Former Johns Hopkins Hospital surgeon Dr. Marty Makary resigned Tuesday as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration after 13 months leading the federal agency.
Makary’s resignation comes after President Donald Trump reportedly signed off on a plan to fire Makary following the doctor’s refusal to approve flavored vapes.
In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, the president praised Makary for his leadership of the FDA.
“I want to thank Dr. Marty Makary for having done a great job at the FDA,” Trump wrote. “So much was accomplished under his leadership. He was a hard worker, who was respected by all, and will go on to have an outstanding career in Medicine.”
Kyle Diamantas, the agency’s Deputy Commissioner for Food, will serve as acting commissioner of the FDA. Diamantas is a lawyer, not a medical doctor.
Trump nominated Makary to lead the FDA in December 2024, the U.S. Senate confirmed him to the role in March 2025, and he began serving as commissioner in April of that year.
Makary was a surgical oncologist and gastrointestinal laparoscopic surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, served as the gastrointestinal surgery chair at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and was chief of Islet Transplant Surgery at Hopkins.
He is now a professor emeritus at Hopkins.
Like much of the federal government, leaders at the Department of Health and Human Services (including the FDA) instituted mass layoffs, creating disarray that has eroded public trust.
That upheaval continued in other aspects of the agency.
The FDA has traditionally turned to panels of experts who have been vetted for financial conflicts and credentials. However, under Makary, the agency often convened panels with individuals with ties to the subject they were weighing in on. Last year, for example, a panel on menopause hormonal therapies included doctors who promoted or consulted on the medications they were advising about, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The FDA then removed the “black box” safety warning from estrogen therapy products used to treat menopause. The move reversed decades-long guidance regarding the risks of breast cancer, endometrial cancer, cardiovascular disease, and dementia.
At times, Makary aligned with the views of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of the “Make America Healthy Again” or “MAHA” movement. He defended the Trump administration’s claim, without evidence, that women’s use of Tylenol during pregnancy is linked to autism in children.
Makary also oversaw efforts to ban certain food dyes that could be linked to child behavioral issues.
In other cases, Makary clashed with members of Trump’s conservative base.
Abortion opponents decried the FDA’s approval of a generic form of mifepristone, a medication used to end pregnancy within the first 10 weeks. The U.S. Supreme Court this week temporarily extended access to mifepristone while it considers a national ban on access to the abortion pill via telemedicine.
