(AP Photo/Matt Freed)
President-elect Donald Trump appointed yet another former television host to a leadership role in his administration on Tuesday. Trump tapped Dr. Mehmet Oz to serve as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator.
“I am very pleased to nominate Dr. Mehmet Oz to serve as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator. America is facing a Healthcare Crisis, and there may be no Physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America Healthy Again. He is an eminent Physician, Heart Surgeon, Inventor, and World-Class Communicator, who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades,” Trump wrote in his Tuesday announcement, adding:
Dr. Oz will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to 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. Dr. Oz will be a leader in incentivizing Disease Prevention, so we get the best results in the World for every dollar we spend on Healthcare in our Great Country. He will also cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.
Trump also praised Oz’s past work on television, “He rose to become a Professor of Surgery at Columbia University, while receiving numerous patents on his medical inventions, authoring more than 400 original publications, and publishing numerous New York Times Best Selling books. He won nine Daytime Emmy Awards hosting “The Dr. Oz Show,” where he taught millions of Americans how to make healthier lifestyle choices, and gave a strong voice to the key pillars of the MAHA Movement.”
Oz ran as a Republican in 2022 with Trump’s support for an open U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania but was defeated by John Fetterman.
So far, Trump has appointed three former Fox News hosts to prominent positions, including Pete Hegseth, Sean Duffy, and Mike Huckabee. Hegseth, a former co-host of Fox News’s weekend morning show has no former experience in government, but both Duffy and Huckabee served as elected officials. Duffy was a member of Congress, while Huckabee was the longtime governor of Arkansas and ran for president multiple times. Other Trump picks, like Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz, have guest-hosted cable news shows and podcasts.
This is a developing story and has been updated.
