President Trump is expected to nominate Heidi Overton, a top conservative policy aide, as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, according to multiple media reports.

Overton is currently the deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and has played a key role in shaping a variety of health policies during Trump's second term. At times, she has notably angered members of the Make America Healthy Again movement, which was created by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Overton has a medical degree from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and earned a doctoral degree in clinical investigation from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. While at Johns Hopkins, she worked with Marty Makary, the previous FDA commissioner who was ousted by Trump amid a cacophony of controversies.

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The federal agency tasked with studying ways to improve America's outstandingly poor healthcare system is "on the brink," experts warn. The Trump administration has cut its staff by 75 percent, canceled its grants en masse, and is refusing to spend tens of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress.

Whether the agency "will survive the second Trump administration is an open question," health policy experts Aaron Carroll and David Atkins wrote in an opinion piece published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The agency in question is the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which has focused on ways to improve patient safety, healthcare quality, care delivery, and new technologies and practices since the 1990s. In the past, "Republican leaders recognized that health care disparities were fundamental quality problems," Carroll and Atkins wrote. But recently, disparities in care have become partisan issues.

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