The Senate Committee on Finance voted along party lines Tuesday afternoon to advance Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to a full confirmation vote. 

The party-line vote, which saw 14 GOP senators vote in favor of Oz’s nomination and 13 Democrats vote against it, follows two hearings by the Senate Finance Committee that probed Oz over his plans for the federal healthcare programs, his views on abortion, potential conflicts of interest in the healthcare industry and more.

‘Dr. Oz has years of experience as an acclaimed physician and public health advocate. His background makes him uniquely qualified for this role, and there is no doubt that he will work tirelessly to deliver much-needed change at CMS,’ Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, the chairman of the committee, said Tuesday. 

Oz graduated from Harvard University and received medical and business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former heart surgeon who saw his fame rise through his appearances on daytime TV and 13 seasons of ‘The Dr Oz Show.’

Oz later transitioned into politics, launching an unsuccessful bid for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat in 2022. He ultimately lost to John Fetterman, then the state’s lieutenant governor. 

If confirmed by the full Senate, Oz would be in charge of nearly $1.5 trillion in federal healthcare spending. Medicare, a federal healthcare program for seniors aged 65 and up, currently provides coverage for about 65 million Americans, according to the Center for Medicare Advocacy. Medicaid, which assists people with low incomes, covers roughly 72 million Americans, according to Medicaid.gov.

Oz’s leadership would direct decisions related to how the government covers procedures, hospital stays and medication within the federal healthcare programs, as well as the reimbursement rates at which healthcare providers get paid for their services.

Earlier this month, Trump’s pick to lead the NIH and FDA, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary, respectively, were also approved in committee and are awaiting full confirmation votes in the Senate scheduled for later Tuesday. It is unclear when Oz’s full Senate vote will take place.

Around the same time that Bhattacharya and Makary won committee approval, Trump withdrew his nomination of former Florida Rep. David Weldon to run the CDC, over fears he did not have the GOP support to clear full confirmation. On Monday, the Trump administration named Susan Monarez, acting director of the CDC, as its new nominee.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing the FBI to immediately declassify files concerning the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the agency probe launched in 2016 that sought information on whether Trump campaign members colluded with Russia during the presidential race. 

After signing the order, Trump said that now the media can review previously withheld files pertaining to the investigation — although he cast doubt on whether many journalists would do so. 

‘You probably won’t bother because you’re not going to like what you see,’ Trump said. ‘But this was total weaponization. It’s a disgrace. It should have never happened in this country. But now you’ll be able to see for yourselves. All declassified.’

The FBI on July 31, 2016, opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump, then a presidential candidate, or members of his campaign were colluding or coordinating with Russia to influence the 2016 election. That investigation was referred to inside the bureau as ‘Crossfire Hurricane.’

The opening of the investigation came just days after a July 28 meeting during which then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Barack Obama on a purported proposal from one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign foreign policy advisors ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.’ Clinton was the Democrat nominee for president that year.

By January 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey had notified Trump of a dossier, known as the Steele dossier, that contained salacious and unverified allegations about Trump’s purported coordination with the Russian government, a key document prompting the opening of the probe. 

The dossier was authored by Christopher Steele, an ex-British intelligence officer, and commissioned by Fusion GPS. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS during the 2016 election cycle.

It was eventually determined that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the dossier through the law firm Perkins Coie.

Trump fired Comey in May 2017. Days later, Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to take over the ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ probe and investigate whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election cycle.

While Mueller investigated, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence opened its own investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion. 

By February 2018, Kash Patel — then chief investigator for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and now the FBI Director — had uncovered widespread government surveillance abuses, including the improper surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Patel was an integral part of the creation of a memo released by Nunes in February 2018, which detailed the DOJ’s and FBI’s surveillance of Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Nunes and Patel revealed that the infamous anti-Trump dossier funded by Democrats ‘formed an essential part’ of the application to spy on Page.

