Don’t Trust the Cabinet, Trust the Market

To the surprise of many, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election handedly. Even more are surprised by his rapid—and sometimes head-scratching—nominations ahead of taking office again.

So far, he has appointed TV personality and physician Dr. Mehmet Oz to be the Center for Medicare and Medicate Services administrator, business woman and former professional wrestler Linda McMahon as secretary of the Department of Education, previous Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel, and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security.

Arguably, his most controversial nomination was selecting the controversial lawyer and politician Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (commonly shortened to RFK) to become the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Our next president has placed lofty expectations and given considerable authority to tackle pressing U.S. public health concerns. As RFK remarked,

President Trump has given me three instructions…He wants the corruption and the conflicts out of the regulatory agencies. He wants to return the agencies to the gold standard, empirically-based, evidence-based, science and medicine that they were once famous for. And he wants to end the chronic disease epidemic with measurable impacts on a diminishment of chronic disease within two years.

As part of this effort, President-elect Trump also nominated Johns Hopkins Professor Dr. Martin Makary to be FDA commissioner. In his new role, Dr. Markay will work closely with RFK and, “properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning, the country’s food supply and drugs [and] to finally address the Childhood Chronic Disease Epidemic.”

Are these gentlemen up for these daunting and complicated tasks? Unlikely. 

Under the previous Trump Administration, then President-Trump appointed the similarly controversial Dr. Scott Gottlieb to become FDA Commissioner. His tenure was short, and is mostly remembered for beginning the FDA’s “war on vaping.” Years later, countless efforts to crackdown on vaping producers and granting the agency newfound powers to curb teen vaping have been a spectacular failure. After resigning, Dr. Gottlieb began working on the advisory board for Pfizer, embodying the “revolving door” corruption Trump’s second administration hopes to eliminate.

Can we expect Dr. Makary to be any more successful in addressing childhood chronic disease? 

President-elect Trump had similar issues with appointing HHS secretaries during his first term. He first picked Congressman and physician Dr. Thomas Price, who resigned less than a year after his nomination due to financial scandals. His second pick, Dr. Alex Azar, was in a constant feud with the President. Both publicly criticized each other, with Dr. Azar coming very close to losing his job during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Dishearteningly, both nominations were seen as reformers, hired to tackle pressing and longstanding problems within the U.S. healthcare industry. 

These missteps aside, there were several impressive and telling healthcare reforms made during the first Trump Administration. In 2018, national right-to-try legislation provided patients with terminal illnesses a way to bypass the FDA’s approval process to receive experimental treatment. Several states have since enacted an expanded version to help patients in dire medical circumstances. Emergency-use-authorizations were tremendously successful in providing quick and reliable treatment and testing during the COVID-19 pandemic. The overlapping approval phases used during Operation Warp Speed to bring a COVID-19 vaccine to market proved it is possible to produce pioneering medicine quickly. 

The vital lesson here is that these successes were provided by markets, not government appointees. In each case, significant deregulation resulted in greater patient access. In many cases, these reforms saved, improved, and prolonged lives. 

What else could you ask for?

Donald Trump will be President again soon, and the shock and novelty of who he nominates for his cabinet will wear off. When it does, let’s hope they remember their greatest chance of success is to empower the market, not themselves.

The post Don’t Trust the Cabinet, Trust the Market appeared first on The Beacon.

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Source: https://freedombunker.com/2024/12/06/dont-trust-the-cabinet-trust-the-market/