President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday he plans to nominate Mehmet Oz, a celebrity heart surgeon and former daytime television host, as administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Oz, a 64-year-old cardiothoracic surgeon, has no experience running a government agency, and has been accused by many U.S. physicians and other health experts of peddling pseudoscience.
For the record:
4:29 p.m. Nov. 19, 2024An earlier version of this article referred to the nominee as Oz Mehmet. His name is Mehmet Oz.
If his nomination is approved by the Senate, Oz will helm a federal agency that provides health coverage to more than 160 million people and oversees critical programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
“I have known Dr. Oz for many years, and I am confident he will fight to ensure everyone in America receives the best possible Healthcare, so our Country can be Great and Healthy Again!” Trump said in a statement on his TruthSocial platform.
Trump said Oz would work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom the former president nominated last week to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Together, Trump said in his statement, the two men would take on “the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.”
“Our broken Healthcare System harms everyday Americans, and crushes our Country’s budget,” Trump said. “Dr. Oz will be a leader in incentivizing Disease Prevention. He will also cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency.”
The son of Turkish parents, Oz graduated from Harvard before getting his medical degree and master’s of business at University of Pennsylvania. He went on to serve as a professor of surgery at Columbia University. After rising to fame as a celebrity physician on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, Oz hosted “The Dr. Oz Show” from 2009 to 2022. In 2008, Time magazine included Oz on its list of “100 Most Influential People.”
But Oz is a controversial figure in the medical world whose television appearances have drawn criticism from fellow physicians who say he backs questionable alternative medicine and unproven weight loss products. In 2012, Oz invited a woman onto his show who claimed she was a psychic and could communicate with the dead. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Oz promoted hydroxychloroquine as a treatment.
At a 2014 congressional hearing, then-Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) scolded Oz for his hype of weight loss products.
“I don’t get why you have to say this stuff, because you know it’s not true,” McCaskill told Oz. “So why — when you have this amazing megaphone and this amazing ability to communicate — why would you cheapen your show by saying things like that?”
After Trump’s announcement Tuesday, many public health experts took to social media to denounce Oz.
Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University who specializes in public health law and directs the World Health Organization’s Center on Global Health Law, said Oz was unfit to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“He peddles conspiracy theories on vaccines & fake cures,” Gostin posted. “He profits from fringe medical ideas. By nominating RFK Jr & Mehmet Oz, Trump is giving his middle finger to science. Having worked for 40 years in public health, it’s utterly disheartening.”
“Madness,” wrote Timothy Caulfield, a professor of health law and science policy at the University of Alberta. “Another anti-science quack given power over a science-informed institution.”
In 2022, Oz ran an unsuccessful campaign to represent Pennsylvania in the Senate. Backed by Trump, he cast himself as a moderate Republican who wanted to cut inflation and crime, but he was ultimately defeated by Democrat John Fetterman.
Reproductive rights groups also sounded alarm that Oz, who celebrated the US Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe Vs. Wade, would preside over an agency that determines what kind of family planning services state Medicaid programs offer low-income Americans.
“Mehmet Oz is an unqualified anti-abortion extremist who has no business leading one of the largest federal agencies overseeing Americans’ health care,” Reproductive Freedom for All President and CEO Mini Timmaraju said in a statement. “Pennsylvania voters already rejected him and his bold-faced attacks on reproductive freedom—and now Trump is giving him an opportunity to force them on all Americans through the implementation of his Project 2025 agenda.”
In picking Oz, Trump continues his strategy of nominating unorthodox television personalities to his administration for his second term: Last week, he nominated Pete Hegseth, a National Guard veteran and “Fox & Friends” host, as secretary of Defense. On Monday, he nominated former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy, known as co-host of “The Bottom Line” on Fox Business and a onetime reality TV star, to helm the Department of Transportation.