The memo referred to closed-door testimony from former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who said that ‘no surveillance warrant would have been sought’ from the FISA court ‘without the Steele dossier information.’

But when applying for the FISA warrant, the FBI omitted the origins of the dossier, specifically its funding from Hillary Clinton, then Trump’s 2016 presidential opponent.

The memo also said Steele, who worked as an FBI informant, was eventually cut off from the bureau for what the FBI described as the most serious of violations, ‘an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI.’

The memo noted that the FBI and DOJ obtained ‘one initial FISA warrant’ targeting Page and three FISA renewals from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The statute required that every 90 days a FISA order on a U.S. citizen ‘must be reviewed.’

The memo revealed that Comey signed three FISA applications for Page, while McCabe, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente signed at least one.

The memo was widely criticized by Democrats but was ultimately correct.

The Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, reviewed the memo and confirmed the dossier served as the basis for the controversial FISA warrants obtained against Page.

Meanwhile, Special Counsel Robert Mueller completed his investigation into a possible Trump-Russia connection in April 2019. The extensive probe yielded no evidence of criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

After Mueller’s report was made public, then-Attorney General Bill Barr tapped John Durham, a U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to serve as special counsel to investigate the origins of ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ itself. 

Durham, in his final report released in May 2023, said he found, after years of investigating, that the FBI did not have any actual evidence to support the start of that investigation. He also found that the Department of Justice and FBI ‘failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law’ when it launched the Trump-Russia investigation. 

Durham also found that the FBI ‘failed to act’ on a ‘clear warning sign’ that the bureau was the ‘target’ of a Clinton-led effort to ‘manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes’ ahead of the 2016 presidential election. 

Durham was referring to intelligence suggesting that the Clinton campaign had a plan to link Trump to Russia, potentially as a distraction from the ongoing investigation into her use of a private email server and alleged handling of classified information.

Durham found that Brennan ‘realized the significance’ of the intelligence that Clinton was stirring up a plan to tie Trump to Russia — so much so, that he ‘expeditiously’ briefed Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and other top national security officials.

But nothing came of that briefing or of his subsequent referral of the information to the FBI, according to Durham’s final report.

‘The aforementioned facts reflect a rather startling and inexplicable failure to adequately consider and incorporate the Clinton Plan intelligence into the FBI’s investigative decision-making in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,’ Durham’s report states.

‘Indeed, had the FBI opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation as an assessment and, in turn, gathered and analyzed data in concert with the information from the Clinton Plan intelligence, it is likely that the information received would have been examined, at a minimum, with a more critical eye,’ the report continued.

This is a breaking story. 

President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Dr. Marty Makary, cleared a key vote in the Senate on Tuesday, the last such test before his final confirmation vote. 

The Senate voted 56-44 to invoke cloture on the nomination. 

A final vote to confirm the FDA nominee is slated for after 8 p.m. Tuesday. 

Makary, a former Fox News medical contributor, went before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) earlier this month and answered various questions on vaccines, chronic illness, food safety and abortion. 

During his hearing, the nominee faced scrutiny over an FDA vaccine meeting that was reportedly postponed at the last minute. 

‘So if you are confirmed, will you commit to immediately reschedule that FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee meeting to get the expert views?’ Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., asked Makary at the time. 

He responded that he ‘would reevaluate which topics deserve a convening of the advisory committee members on [Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee] and which may not require a convening.’ 

When this response wasn’t good enough for Murray, Makary flipped the question, telling her to confront the Biden administration. ‘Well, you can ask the Biden administration that chose not to convene the committee meeting for the COVID vaccine booster,’ he said. 

He was referring to the Biden administration in 2021 pushing through FDA approval for a COVID-19 booster for everyone over the age of 18. 

‘The FDA did not hold a meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee on these actions,’ read a press release at the time, ‘as the agency previously convened the committee for extensive discussions regarding the use of booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines and, after review of both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s EUA requests, the FDA concluded that the requests do not raise questions that would benefit from additional discussion by committee members.’

