What to know about Doug Collins, Trump's pick to oversee veterans affairs

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What to know about Doug Collins, Trump's pick to oversee veterans affairs

2024-11-15 09:35 Last Updated At：09:40

ATLANTA (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he would appoint Doug Collins to lead the Veterans Affairs Department in his new administration.

Here are five things to know about the former Republican congressman from Georgia who would lead the agency tasked with providing health care to former members of the U.S. armed forces:

Collins, 58, holds a master’s degree in divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and pastored a church for 11 years. He served as a U.S. Navy chaplain for two years in the late 1980s. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve as a chaplain. Collins deployed to Balad Air Force Base in Iraq for five months in 2008. He remains a colonel in the Air Force Reserve. Collins became a lawyer well into adulthood.

Collins was elected to the Georgia state House in 2007 and served three two-year terms. He was a floor leader for Gov. Nathan Deal, a fellow northeast Georgian, for one of those terms, helping to broker a budget cut that kept Georgia's lottery-funded HOPE Scholarship program going at a time when leaders feared it would go bankrupt and not be able to pay promised college tuition for all beneficiaries.

Collins won a seat in Congress in 2012 representing northeast Georgia's 9th Congressional District, one of the most Republican districts in the country. The former incumbent, Tom Graves, was drawn into a new northwest Georgia district when the state added a 14th congressional seat because of population growth.

Despite his right-wing positions, Collins faced serious primary challenges in 2016 from other Republicans who claimed he wasn't conservative enough. While in Congress, Collins rose to vice chair of the House Republican Conference, the fifth-highest post in GOP leadership.

Collins acquired a national reputation while defending Trump as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee during the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into whether Russia improperly influenced Trump's 2016 election victory.

Collins wrote a book about Trump's first impeachment over allegations that he improperly withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to push Ukraine into announcing an investigation into Joe Biden, who went on to beat Trump in 2020. That book, “The Clock and the Calendar,” argued that Democrats were impeaching Trump to get revenge for him beating Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to prevent him from being reelected in 2020.

“From the very moment that the majority party in this House won, the inevitability that we would be here today was only a matter of what date they would schedule it. Nothing else,” Collins said on the House floor in 2019 when representatives were debating before voting to impeach Trump.

Trump was displeased when Collins was not appointed to the U.S. Senate in 2019 when incumbent Republican Johnny Isakson stepped down because of health problems. Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp instead decided to appoint Kelly Loeffler, but not before a frantic last-minute push by anti-abortion groups and people close to Trump to undermine Loeffler's appointment.

Collins ran for Senate anyway, finishing third in an all-party special election in November 2020 in which he was disfavored by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Loeffler and Democrat Raphael Warnock went on to a January runoff where Warnock bested Loeffler. Warnock won a full term in 2022 by beating another Trump favorite, football great Herschel Walker.

Collins passed on challenging Kemp or running for the Senate in 2022, but said “this is goodbye for now, but probably not forever.” Collins helped represent Trump in challenging the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and became the Georgia chair of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. He repeatedly spoke at Trump rallies in Georgia during the 2024 campaign. But if Collins becomes Veterans Affairs secretary, it could be less likely that he will run for office in 2026, when Georgia's other Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, will be up for reelection.

Trump chooses anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary

2024-11-15 09:36 Last Updated At：09:40

NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday he will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, putting a man whose views public health officials have decried as dangerous in charge of a massive agency that oversees everything from drug, vaccine and food safety to medical research, Medicare and Medicaid.

“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said Thursday in a post on his Truth Social site announcing the appointment. Kennedy, he said, would “end the Chronic Disease epidemic" and “Make America Great and Healthy Again!”

Trump said Kennedy would target drugs, food additives and chemicals.

As one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the world, Kennedy's nomination immediately alarmed some public health officials.

Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Associated Press, “I don’t want to go backwards and see children or adults suffer or lose their lives to remind us that vaccines work, and so I am concerned.”

Trump also announced Thursday that he has chosen Doug Collins, a former congressman from Georgia, to run the Department of Veterans Affairs. Collins is a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force Reserve Command. The Republican served in Congress from 2013 to 2021, and he helped defend Trump during his first impeachment process.

Kennedy hails from one of the nation’s most storied political families and is the son of the late Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy. He first challenged President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination last year. He then ran as an independent but abandoned his bid this summer after striking a deal to endorse Trump in exchange for a promise to serve in a health policy role during a second Trump administration.

