Robert F. Kennedy

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Calley Means is out of the White House; Casey Means misses Senate hearing

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In a statement Thursday, government watchdog Public Citizen cheered the news of his departure.

“The Trump Administration has wildly abused the Special Government Employee designation to shoehorn powerful people into official jobs in a way that allowed them to evade financial transparency and anti-corruption restraints,” Public Citizen Democracy Advocate Jon Golinger said. “The clock ran out on Mr. Means, and we’re glad he finally resigned.”

“Charlatan”

Casey has a background in actual medicine, with a degree from Stanford Medical School, but she dropped out of her residency, holds no active medical license or board certification, and has gone all in on “functional” medicine, which is an ill-defined form of alternative medicine. She co-founded a company called Levels, which promotes intensive health tracking, including continuous blood glucose monitoring for people who don’t have prediabetes or diabetes. (Another Levels co-founder is Sam Corcos, now the chief information officer for the Department of the Treasury, who, as The New Yorker reported, led the effort to dismantle the Internal Revenue Service on behalf of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.)

Casey and Calley Means made a name for themselves among the MAHA crowd with their 2024 book Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. The book encourages health-conscious readers to avoid processed foods, seed oils, fragrances, a variety of home care products, fluoride, unfiltered water, bananas (when eaten alone), receipt paper, and birth control pills. It includes a chapter titled “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor.”

Health experts have sharply criticized her nomination to the role of surgeon general. The health network Defend Public Health released a statement Thursday urging lawmakers to reject her “quackery.”

“The US Surgeon General is the leading US government voice on public health issues,” said DPH member and physician Oni Blackstock, an HIV expert and former assistant commissioner at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “That person must be someone Americans can trust to give credible advice based on solid science and real data, not a charlatan who specializes in selling expensive, unproven tests and treatments.”

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CDC can no longer help prevent lead poisoning in children, state officials say

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Amid the brutal cuts across the federal government under the Trump administration, perhaps one of the most gutting is the loss of experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who respond to lead poisoning in children.

On April 1, the staff of the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was terminated as part of the agency’s reduction in force, according to NPR. The staff included epidemiologists, statisticians, and advisors who specialized in lead exposures and responses.

The cuts were immediately consequential to health officials in Milwaukee, who are currently dealing with a lead exposure crisis in public schools. Six schools have had to close, displacing 1,800 students. In April, the city requested help from the CDC’s lead experts, but the request was denied—there was no one left to help.

In a Congressional hearing this week, US health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told lawmakers, “We have a team in Milwaukee.”

But Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis told NPR that this is false. “There is no team in Milwaukee,” he said. “We had a single [federal] staff person come to Milwaukee for a brief period to help validate a machine, but that was separate from the formal request that we had for a small team to actually come to Milwaukee for our Milwaukee Public Schools investigation and ongoing support there.”

Kennedy has also previously told lawmakers that lead experts at the CDC who were terminated would be rehired. But that statement was also false. The health department’s own communications team told ABC that the lead experts would not be reinstated.

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