FDA Commissioner Marty Makary Forced Out After Refusing to Authorize Flavored Vapes

A Resignation the President Demanded

On Tuesday, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned after roughly a year on the job. The official statement was cordial. The reporting was not. According to NBC News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and STAT, Makary was pushed out after President Trump personally and angrily reprimanded him for trying to block agency scientists from authorizing fruit-flavored electronic cigarettes — products the FDA’s own career staff have warned for years are designed to addict children.

The president did not ask Makary to weigh the science. He told him to do it because, in Trump’s words, the MAGA movement’s young voters wanted flavored vapes. Six days before the resignation, the FDA — under exactly that pressure — formally authorized 45 flavored e-cigarette products, including mango and blueberry varieties from Glas Inc., the first fruit-flavored vapes the agency has ever cleared.

Trump did not just lean on the FDA. He broke it.

The “Save Vaping” Promise

The flavored-vape fight is not a one-off scandal. It is a campaign promise being collected on by the tobacco and vaping industry that helped pay for it. During the 2024 campaign, Trump publicly pledged to “save vaping” and accepted political support from vape distributors and the broader nicotine industry. Once in office, the pressure on FDA to authorize the flavored products that make vaping appealing to teenagers became a White House priority.

Career scientists at the FDA had long resisted, citing the agency’s own data: youth e-cigarette use exploded the moment fruit, candy, and dessert flavors hit the market in the late 2010s. Those flavors are why kids vape. The FDA’s previous position — backed by pediatricians and public-health groups across the political spectrum — was that no flavored e-cigarette had cleared the statutory bar requiring manufacturers to show their products were “appropriate for the protection of public health.”

Makary, a Trump appointee and a Johns Hopkins surgeon with no prior tobacco-policy record, was supposed to deliver the reversal. When he hesitated, Trump reportedly screamed at him in person. When the May 6 authorizations went through over his objections, his exit was already arranged.

Regulatory Capture, Filmed in Real Time

What happened at the FDA in May 2026 is a textbook case of what political scientists call regulatory capture — the moment a regulator stops protecting the public and starts protecting an industry. Usually it takes years and unfolds in obscurity. Here it happened on a tight schedule, in public, with the president personally cracking the whip and a sitting commissioner getting fired for the offense of doing his job.

The mango and blueberry vapes are the headline. The precedent is the story. The next time a tobacco, pharmaceutical, food, or cosmetics company wants the FDA to clear a product its scientists oppose, they now have a worked example: complain to the White House, and the White House will fire the commissioner. There is no reason to believe the precedent stops at vapes.

Trump’s replacement is Kyle Diamantas, a deputy commissioner who runs the agency’s food program. He has not, as of this writing, said whether he believes career scientists should be allowed to overrule political appointees on safety findings. Given how he got the job, the answer can be inferred.

The Pattern

This is the second-term version of a pattern that has defined Trump’s relationship to the federal bureaucracy from day one: civil servants and independent expert agencies exist to be bent to whatever the president’s political coalition wants this week, and anyone who refuses gets removed. Inspectors general were fired en masse in January 2025. Career prosecutors who declined to pursue Trump’s enemies were pushed out. Independent agency boards have been gutted. The FDA — one of the few American institutions that is supposed to put evidence ahead of politics — has now joined the list.

The cost is not abstract. According to the most recent CDC data, more than two million U.S. middle and high schoolers used e-cigarettes in the year before the FDA’s reversal, and flavored products account for the overwhelming majority of that use. The administration just told that population, and the industry that markets to it, that the federal government is open for business. The commissioner who tried to say otherwise is gone.