Michael Shearer

And he took the deal.

It's been a real whirlwind.

I don't think, you know, there's ever been as dramatic a—we're nine months or ten months now into the administration at HHS.

The first thing you have to say is about a quarter of the people who worked for HHS have left, which is a massive downsizing.

Some of them were fired.

Some of them were given buyout packages.

Some of them left voluntarily because they objected to the direction of the policies that were happening.

But that's a dramatic shift.

There have been enormous reductions in—

Funding at NIH.

So that's sort of the institutional part.

On the policy front, there's a whole bunch of stuff he's done.

A lot of them are things that are classically liberal Ralph Nader type policies.

You know, he's announced that he wants to review whether pharmaceutical advertising should be allowed in the U.S.

It's a Bernie Sanders priority.

He has pushed for voluntary agreements from food companies to take certain food dyes out of cereal and candy.

He has pushed states to change eligibility for public assistance to make it so that people who are receiving public assistance cannot spend that money on sugary sodas and in some cases candy because –

He's sort of refocused a lot of everyone's attention on the fact that chronic disease is now the thing that's killing us.

It's not infectious disease like it was 100 years ago.

But the most controversial area and the area of greatest friction that has gotten most attention has been his efforts to remake the way U.S.