Committee member Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, criticized the administration’s move, saying, ‘We’re being asked to approve this as a three-dose vaccine for people 16 years of age and older, without any clear evidence if the third dose for a younger person when compared to an elderly person is of value.’

Makary has long been a critic of the administration he is poised to lead. He wrote an opinion piece in 2021, calling for ‘fresh leadership at the FDA to change the culture at the agency and promote scientific advancement, not hinder it.’

‘We now have a generational opportunity in American healthcare,’ he said at his hearing. ‘President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s focus on healthy foods has galvanized a grassroots movement in America. Childhood obesity is not a willpower problem, and the rise of early-onset Alzheimer’s is not a genetic cause. We should be, and we will, be addressing food as it impacts our health.’

The full Senate voted Tuesday evening to confirm President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

The party-line vote followed approval from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which also voted along party lines to advance Bhattacharya, leading to today’s full Senate vote.  

A physician, Stanford professor of medicine and senior fellow at the university’s Institute for Economic Policy Research, Bhattacharya was a leading voice during the COVID-19 pandemic against lockdown measures and vaccine mandates. 

He was one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document published in October 2020 by a group of scientists advocating against widespread COVID lockdowns and promoting the efficacy of natural immunity for low-risk individuals as opposed to vaccination.

Bhattacharya was probed by the Senate HELP Committee earlier this month over various issues related to his potential role as NIH director. However, for much of the hearing, he was forced to defend the president’s decision to cut certain research funds at NIH, including a 15% cap on indirect research costs, also known as facilities and administrative costs, dispersed by the NIH.

Bhattacharya would not explicitly say he disagreed with the cuts, or that, if confirmed, he would step in to stop them. Rather, he said he would ‘follow the law,’ while also investigating the effect of the cuts and ensuring every NIH researcher doing work that advances the health outcomes of Americans has the resources necessary.

‘I think transparency regarding indirect costs is absolutely worthwhile. It’s something that universities can fix by working together to make sure that where that money goes is made clear,’ Bhattacharya said of the indirect costs going to universities, hospitals and research clinics from the NIH. 

In addition to addressing questions about the Trump cuts, Bhattacharya also laid out what he called a new, decentralized vision for future research at NIH that he said will be aimed at embracing dissenting ideas and transparency, while focusing on research topics that have the best chance at directly benefiting health outcomes of Americans. Bhattacharya added that he wants to rid the agency’s research portfolio of other ‘frivolous’ efforts that he says do little to directly benefit health outcomes.

‘I think fundamentally what matters is do scientists have an idea that advances the scientific field they’re in?’ Bhattacharya said last week during his confirmation testimony. ‘Do they have an idea that ends up addressing the health needs of Americans?’

Prior to his confirmation, Bhattacharya, alongside several other scientists, including Trump’s pick to head the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, launched a new research journal focused on spurring scientific discourse and combating ‘gatekeeping’ in the medical research community. The journal, the Journal of the Academy of Public Health (JAPH), aims to spur scientific discourse by publishing peer reviews of prominent studies from other journals that do not make their peer reviews publicly available.

President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Dr. Marty Makary, was confirmed in the Senate on Tuesday.

His confirmation was cemented just hours after he cleared one last procedural test vote earlier in the evening. 

The Senate voted 56-44 to invoke cloture on the nomination prior to his final confirmation.

Makary, a former Fox News medical contributor, went before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) earlier this month and answered various questions on vaccines, chronic illness, food safety and abortion. 

During his hearing, the nominee faced scrutiny over an FDA vaccine meeting that was reportedly postponed at the last minute. 

‘So if you are confirmed, will you commit to immediately reschedule that FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee meeting to get the expert views?’ Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., asked Makary at the time. 

He responded that he ‘would reevaluate which topics deserve a convening of the advisory committee members on [Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee] and which may not require a convening.’ 

