A 13-month FDA tenure ends in moral resignation. A White House overrides its own commissioner to deliver a $6 billion gift to its donors. And the country’s nicotine policy is now written, in plain sight, by the men the president once called “my tobacco guys.”
On the afternoon of Tuesday, May 12, Dr. Marty Makary submitted his resignation as Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration by text message — a fittingly graceless end to a thirteen-month tenure that began with bipartisan support and ended in what associates have described as moral exhaustion. Less than a week earlier, the agency he ran had issued its first-ever authorization of fruit-flavored vapes for the American market: mango, blueberry, and two menthol varieties, all manufactured by a Los Angeles startup called Glas Inc. According to reporting in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, Makary had spent weeks resisting that approval. President Donald Trump had spent those same weeks demanding it.
The vape itself is almost beside the point. What the episode reveals — about whose interests this administration serves, about how regulatory science is now produced inside the West Wing, and about the simple inability of a 79-year-old president to keep his own stated positions straight from one administration to the next — should alarm anyone who still believes the federal regulatory state is supposed to answer to evidence rather than to a donor list.
1. The Reversal
In 2019, during his first term, Donald Trump signed legislation raising the federal tobacco purchase age to 21 and oversaw a regulatory crackdown on the sweet, candy-flavored vape pods that public health officials had identified as the principal accelerant of a youth nicotine crisis. Announcing those restrictions, Trump told reporters that the country could not allow its young people to be made sick. The policy worked. Youth vaping rates, which had peaked near 20 percent in 2019, fell steadily for five consecutive years. In April 2025, a unanimous Supreme Court — Trump’s Court — upheld the FDA’s authority to deny flavored vape applications.
Then Trump won re-election, and the policy collapsed.
On May 5, 2026, the FDA authorized Glas Inc.’s “Gold” (mango) and “Sapphire” (blueberry) pods, each containing five percent nicotine, alongside two menthol varieties. Bret Koplow, the acting director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, framed the move as a victory for age-gating technology. STAT News, which scrutinized the announcement closely, noted a striking omission: no quote from Commissioner Makary appeared anywhere in the agency’s press release. Instead, the authorization was attributed to a decision made under the president’s leadership — language without precedent for a scientific regulatory determination, and a tell-tale signal of where the decision actually originated.
“We can’t allow people to get sick. And we can’t allow our youth to be so affected.”
— President Donald J. Trump, defending the 2019 flavored vape restrictions he reversed seven years later
2. The Resignation
A week after the Glas approval, Makary was gone. CBS News reported that one source familiar with the matter said the commissioner did not want to approve the flavored varieties but had been forced to do so by other members of the administration. NBC News reported that Makary chose to resign rather than defend, under oath before Congress, a position he did not hold. He had been scheduled to testify the following morning. He resigned the afternoon before.
The Time magazine account made the trigger explicit: Makary’s concern over the appeal of fruit-flavored e-cigarettes to young people prompted his decision to step down. President Trump, asked about the departure, told reporters that Makary “was having some difficulty” and that the former commissioner would “lead a good life.” He named Kyle Diamantas, previously the agency’s top food regulator, as acting commissioner. Diamantas has no public record on tobacco policy.
Rich Danker, the chief spokesperson for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., resigned the following day. In an exit letter addressed to Trump, Danker warned that the new policy would appeal to children and expose them to nicotine addiction, lung damage, and elevated cancer risk. He did not attribute the policy to Trump directly. He attributed it, pointedly, to senior officials in the immediate office of the Secretary.
The line of accountability, in other words, runs upward from the agency — past the commissioner who would not sign it, past the spokesperson who would not defend it, into a White House that does not want it discussed at all.
3. The Money Trail
Why did the president who signed Tobacco 21 become the champion of mango pods? The answer is not ideological. The answer is on file at the Federal Election Commission.
