New Acting FDA Commissioner: Some Florida Lawyer That Shoots Animals With Don Jr.

from the pew-pew dept

I assume at one point America was a serious big boy country, but we are certainly not that any longer. You can get examples of the unserious nature of our government in spades, of course, but I’m just going to keep hammering on what is going on at HHS and its child agencies as the prime example. With the recent resignation of Marty Makary as FDA Commissioner, the country is left without Senate confirmed commissioners for the FDA, CDC, as well as Surgeon General. This is because of a combination of RFK Jr. being incapable of hiring any normies for those roles combined with the Trump administration’s general apathy towards doing the business of government. It’s a clown show, currently resting on the shoulders of acting commissioners in these roles.

Which isn’t to say that the clownery hasn’t infected those acting commissioner appointments as well. It absolutely has. And you need look no further than the new acting FDA Commissioner to see that.

Soon after Trump posted Makary’s resignation text to Truth Social, Kyle Diamantas, 38, an obscure Florida lawyer who first landed at the FDA in 2025 as director of the human foods program, following his previous role as Don Jr.’s hunting buddy, was named acting FDA commissioner.

In March 2021, Don Jr. and Diamantas posed holding dead Osceola wild turkeys, as I had first reported. Mike Tussey, the founder of the hunting outfit Osceola Outdoors, described the scene on X as: “Don Jr. With his good friend Kyle Diamantas! Kyle’s first Osceola!” A picture of Trump Jr., Diamantas, and Tussey, with a single turkey, is featured on Osceola Outdoors’s website.

While a great deal of attention has been paid to Diamantas’ brief role defending Planned Parenthood in one legal case, which he claims he eventually got out of over his moral objections to the organization, his more salient work history was his legal defense of Abbott Laboratories for selling harmful baby formula and the tobacco industry. He spent a decade doing his lawyerly work before being appointed acting deputy commissioner of human food at the FDA last year. There he dabbled in a little conflict of interest by being in charge of reviewing infant formula safety, given his past legal work defending the industry, and embraced the whole MAHA movement.

So what else qualifies Diamantas for that role, or his new role running the larger FDA? Nothing, that’s what. Nothing at all, other than being Don Jr.’s pal. The real government, it seems, was the friends we made along the way.

And so we have another nepo-appointment in the Trump administration, but this one is responsible for food and drug safety across the entire country. I’m sure there’s nothing that will go wrong as a result.

Filed Under: donald trump jr., fda, health & human services, kyle diamanatas, mark makary, rfk jr.