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WASHINGTON — The head of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, is resigning after a rocky tenure that drew months of complaints from health industry executives, anti-abortion activists, vaping lobbyists and other allies of President Trump.

He steps down after just over a year leading the powerful health regulatory agency, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak before an announcement expected Tuesday and requested anonymity.

Kyle Diamantas, the agency’s chief for foods, will take over as acting commissioner, the official said. Diamantas is an attorney with personal ties to Donald Trump Jr.

A surgeon and health researcher, Makary came to prominence among Republicans as an outspoken critic of COVID-19 health measures during the pandemic when he frequently appeared on Fox News.

But he struggled to manage the FDA’s bureaucracy and failed to win the confidence of its staff after mass layoffs, leadership changes and a series of controversies in which the agency’s scientific principles appeared to be overridden by political interests, including those of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The FDA commissioner, as the leader of an agency that regulates billions of dollars in consumer goods and medicines, is often required to juggle competing priorities that straddle science and politics.

Makary faced a unique challenge in balancing calls by Trump and other Republicans to cut red tape at the FDA, while also tending to Kennedy’s interest in scrutinizing the safety of vaccines, drugs and food additives.

Virtually all of the FDA’s senior career officials resigned, retired or were forced out in the first year of the second-term Trump administration, leading to a steady stream of leaks and negative stories in the media cataloging low morale, dysfunction and frustration among staff.

Makary’s handpicked deputy, Dr. Vinay Prasad, was pushed out of the agency twice in less than a year for running afoul of specialty drugmakers and groups for patients with rare diseases. Makary appeared poised to weather the controversy, despite an ongoing pressure campaign calling on Trump to fire him.

Recent months brought fresh criticisms from other interest groups that the White House considers key to Republican chances in November elections.

Anti-abortion groups have criticized Makary for allegedly slow-walking an internal review of the abortion pill mifepristone, which has been on the market for 25 years but remains a target for conservative activists.

Vaping executives told Trump that Makary was blocking approval of their products, including new flavored e-cigarettes seen as crucial to the industry’s survival.

Last week, the agency abruptly changed course on vaping: authorizing the first fruit-flavored products and issuing guidelines that loosened marketing for major manufacturers. But it wasn’t enough to keep Makary in the job.

A permanent replacement for FDA commissioner will need to be nominated by Trump and confirmed by a majority vote in the Senate.

Faster drug reviews are overshadowed

As a former regular on Fox News, Makary was aggressive about promoting his accomplishments on cable television and podcasts and in online opinion pieces.

More than a half-dozen initiatives from Makary aimed to speed up or streamline FDA drug reviews, including dropping certain study requirements, incorporating artificial intelligence into drug evaluations and offering expedited reviews to medicines that support “national interests.”

But pharmaceutical executives rely on the predictability and consistency of FDA decisions, even more than speedy reviews. Makary’s efforts on drug reviews were overshadowed by internal conflicts and upheavals that created headaches for drugmakers, investors and patients.

A number of specialty drugmakers studying therapies for rare or hard-to-treat diseases said they received rejection letters or requests to run additional studies for drugs that previously had been given the go-ahead by FDA staff. Those drugs were primarily overseen by Prasad, who stepped down for a second time from his role as FDA’s vaccine and biotech chief in April.

Vaccine moves denounced

Prasad repeatedly overruled vaccine staffers to restrict eligibility for new COVID shots. In February, Prasad initially refused to even consider Moderna’s mRNA shot for flu. The FDA was forced to reverse itself after Moderna pledged to formally challenge the decision and called for intervention by the White House.

Some of Makary and Prasad’s most controversial vaccine proposals never came to fruition, despite stoking confusion and anxiety within the FDA and beyond.

In an internal memo in November, Prasad claimed — without publishing evidence — that the FDA had linked COVID shots to the deaths of 10 children. Prasad used that to justify a planned wholesale overhaul of the agency’s approach to approving and updating vaccines.

A dozen former FDA commissioners issued a scathing denunciation of the plan, warning that it would “undermine the public interest” and decimate vaccine development. The FDA has not released its analysis of the deaths or its plan for the vaccine overhaul.

FDA’s drug center had a revolving door

In the FDA’s drug center, which is the agency’s largest division, Makary oversaw a revolving door of leadership changes. Six people served as director over the course of one year.

Makary’s initial pick for the job, Dr. George Tidmarsh, was forced to resign after allegations that he used his FDA position to pursue a personal vendetta against a former business partner.

His replacement, longtime FDA cancer specialist Dr. Rick Pazdur, announced he would retire after just three weeks on the job, after clashing with Makary on multiple issues involving drug reviews.

With Makary’s departure, the fate of many fledgling initiatives is uncertain.