When this response wasn’t good enough for Murray, Makary flipped the question, telling her to confront the Biden administration. ‘Well, you can ask the Biden administration that chose not to convene the committee meeting for the COVID vaccine booster,’ he said. 

He was referring to the Biden administration in 2021 pushing through FDA approval for a COVID-19 booster for everyone over the age of 18. 

‘The FDA did not hold a meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee on these actions,’ read a press release at the time, ‘as the agency previously convened the committee for extensive discussions regarding the use of booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines and, after review of both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s EUA requests, the FDA concluded that the requests do not raise questions that would benefit from additional discussion by committee members.’

Committee member Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, criticized the administration’s move, saying, ‘We’re being asked to approve this as a three-dose vaccine for people 16 years of age and older, without any clear evidence if the third dose for a younger person when compared to an elderly person is of value.’

Makary has long been a critic of the administration he will now lead. He wrote an opinion piece in 2021, calling for ‘fresh leadership at the FDA to change the culture at the agency and promote scientific advancement, not hinder it.’

‘We now have a generational opportunity in American healthcare,’ he said at his hearing. ‘President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s focus on healthy foods has galvanized a grassroots movement in America. Childhood obesity is not a willpower problem, and the rise of early-onset Alzheimer’s is not a genetic cause. We should be, and we will, be addressing food as it impacts our health.’

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has lingering questions about President Donald Trump’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) nominee, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and his past stances on transgender treatments for minors and abortion, and he says the nominee hasn’t answered his inquiries. 

The Missouri Republican told Fox News Digital in an interview that he remains concerned by Oz’s past of ‘promoting transgender surgeries for minors, promoting transgender hormone treatments and puberty blockers for minors.’

He submitted a number of questions to Oz on the subjects earlier in the month, but Hawley said Oz never answered. ‘He hasn’t. Which I think is strange,’ he said. 

‘I’m hoping that he’s changed his views,’ Hawley added. ‘I’d like to hear from him that he is in total alignment with President Trump, who has been tremendously strong on this.’

In a statement to Fox News Digital, White House spokesman Kush Desai said, ‘Every member of the Trump administration is working from the same playbook, President Trump’s playbook, to restore commonsense policies and put an end to left-wing ideological nonsense afflicting our government.’

‘We look forward to the Senate’s swift confirmation of Dr. Oz so he can join the rest of our all-star team at HHS working to Make America Healthy Again by restoring common sense, transparency, and confidence in our healthcare apparatus.’

As Hawley noted, Oz has used his television show to platform people who supported and promoted transgender treatments, particularly for minors. 

Oz hosted two transgender children on his show in 2010 in a segment titled, ‘Transgender Kids: Too Young to Decide?’ 

Josie, 8, and the child’s mother, Vanessia, claimed that Josie’s life improved once the male-born child began embracing a feminine lifestyle. Isaac, who was 15, and the minor’s parents, Arturo and Monica, revealed that they decided to let their female-born teenager begin taking puberty blockers and have the teenager’s breasts removed in a double mastectomy. 

The segment was touted as ‘groundbreaking’ by LGBTQ activist group GLAAD, which told supporters to thank Oz. 

The television doctor has also had a history of supporting abortion. 

In a 2019 interview on popular radio show ‘The Breakfast Club,’ Oz said he was concerned by state laws aimed at restricting or limiting abortion, saying it’s ‘a hard issue for everybody.’

And while on ‘a personal level,’ he didn’t like abortion, he also believed he should not ‘interfere with everyone else’s stuff.’ 

‘Because it’s hard enough to get into life as it is,’ he added. 

When Oz ran for Senate in Pennsylvania as a Republican in 2022, he still opposed government jurisdiction on the subject of abortion. 

‘I don’t want the federal government involved with that at all,’ he said during a debate with now-Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa. ‘I want women, doctors, local political leaders, letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive, to put the best ideas forward, so states can decide for themselves.’

Asked whether he would vote to confirm Oz even without answers to his questions, Hawley wouldn’t say. ‘I just have to believe that he will respond here.’