in public health and vaccine administration. This morning, HHS announced additional workforce cuts, including 3,500 at FDA and 1,200 at NIH.

To TCTMD, Robert Califf, MD, who served as FDA commissioner from 2016 to 2017 and again from 2022 to January 2025, said he’s hoping for the best even though both Makary and Bhattacharya “are coming into jobs leading a demoralized workforce that has been decimated by reductions in force and demeaning depictions of the work they do by the incoming administration.”

Also, “there is tremendous uncertainty in the 20% of the economy regulated by FDA and the vast external research community that has been the envy of the world because of NIH’s tradition,” he said in an email. “I cannot tell from their previous statements exactly what they plan on doing, but everyone deserves a fair chance.”

AdvaMed, a lobbying group for the medical device industry, issued remarks from its president and CEO, Scott Whitaker, congratulating Makary on his confirmation. “As a renowned surgeon and health policy expert, Dr. Makary understands the importance of improving patient access to transformative medtech,” he said.

Bhattacharya was congratulated by Stanford University, which said in statement that “as an institution, we are staunch supporters of the NIH's mission, which continues to advance the frontiers of medical knowledge and unlock new possibilities for health improvement.”