The New York Times, in a detailed reconstruction of how the policy came together, reported that during the 2024 campaign Reynolds American executives became such a regular presence around Trump’s operation that the candidate took to calling them his tobacco guys. Two days into his second term, the administration withdrew the proposed federal menthol cigarette ban — an initiative the Biden administration had, by then, largely abandoned but had not formally killed. Sixteen months later, with Glas’s fruit pods cleared for sale, the tobacco industry has won the two largest deregulatory prizes it had on its wish list before Trump took the oath.
The chronology, laid out, is its own indictment:
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4. The Children Left Behind
Public health organizations responded with the institutional fury usually reserved for clear policy disasters. Yolonda C. Richardson, who runs the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said the decision risks reversing the progress the country has made on youth e-cigarette use and contradicts the FDA’s own scientific record. The American Lung Association called the move reckless. Kelsey Romeo-Stuppy, managing attorney at Action on Smoking and Health, told Fortune the agency had failed Americans’ right to health, warning that flavors induce children and young adults into lifetime addiction.
The data justifies their alarm. Of the roughly 1.6 million middle and high school students using vape products in the CDC’s 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey, nearly nine in ten reported using fruit- or candy-flavored varieties. Flavor is not an incidental feature of the youth vape market — flavor is the youth vape market. The FDA has known this for years. The Supreme Court has formally endorsed the agency’s authority to act on this knowledge. The president was, until recently, on record as agreeing with both of them.
The bipartisan letter from Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, delivered on May 5, framed the issue with what passes in this Senate for clarity: the public health risks of authorization outweigh the benefits. The position has support across party lines in both chambers. The position has support in the FDA’s own scientific staff. The position had, until ten days ago, the support of the FDA Commissioner. None of that mattered.
5. Constitutional Accountability
The episode is a corruption story first and a competence story second. But it is also — and the country should not look away from this — a coherence story. In 2019, Donald Trump warned the nation that it could not allow its youth to be made sick. In 2024, he pledged to save vaping. Between those two positions there is no new science, no new data, no new technology. There is only a private lunch with industry lobbyists at a Florida golf club, ten million dollars in super-PAC contributions, and the inauguration-committee checks from Altria, Breeze Smoke, and the Vapor Technology Association.
A president whose stated positions move only with the donor file is not exercising independent judgment. A president who berates his own FDA commissioner for refusing to override the agency’s scientific staff is not running a government. He is processing requests.
When Section 4 was written, this was the precise scenario it imagined.
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, provides two distinct remedies for presidential incapacity. Section 3 permits a president to voluntarily transfer power. Section 4 — the contested provision — allows the Vice President, together with a majority of the Cabinet or “such other body as Congress may by law provide,” to declare that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office and to transfer those powers to the Vice President as Acting President.
That “other body” has never been created. On April 14, 2026, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation to establish it — a 17-member Commission on Presidential Capacity composed of physicians, psychiatrists, and former high-ranking executive officials appointed equally by the two parties. The bill has 50 House co-sponsors. More than 85 House and Senate Democrats have, in the past month, formally called for Trump to be removed via the 25th Amendment or impeached, citing a pattern of erratic public statements, including a Truth Social post threatening that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not capitulate to a deadline.
The constitutional argument advanced by Raskin and his co-sponsors is that the framers of Section 4 deliberately left the term “inability” undefined precisely so that Congress could apply it to forms of incapacity the framers could not predict. John Feerick, the amendment’s principal draftsman, has written that the terms were left flexible by design — that “inability” was meant to cover any condition or circumstance preventing the president from discharging his duties, including erratic decision-making, donor-captured judgment, or a documented inability to maintain a coherent policy position from one term to the next.
The vape episode, on its own, is not Section 4 evidence. It is a policy reversal — corrupt, perhaps, but not strictly an incapacity. What it adds is pattern. It joins the Iran threats. It joins the public outbursts. It joins a record in which decisions of national consequence appear to track not evidence, not advisors, not science, but the most recent transaction.
Congress has had 58 years to constitute the “other body” the Constitution authorizes. The reason it has not is not legal. It is political cowardice. The Makary resignation, the menthol withdrawal, the inaugural checks, the Mar-a-Lago lobbyist meetings — none of these are evidence of the president’s good faith stewardship of his office. They are evidence of a presidency that has stopped functioning as one.
