Trump Selects Haley as Domestic Chief, Phelan for Navy Secretary
(Bloomberg) -- President-elect Donald Trump continued staffing his new administration on Tuesday night, announcing names for key roles involving health care, the military and domestic policy coordination.
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His transition team’s rapid fire of personnel announcements signals how fast he plans to take action after Trump’s inauguration less than two months from now.
Here are the selections:
Vince Haley, Head of Domestic Policy Council
Haley, who worked in the White House during Trump’s first term, will hold an influential post responsible for coordinating the Trump agenda across major federal agencies. The Domestic Policy Council is comprised of cabinet-level secretaries and other White House officials.
The office is likely to weigh in on several ambitious proposals Trump has vowed to undertake in office, including cracking down on immigration, combating crime in cities and changes to the federal government’s role in education. Trump plans to execute a massive deportation of undocumented immigrants, dismantle the Education Department, which oversees the distribution of billions in student aid, and has floated conditioning federal funding to local police departments with changes in policing.
John Phelan, US Navy Secretary
Phelan co-founded MSD Capital more than two decades ago to manage the family fortune of computer maker Michael Dell. Phelan later founded Rugger Management, a private investment firm based in Palm Beach.
“He will put the business of the US Navy above all else,” Trump said of Phelan in his statement announcing the pick.
Jay Bhattacharya, National Institutes of Health
Trump named Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor, to lead the NIH, the primary US agency that conducts medical and public health research.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Bhattacharya was a critic of mask mandates and public lockdowns and cast doubt of the severity of the virus. He’s called the lockdowns the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made.” Those views have been rejected by much of the mainstream public health establishment.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s pick to the lead Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, praised the selection. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, said in a post on X that “Bhattacharya is the ideal leader to restore NIH as the international template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medicine.”
Jim O’Neill, Deputy Secretary of HHS
O’Neill, who is expected to work alongside Kennedy at the Department of Health and Human Services, is a Silicon Valley investor and an ally of the billionaire Peter Thiel, who advised Trump during his first administration’s transition.
He previously served as a senior HHS official during the George W. Bush administration. O’Neill, who has ties to the pharmaceutical industry, at one point called for fully reviewing drugs after they’ve been on the market.
“Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized,” he said.
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