He and the president-elect have since become good friends. The two campaigned together extensively during the race’s final stretch, and Trump made clear he intended to give Kennedy a major public health role.

“I’m going to let him go wild on health,” Trump said at a rally last month.

During the campaign, Kennedy told NewsNation that Trump had asked him to “reorganize” agencies including the CDC, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.

Kennedy has pushed against processed foods and the use of herbicides like Roundup weed killer. He has long criticized the large commercial farms and animal feeding operations that dominate the industry.

But he is perhaps best known for his criticism of childhood vaccines.

Again and again, Kennedy has made his opposition to vaccines clear. In July, he said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism.

In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines that advise when kids should receive routine vaccinations.

“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get them vaccinated,’” Kennedy said.

Repeated scientific studies in the U.S. and abroad have found no link between vaccines and autism. Vaccines have been proven safe and effective in laboratory testing and in real world use in hundreds of millions of people over decades. The World Health Organization credits childhood vaccines with preventing as many as 5 million deaths a year.

Trump during his first term launched Operation Warp Speed, an effort to speed the production and distribution of a vaccine to combat COVID-19. The resulting vaccines were widely credited, including by Trump himself, with saving lives.

Kennedy has also worked to shore up support among young mothers in particular, on a message of ridding the U.S. of unhealthy ingredients in foods, promising to model regulations after those imposed in Europe. His claims that the U.S. obesity epidemic, as well as a rise in chronic diseases like diabetes, are the result of processed and unhealthy foods has resonated on social media among fitness gurus and mom influencers alike.

It remains unclear how that will square with Trump’s history of deregulation of big industries, including food. Trump has pushed for fewer inspections of the meat industry, for example.

Kennedy’s stance on vaccines raises question about his ability to get confirmed, even in a GOP-controlled Senate. He also has said he would make a controversial recommendation to remove fluoride from drinking water, although fluoride levels are mandated by state and local governments. The addition of the mineral has been cited as leading to improved dental health and is considered safe at low levels.

Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune would not comment on Trump's pick of Kennedy or any other potential nominee. “I’m not going to make any judgments about any of these folks at this point,” he said.

But Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO, praised the HHS pick, posting on X: “Bad day for Big Pharma! @RobertKennedyJr."

Several Democrats quickly condemned the selection.

Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the No. 3 Democrat, said that Kennedy’s confirmation would be “nothing short of a disaster for the health of millions of families.”

But not every Democrat recoiled from the news. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said he was “excited” for Kennedy to lead HHS. Polis said he wants to see Kennedy take on “big pharma” and hopes he will “lean into personal choice” on vaccines.

That idea is concerning to former New York Public Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan, who said that if people opt against vaccines, deadly viruses could run wild. He points to an uptick in measles outbreaks — 16 have occurred so far this year compared to four last year. “That’s going to continue if we have someone at the top of our health system that is saying, ‘I’m not so sure about the science here,’” Vasan said.

FDA could have one of the biggest shakeups, with Kennedy's promises of more regulations — action that would buck the moves that previous Republican administrations have made. He has promised a crackdown on food dyes and preservatives. And with pharmaceutical companies, he's suggested that drugmakers be barred from advertising on TV, a multibillion-dollar enterprise that accounts for most of the industry’s marketing dollars. He also proposed eliminating fees that drugmakers pay the FDA to review their products.

He wants to weaken FDA regulations around a host of unsubstantiated therapies, including psychedelics and stem cells as well as discredited COVID-era drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

Kennedy also will focus on ending the “revolving door” of employees who have previously worked for pharmaceutical companies or leave government service to work for that industry, his former campaign communications manager, Del Bigtree, told the AP last month.

This past weekend, Kennedy said he wanted to fire 600 employees at NIH, which oversees vaccine research and replace them with 600 new people. In separate comments, he has said that in his first week he would order a pause in drug development and infectious disease research, shifting the focus to chronic diseases.

Kennedy’s anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took leave from the group when he announced his run for president but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.

Trump also announced Thursday that he will nominate Jay Clayton, who served as chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission during his first term, to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

__ Seitz reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Mary Clare Jalonick and Matthew Perrone in Washington, Mike Stobbe in New York, and JoNel Aleccia in Temecula, California contributed to this report.