Most of the programs Makary introduced have not gone through federal rulemaking required to enshrine them in U.S. regulations and could easily be overturned by his successors.

Democrats in Congress have questioned the legality of some of those efforts, including a program that offers drugmakers expedited reviews for innovative medicines.

Perrone and Kim write for the Associated Press.

Within days of California’s long-anticipated single-use plastic law going into effect, environmentalists, anti-waste activists and the packaging industry reacted with anger and frustration.

Anti-plastic activists say Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and CalRecycle inserted exemptions favoring the plastic industry into the law’s regulations that weaken it and undermine legislative intent.

“These new rules create huge loopholes for plastic packaging that violate the law,” said Avinash Kar, senior director of the toxics program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

On the other side, the packaging industry has sued over similar laws in other states. “Our members have real concerns about cost, compliance, and constitutionality,” said Matt Clarke, spokesman for the National Assn. of Wholesaler-Distributors, which sued Oregon earlier this year over a similar waste law.

CalRecycle, the state’s waste agency, did not respond in time for publication. The final regulations putting the law into effect were released May 1 and posted for review Tuesday.

The environmental organizations say the law’s new final regulations open the door to what is known as “chemical recycling,” which produces large amounts of hazardous waste. The law also contains problematic exemptions for certain categories of plastic foodware, they say.

The language of the law forbids any kind of recycling that would produce significant amounts of hazardous waste. The new regulations allow for these recycling methods if the facilities are properly permitted.

The new regulations also exempt certain products if they are already covered by federal law. For instance, a packaging company, retailer or distributor can claim that they have such a preemption, Kar said, and CalRecycle might not immediately review that claim. “And as long as they don’t review it, they’ll get the exemption for as long as CalRecycle doesn’t review it,” creating a potential “forever loophole.”

“Californians were promised a system where producers take real responsibility for the waste they create,” said Nick Lapis, advocacy director for Californians Against Waste. “When regulations introduce broad exemptions and redefine key terms, that promise starts to erode. The details matter here, and right now they don’t line up with the intent of the law.”

Senate Bill 54, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act, was signed by Newsom in 2022. It was considered landmark legislation because it addressed the scourge of single-use plastics, requiring plastic and packaging companies to use less of them and ensuring that by 2032, all food packaging is either recyclable or compostable.

Accumulating plastic waste is overwhelming waterways and oceans, sickening marine life and threatening human health.

The law’s intent was not only to reduce it, but also to put the onus and cost of dealing with it on packaging producers and manufacturers, not consumers and local governments. It was supposed to incentivize companies to consider the fate of their products and spur innovation in material redesign.

According to one state analysis, 2.9 million tons of single-use plastic and 171.4 billion single-use plastic components were sold, offered for sale, or distributed during 2023 in California.

Similar laws have been passed in Maine, Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland and Washington. Oregon’s law, however, is on hold while a lawsuit by the National Assn. of Wholesaler-Distributors works its way through the courts.

“We see a lot of the same problems in California that we flagged in Oregon,” said Clarke, the trade group spokesman. “Given California’s scale, the cost implications are going to be even larger. Our legal counsel has noted that California’s proposed fees are already higher than what other states have put forward.”

Jan Dell of Last Beach Cleanup, an anti-plastic waste group based in Laguna Beach, doesn’t believe the law will work — irrespective of the final regulations — and said the “exorbitant” cost of its implementation will either spur producers to sue, or they’ll end up passing the higher costs onto consumers.

She referred to a report from the Circular Action Alliance, the state-sanctioned group established to represent and oversee the implementation of the law on behalf of the plastic and packaging industry. It finds the law will increase the cost of disposal between six and 14 times for common products, such as Windex bottles, made of polyethylene terephthalate.

“If the producers don’t successfully sue to stop the fees, this will certainly add to product inflation for CA consumers,” she said in an email. “Californians already have to pay exorbitantly high curbside collection fees for trash, recycling, and organics … so, starting in 2027, our groceries will cost a LOT more but we won’t see a reduction in our waste bills.”

Christopher “Smitty” Smith, a partner at law firm Saul Ewing in Los Angeles, who councils companies and interest groups on SB 54 and other Extended Producer Liability laws, said that although he could see areas of the law that “could be sharper and avoid the legal challenges … you can’t stop people from suing.” Environmentalists and anti-waste activists say they are preparing a lawsuit.

Smith said the law already has sparked changes in how companies think and respond to concerns about waste.

One of his national fast-food chain clients has realized that if its brand name is on plastic packaging, it’s that company’s responsibility, he said, so “they’ve spent the past year mapping out their franchise agreements, their supply chain agreements, their producer agreements, to figure out” what it needs to do to comply.

