If there is one word that accurately describes Donald Trump it is authentic. He refuses to put his finger in the political winds to see which way they are blowing; he will not bend to political correctness; and, most importantly, he does exactly what he says he is going to do. It got him elected the 47th President of the United States.
He comes to Washington DC for the second time having shed the naivete from his first term and determined to root out corruption and waste in the government bureaucracy through reconstruction and reform. He is moving at lightning speed to make appointments that are unconventional by any measure and signaling he fully understands Washington insiders are not who he needs to get the job done.
Members of the media and liberals snicker at Trump’s plans to go after waste, fraud, and abuse throughout government agencies and programs. They sneer at business titans Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk as they confidently predict they can find up to $2 trillion in wasteful government spending and then sunset the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) they are leading by July 2026 as a 250th birthday present to the American people. The naysayers claim Trump and his picks just don’t understand how the government works and they predict that career government bureaucrats can outlast any administration’s efforts to make meaningful change.
We do not have to look further than the health care government bureaucracy to understand how desperately reform is needed. The COVID pandemic exposed corruption and betrayal of the American people at a level we would not have imagined.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is a huge federal bureaucracy with more than 80,000 federal employees and an annual budget of greater than $1.6 trillion.
Two agencies of this department, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and The National Institutes of Health (NIH) played prominent roles in the COVID pandemic response.
The FDA is responsible for ensuring food is safe and drugs and medical devices are safe and effective.
The NIH supports biomedical and behavioral research in the United States and abroad, conducts research in its own labs and clinics, trains researchers and promotes sharing medical knowledge.
Trump is assembling a leadership team well equipped to remake the healthcare bureaucracy into one that is focused on serving the American people. It’s ironic that bureaucrats from the agencies they will lead have tried to destroy them.
Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as Secretary of HHS. He is viewed as a major threat by the defenders of the status quo for many reasons including his willingness to expose and fight how corruption in the food and pharmaceutical industries and in politics is contributing to the chronic illness epidemic that plagues our country.
Marty Makary, a renowned oncology surgeon and Johns Hopkins Professor, has been selected by Trump as Commissioner of the FDA. He was one of the few who demonstrated the integrity and courage to speak out against government mandates and policies that were not supported by the scientific evidence during the pandemic. His latest book “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets it Wrong and What it Means to Our Health” reveals a man who can be trusted to lead with integrity.
Jay Bhattacharya is a recent addition to the Trump healthcare leadership team, nominated as Director of NIH. He is a highly respected Stanford Medical School Professor and economist who became known as “the man who talked back” when he had the audacity to speak out against COVID lockdowns. His story is a real-life example of Trump’s “enemies from within.” The men who at the time ran the NIH, Tony Fauci and Francis Collins, tried to destroy him.
Bhattacharya, as a result of his own research and that of many others, co-authored “The Great Barrington Declaration” with two renowned epidemiologists, Sunetra Gupta from Oxford and Martin Kulldorff from Harvard. They cautioned, “As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach that we call focused protection.” They believed rather than shut down the country the focus should be on protecting those at greatest risk.
Within days of the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration, Francis Collins, Director of the NIH, sent a message to Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) that said, “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists seems to be getting a lot of attention. There needs to be a quick and devastating public takedown of its premises.” Collins then told the Washington Post “This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.”
This was part of a vicious effort to silence dissenters. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he invited Jay Bhattacharya to an in-person meeting to show him how Twitter had blacklisted him to prevent him from reaching the broad population he was trying to alert to his concerns. Twitter had a very sinister approach to blacklisting that kept Bhattacharya from ever knowing communications he thought he had tweeted had gone nowhere.
In the end, everything Jay Bhattacharya was saying was supported by the evidence from lockdowns to masking to vaccines. When asked why he thought the medical establishment was so invested in destroying those who questioned the COVID response, Bhattacharya said it was inconvenient to their reputations to have noted professionals say it was not necessary to be inflicting such harm on the American people.
Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins were a far greater threat to the American people than the COVID pandemic. They suppressed scientific debate, censored free speech, lied to Congress, and have never accepted responsibility for any wrongdoing. They deserve to be punished.
Today, a fierce battle is being waged over the American people’s right to information about government decisions made during the pandemic.
The pharmaceutical and health products industries are among the biggest lobbyists in the country. In 2023 they spent $379 million trying to influence legislators. Pfizer, one of the companies that produced a COVID vaccine, is one of the largest corporate lobbyists at more than $7 million a year. In 2024, Pfizer also contributed more than $1.2 million to Democrats’ political campaigns and more than $790,000 to Republicans. Pfizer made more than $80 billion in revenue from its COVID vaccine.
In late 2021, Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT), an organization formed to promote transparency of the COVID-19 vaccine data used to secure “Emergency Use Authorization” from the FDA, filed a lawsuit to force a timely release of the data. Members of PHMPT are professors and scientists from Yale, Harvard, UCLA, and Brown Universities. PHMPT asserted that the data “should be made publicly available to allow independent experts to conduct their own review and analyses.”
The FDA had taken the position that it needed 55 years (no, that is not a typo) in order to produce the data because it had to be closely reviewed for confidential details and trade secrets. This month, in a victory for the people, a federal judge in Texas ruled against the FDA requiring them to produce the data in the next 8 months.
In November 2023, the Texas Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Pfizer following his own investigation that accuses them of misrepresenting the COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and conspiring to censor public disclosure. The lawsuit charges that Pfizer misrepresented how long vaccine protection would last and that it would prevent transmission of the disease. The lawsuit says Pfizer tried to intimidate the public into believing they needed to be vaccinated to protect their loved ones. The suit further charges that Pfizer was involved in intimidating critics and coercing social media into silencing truth tellers.
Common sense tells us that this is only the tip of a monstrous iceberg.
Trump has only 4 years to begin reworking deeply entrenched bureaucracies and replacing bureaucrats who do not have the welfare of the American people as their primary concern. This will be a long, arduous process and will undoubtedly face tremendous resistance. Honesty and transparency from his new leadership team as they uncover waste and corruption will generate the outrage needed to fuel public support for like-minded leaders to continue this work long after Trump’s term ends. An opportunity of this magnitude is unparalleled in our lifetimes and the unwavering support of the American people will be critical to success. The media and many career politicians will be doing what they can to impede the work. They have it wrong when they claim Trump’s plan is doomed because people don’t understand how the government works. It’s time to flip the script. Understanding all we need to about how the government works catapulted Trump, a fearless disruptor, into the Presidency. The people stand with Trump and we are demanding real change.