6. What Marty Makary Knew
It would be wrong to read this episode as a story of one principled commissioner against a corrupted White House. Makary’s tenure was, by the account of career FDA staff who spoke to CBS News, defined by self-promotion, by micromanagement, and by approval pathways that placed impossible burdens on understaffed scientific divisions. He angered abortion-rights advocates by promising a renewed review of mifepristone. He angered anti-abortion groups by not delivering one. He angered vaccine specialists by entertaining the Health Secretary’s most fringe ideas. He angered the pharmaceutical industry by being inconsistent. Dr. Aaron Kesselheim of Harvard Medical School summarized the consensus: nobody was happy with what he did.
But on this one issue — at the very end, with his job on the line — Makary held the line that the FDA’s career scientists had been holding for a decade. He looked at the data on youth uptake of flavored vapes. He looked at the bipartisan letter from Durbin and Collins. He looked at the Supreme Court ruling that had unanimously affirmed his agency’s authority. And he refused to sign the document the president wanted him to sign.
That refusal, in this White House, is now a resignation offense.
That is the part the country must not let pass. A regulator whose final professional act was to decline to lie to Congress about a position he did not hold was forced out by an administration that found his honesty inconvenient. The person who took his place has no public record on the policy at issue, and was selected — the president told reporters — for being “a very talented person.” This is how regulatory capture ends. Not with a thunderclap, but with the quiet replacement of inconvenient commissioners by talented people.
Editorial Conclusion
The Glas Inc. authorization is not, in the long view of American public health, the worst thing this administration has done. It will not be the worst thing it does. But it is one of the clearest demonstrations yet of how this presidency now works: a donor places an order, a commissioner is broken or removed, a scientific agency is overridden, and a generation of teenagers is delivered to a lifetime of addiction so that an industry that has already killed millions of Americans can sell mango pods.
Marty Makary will be all right. The tobacco executives will be more than all right. The question is whether the country’s institutions — the FDA, the Senate, the courts, the constitutional machinery the framers gave us for exactly this kind of failure — can still recognize what has happened to them. The 25th Amendment exists for a reason. So does the FDA. So does Congress. They are not ornaments. The question is whether anyone left in office has the courage to use them.
Sources & References
- The Washington PostIn a first, FDA authorizes fruit-flavored vapes for adults (Roubein, May 5, 2026)
- CBS NewsMarty Makary resigns as FDA commissioner after internal tensions (May 12, 2026)
- NBC NewsDr. Marty Makary is out as FDA commissioner (Lovelace, May 12, 2026)
- Time MagazineFDA Commissioner Marty Makary Resigns (May 12, 2026)
- Scientific AmericanThe Trump administration is bringing back flavored vapes (Kovac, May 6, 2026)
- FortuneTrump pressed his FDA chief to allow mango and blueberry flavors (May 7, 2026)
- STAT NewsFDA approval of fruit-flavored vapes raises political concerns (May 6, 2026)
- The HillFDA approves some flavored vapes after reports of Trump pressure
- CBS NewsFruit-flavored e-cigarettes for adults OK’d by FDA in major shift under Trump
- Common DreamsReport Details How Trump Did Big Tobacco’s Bidding on Flavored Vapes (Prager, May 13, 2026)
- Democracy NowFDA Chief Pushed Out in Latest Sign of Public Health Chaos
- Pulmonology AdvisorFDA Authorizes Fruit-Flavored Vapes for Adults
- The Washington Post (2024)Tobacco industry bets on Trump to stop proposed menthol cigarette ban
- House Judiciary DemocratsRaskin Introduces Legislation Establishing Independent Commission on Presidential Capacity (April 14, 2026)
- AxiosHouse Democrats file long-shot 25th Amendment bill targeting Trump
- Fox NewsRep. Jamie Raskin introduces bill to assess Trump’s fitness for office
- Wikipedia · ReferenceTwenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution
- OpenSecretsTobacco Industry Contribution Summary
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