He said in the past, companies have paid little attention to these details and just let their franchisees figure this kind of thing out. Now, they’re spending a lot of time and money “to wrap their arms around what their supply chain looks like and like, what post consumer use of their plastic products looks like and what their regulatory obligations are.”

It’s bringing a new dialogue within companies. And that, Smith said, is what could make this law so powerful.

Times staff writer Meg Tanaka contributed to this report.

Ukraine used its latest technology to deepen strikes against Russian oil storage, ports and refineries in the past week, bombing targets in the Urals 1,600 kilometres (990 miles) from its borders and prompting protests about “terrorist attacks” from the Kremlin spokesman.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday announced “a new stage in the use of Ukrainian weapons to limit the potential of Russia’s war”.

The Ukraine Security Service (SBU) later clarified it had struck Transneft’s oil pumping and distribution facility in the city of Perm that day, from where oil was pumped to the Perm refinery and via pipeline in four directions across Russia.

The facility is “a strategically important hub of the main oil transportation system”, said the SBU, and preliminary information suggested that “almost all oil storage tanks are on fire”.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence confirmed the strike and said it had downed 98 Ukrainian UAVs across various regions.

“The Urals are now within reach, be vigilant,” wrote Russia’s presidential envoy to the region, Artem Zhoga.

Ukraine’s campaign has begun to elicit reactions from the Russian government.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the attacks on oil facilities “terrorist attacks”.

A Russian Defence Ministry announcement – that military cadets and a column of equipment would not take part in this year’s Victory Day parade commemorating the end of World War II “due to the current operational situation” – was also widely interpreted as a precaution against potential Ukrainian drone strikes.

Ukraine’s strikes are part of a strategy of depriving Russia of windfall profits from soaring oil prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Zelenskyy said Russian internal documents seen by his foreign intelligence service admitted that Ukraine had deprived oil offloading ports of much of their capacity.

Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea had lost 13 percent and 43 percent of capacity, respectively, and the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk 38 percent.

“We believe that such internal Russian data may be underestimated,” Zelenskyy said.

The internal figures roughly agree with a Reuters March estimate that Russia had lost approximately 40 percent of its export capacity.

That translated into revenue losses of $2.3bn in March, Zelenskyy estimated.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said that Ukraine had likely conducted at least 18 strikes against Russian oil infrastructure in April.

Kyiv’s attacks have been “steadily increasing the range, volume, and intensity” with “outsized impacts on Russian oil exports”.

Ukraine struck other oil and military targets during the past week.

On April 23, it damaged three storage tanks at the Gorky oil pumping station in Nizhny Novgorod and struck the Novokuibyshevsk petrochemical plant in Samara.

The next day, it destroyed two production facilities at the Atlant-Aero factory in Taganrog, Rostov, which builds the Molniya drones used to attack Ukrainian cities.

On Sunday, Ukraine struck the Yaroslavl oil refinery, and on Tuesday, they struck the Tuapse oil refinery on the Black Sea for the third time this month. Even before this latest strike, at least 24 oil storage tanks at the site had been destroyed, said Ukraine’s head of the Center for Countering Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko.

Russian President Vladimir Putin dispatched his Civil Defence, Emergencies, and Disaster Relief minister, Alexander Kurenkov, to oversee the response personally.

An emerging air power

Ukraine has been developing its own long-range strike capabilities and devotes 20 percent of its defence resources to new technologies, said Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

One of its leading drone manufacturers, Wild Hornets, recently said a drone operator had used its remote piloting system to fly a Sting interceptor drone at a distance of 2,000km (1,240 miles).

On April 23, Fedorov said Ukraine had successfully tested remote control technology that enabled pilots to operate from the relative safety of Kyiv or Lviv, “at distances of hundreds and thousands of kilometres”.

Ukraine is now touting its battlefield innovations in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in the wake of Iran’s attack on the Gulf nations.

Zelenskyy met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Riyadh on April 24 to discuss “the export of our Ukrainian security expertise and capabilities in air defence”.

Days later, he said Kyiv produces as many as twice the number of certain types of weapons as the military needed, and that “Ukrainian companies will get a real opportunity to enter the markets of partner countries, provided that our military have the right to take the necessary amount of weapons first”.

The burgeoning relationship with the Gulf, he said, had invoked Moscow’s concern.

“Russia is particularly irritated by our contacts in the Middle East and the Gulf region,” he told Ukrainians on Wednesday.

More surprisingly, he said some allies, too, were irritated by the competition.

“We are also aware of the complex attitude of some of our other partners towards this – partners who would prefer to limit our state’s independence,” Zelenskyy said in an evening video address. “We consider this their mistake.