President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration previously called on conservatives to create new academic journals and to fund science that would explicitly back right-wing policy goals.
Heidi Overton made the comments in a December 2023 appearance on The Tank, a podcast by the conservative think tank America First Policy Institute. Overton, who has a medical degree and is now a White House aide, was previously chief policy officer at the think tank. There she led health care policy and was director of the institute’s Center for a Healthy America.
In the 2023 interview, Overton called for new science journals that would be dedicated to “conservative-based” science and described a 20-year vision for changing the infrastructure of funding and research to make it more aligned with conservative policy. This vision included “alternate systems” for publishing research.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
“We have, for too long, said conservatives are going to stay in the current system and just continue to fight and hope our ideas are heard. But in the meantime, the left starts journals called the Journal of Adolescent Transgender Medicine,” she said. No journal with that title exists. The America First Policy Institute did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“You’re up against this mountain of evidence,” she said. “We need publications and academic journals that are conservative-based. We need research funding that is willing to say, ‘No, let’s fund these type of studies.’ That’s not happening at the [National Institutes of Health]. The FDA isn’t prioritizing those kind of decisions, the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] certainly is not.”
White House spokesperson Kush Desai defended Overton, saying the number of articles in scientific literature supporting transition surgeries for children outnumbered those questioning the practice. Desai pointed to policies on child gender-affirming care in Europe as being ahead of the U.S.
“There is a clear bias in academic research and publishing that has kept conservative ideas out of the main stream of science, and the result has been an environment in which rigorous scholarship and skepticism of topics like gender transition surgeries for minors has been shut down," Desai said. "Numerous respected academics have, as a result, stepped to launch the Academy of Publish Health and its associated scientific journal that are committed to open discourse without compromising on intellectual rigor.”
Overton was nominated by Trump to head up the FDA last week. She is widely seen as a key supporter of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign. When asked for comment, the FDA referred Scientific American to the White House.
During the first Trump administration, Overton worked on the response to the COVID pandemic. She was more recently present at Trump’s side when he signed an executive order seeking to change the childhood vaccine schedule. The order particularly emphasizes a need to split the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) shot into three separate inoculations. The overwhelming evidence is that the combined MMR vaccine is safe and effective.
After Overton’s nomination to lead the FDA, the nonprofit group Stand Up for Science posted a clip of the 2023 podcast interview to social media. Stand Up for Science was founded in response to the current Trump administration’s job and budget cuts to federal science agencies, as well as attempts to inject political interference into research.
“This interview is a couple years old and shows how the Trump administration has always separated out science along partisan lines,” said Stand Up for Science founder and CEO Colette Delawalla in response to a request for comment. “Knowledge isn’t inherently neutral; this is why we must protect independent centers of thought.”