The Trump administration is reportedly looking to change up the top leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services ahead of the midterms.
HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill and General Counsel Mike Stuart are expected to leave their roles, Politico reported.
The changes are part of an attempt at “muscling up the management team” to emphasize President Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s signature Make America Healthy Again policies, such as rolling out new healthy-eating guidelines and reducing drug prices.
“What basically happened was that HHS Secretary Kennedy, and also the White House, realized that we want to be most efficiently and most effectively implementing that policy and moving the needle on these issues that we see as very clear and unambiguous wins for us,” a White House official told the outlet. “And obviously the polling and such is very clear on these topics as well.”
The administration reportedly saw O’Neill as a poor communicator who hadn’t found his fit within HHS, an insider told CNN.
Both officials are reportedly expected to be offered other jobs within the administration.
O’Neill, currently Kennedy’s second in command at HHS, has been attached to some of the administration’s more divisive health policy moments.
The official, who does not have a formal medical or public health background, took over as interim leader of the Centers for Disease Control after the August ouster of Dr. Susan Monarez, who said she was pressured to pre-approve controversial vaccine recommendations and fire career scientists.
More recently, O’Neill has been one of the public faces of the administration’s attempt to freeze child care funding to states in the wake of a conservative influencer’s allegations of mass fraud at day care centers in Minnesota.
GOP insiders reportedly see so-called MAHA voters as a key voting bloc ahead of the midterms and want the administration to emphasize its more palatable health goals, like healthy eating, rather than Kennedy’s more divisive vaccine skepticism.
“While the MAHA agenda is broadly popular in the area [of] food and agriculture, vaccine skepticism stands as an outlier, rejected by most voters even within the MAHA movement,” according to a recent memo obtained by Axios regarding polling of voters in competitive House districts.
