Outrage of the Month: Trump’s Corporate Interest Healthcare Advisory Panel
Health Letter, August 2026
By Sarah Karlin-Smith
Research Director, Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines Program
If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention!
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In March 2026 the Trump administration announced a new Healthcare Advisory Committee tasked with providing expert advice on improving, strengthening and modernizing U.S. health care. The committee’s broad scope includes advising on ways to improve how care is financed and delivered across Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Affordable Care Act’s Health Insurance Marketplace. Together these programs serve more than 160 million Americans. The committee met for the first time in mid-May.
The composition of the panel raises grave concerns about its ability to provide sound recommendations in the best interest of U.S. patients and their health. A Public Citizen investigation found financial conflicts of interest were widespread among the 18 members. Nearly all the appointees hold senior leadership positions in health care organizations that are invested in making money off the U.S. health system. Some members are, or were previously, involved in health-industry lobbying. Only a third of the committee are medical doctors, and two are former nurses. Most of the medical professionals, however, don’t appear to be involved with direct patient care and instead serve in business and operational roles. The committee has no patient or consumer representatives.
Committee members include Andrew Lynch, the Chief Strategy Officer at a for-profit behavioral health company that has faced a number of legal challenges in recent years including scrutiny for understaffing of the psychiatric hospitals it operates. They also include Sebastian Caliri, a venture capitalist at 8VC, which invests in a range of life science and health care companies such as Blink Health, a prescription drug platform whose board includes President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr.
The U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other high-income nation but consistently has lower life expectancy than our peers. A panel of health care advisors invested in health care as a money-making business, not a human right, is a recipe for more of the same failing strategies that put profit over health.
Many of the committee’s appointees are also politically connected to the Trump world, the Republican party, or have business relationships with the Trump family or Trump administration officials. The lack of diversity in political philosophy among the panel members raises questions about whether their appointments were in part a reward for political donations and favors, not their qualifications and expertise.
Committee member Elizabeth Fargo, who worked in the nursing home business, has raised millions of dollars for President Trump. In 2025 Trump pardoned Fargo’s son, Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who pleaded guilty to tax crimes. Another appointee, Tony Robbins, was reportedly approached by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Kennedy’s running mate for his 2024 Presidential bid. Robbins is a motivational speaker and life coach who profits from expensive and unproven supplements. Robbins appears to have no professional credentials that would qualify him to serve on the committee.
On July 14, U.S. Senators Jeffrey Merkley and Ron Wyden, Democrats from Oregon, wrote to HHS Secretary Kennedy and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz raising serious concerns about the committee’s composition and the credibility of any policy recommendations it might make. Merkley and Wyden argue that the committee fails to satisfy the membership balance required by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).
FACA’s requirements “exist to ensure that committees advising the federal government are balanced, accountable, and accessible to the public,” the senators wrote. FACA requires “the membership of the advisory committee to be fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented,” and that there be procedures in place “to assure that the advice and recommendations of the advisory committee will not be inappropriately influenced by the appointing authority or by any special interest, but will instead be the result of the advisory committee’s independent judgment.”
The senators’ first substantive concern is that the committee lacks public health experts, academics, health care economists and patient advocates. They fear that that the dominance of industry executives and investors will lead to recommendations that “skew towards overrepresenting industry concerns and special interests, while patient voices and lived experience of harm will be notably underrepresented.”
The senators’ second concern relates to the committee members’ connections to the Trump campaign or Trump’s businesses. “These relationships raise serious questions as to whether such members can render advice that is not ‘inappropriately influenced by the appointing authority,”” as required by FACA, the senators said. They call for such committee members to be removed.
The Senators are undertaking a formal review of the advisory committee.
Public Citizen urges HHS and CMS to disband this committee, which does not appear to be performing any essential or statutorily required functions. If HHS and CMS believe such a committee is necessary, they should reconstitute it according to FACA requirements, ensuring membership is free from conflicts of interest and that it is composed of a diverse array of health professionals including academic experts and consumer and patient advocates. The committee must also be explicitly directed to offer guidance in the best interest of patients, public health and the U.S. government, not corporate health care entities.