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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGMay 12, 2026

Live updates: Hegseth takes shots from Republicans; Makary out at FDA

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared before Congress on Tuesday for budget hearings where he faced bipartisan grilling — including notable pushback from senior Republicans — over the Iran war's costs, weapons stockpile depletion, and strained NATO alliances. Separately, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced his resignation after roughly two months on the job, amid reports of President Trump's dissatisfaction, with Kyle Diamantas set to replace him as acting director.

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⚡The conservative argument represents the dominant position. A significant conservative faction disagrees — see The Divide below.

Are Trump's cabinet picks facing real scrutiny from within the party, or is this performative? And what does it mean for his agenda if even Republicans won't rubber-stamp his choices?

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FDA firing as political capture
Conservative
Makary was a Senate-confirmed political appointee who served at the president's pleasure — that is not a constitutional quirk, it is the design. The FDA has never been truly independent; its commissioners are presidential choices expected to implement the administration's agenda, and the idea that it floats above politics is a myth the agency tells itself between budget cycles. The real question is whether the specific policies Trump is pushing are defensible on the merits, and that's a policy debate, not a constitutional crisis.
Liberal
You're describing a lock the locksmith can pick and calling it a security system. Yes, commissioners serve at the president's pleasure — but you just acknowledged the real question is whether the policies are 'defensible on the merits,' and then declined to answer it. The reported trigger here was Makary resisting flavored vape approvals that Trump wanted to approve for young MAGA voters. That is not a policy philosophy. That is a president using a health agency as a campaign prop.
Conservative
If the vape approval is indefensible on the merits, argue against the approval — that's the legitimate fight. But you're using a bad policy outcome to make a structural claim that the president can't direct his own appointees, and those are different arguments that require different remedies.
Liberal
They're not different arguments when the structure guarantees the bad outcome — if even a Trump-appointed commissioner who pushed back lasted two months before being fired, the problem isn't the personnel, it's the control system that makes independent judgment professionally fatal.
Adolescent health versus deregulatory mandate
Conservative
The flavored vape question is a legitimate policy debate — but it's worth noting that FDA regulatory overreach on vaping also drove millions of adult smokers toward black-market products with no safety oversight whatsoever. A serious public health argument has to account for both sides of that ledger, not just cite youth addiction statistics as if the counterfactual is a nicotine-free world.
Liberal
The counterfactual you're offering — that restricting flavored vapes pushes adults to black markets — doesn't explain why Trump framed the approval as playing well with 'young MAGA voters.' That framing is the tell. It means the decision process started with the political constituency and worked backward to the regulatory outcome, which is exactly how you destroy the institutional credibility that makes the FDA worth having when the next drug safety scandal hits.
Conservative
Politicians calculate constituent interests — that's not unique to Trump, and it doesn't automatically corrupt the underlying regulatory reasoning. The question is whether the science on flavored vapes for adult harm reduction is being evaluated, and that's an argument you haven't actually made.
Liberal
The FDA's authority in a real crisis — an outbreak, a contaminated drug supply — rests entirely on public confidence that its decisions are scientific rather than political. Trump just spent that credibility on nicotine pouches, and no one will be able to buy it back.
Republican NATO dissent as mandate rejection
Conservative
McConnell declaring NATO 'the most important military alliance in world history' is not a strategic argument — it is a catechism. And catechisms don't solve the fundamental problem that decades of alliance management produced a Europe that spent 1.5% of GDP on defense while Americans bled and borrowed. The voters noticed that asymmetry, which is why they're here. Breaking with the consensus that asked Americans to be first in sacrifice and last in credit is not abandoning the alliance — it is renegotiating terms that were always lopsided.
Liberal
McConnell is not a progressive critic reading talking points — he is one of the architects of the hawkish Republican foreign policy consensus, and Tom Cole, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said American power is 'most effective when exercised in concert with like-minded nations.' These are the people who built the infrastructure you inherited. When they break with their own party's Defense Secretary in public, the argument that this is just establishment catechism rather than substantive alarm becomes very hard to sustain.
Conservative
Institutional architects defending the institutions they built is not the same as those institutions being right. The 2% GDP NATO spending target existed the entire time McConnell was building that consensus — it wasn't enforced, and he didn't make it a crisis. Voters made it a crisis.
Liberal
The question isn't whether burden-sharing needed renegotiation — it did. The question is whether publicly destabilizing the alliance during an active conflict with Iran, while Congress can't get straight answers on warfighting readiness, is renegotiation or just damage.
Pentagon budget without warfighting metrics
Conservative
Ken Calvert's skepticism deserves respect because it comes from the right place — he wants warfighting capability, not budget theater. But the implied alternative from establishment critics is a return to the procurement model that spent $700 billion a year for twenty years and still couldn't field a ready force for a peer conflict. Stockpile depletion from the Iran campaign is a real problem, but it's an argument for the massive supplemental funding the Pentagon is requesting, not against it. Congressional Republicans blocking the budget while demanding accountability are performing oversight theater.
Liberal
You're calling it oversight theater, but Calvert's specific complaint was that the Pentagon can't explain how its budget 'translates into real, measurable improvements in warfighting capability.' That's not a procedural quibble — that's the core question any functioning democracy must answer before it spends its treasury and soldiers on a war. The Bush administration's Iraq accounting failure is the direct precedent here, and Congress learned that lesson the expensive way.
Conservative
The Iraq precedent cuts both ways: the failure there was post-conflict planning and mission definition, not the initial funding authorization. Demanding complete warfighting metrics before authorizing any supplemental during an active conflict is its own kind of strategic liability.
Liberal
Authorizing funds without metrics isn't expedience — it's a blank check, and the historical record on blank checks in wartime is not ambiguous.
Mifepristone study as executive non-compliance
Conservative
The mifepristone safety review is a legitimate institutional concern, but it needs to be separated from the broader narrative. A study moving slowly through an administration is not the same as sabotage — federal agencies slow-walk studies across administrations for bureaucratic reasons that have nothing to do with political interference, and the jump from 'delayed' to 'disappeared into administrative indefiniteness to avoid embarrassing findings' is an inference, not a documented fact.
Liberal
This study was mandated by a legal agreement, not optional — that's not a bureaucratic delay framing, that's non-compliance with a legal obligation. And Makary himself reportedly slow-walked it, which you might expect to complicate the politicization narrative, but it actually sharpens it: if a Trump-appointed commissioner who was apparently willing to sit on a politically inconvenient study still got fired for insufficient loyalty on vapes, the pressure from above him was intense enough to make even that insufficient.
Conservative
Whether the slow-walk was Makary protecting political allies or scientists protecting research integrity is genuinely unclear from what's public — and you're building a systemic indictment on a motive you're inferring.
Liberal
The motive doesn't need to be certain for the pattern to be visible. A legally required study stalled, a commissioner fired for resisting political pressure on a separate regulatory decision — at some point the accumulation of coincidences becomes the explanation.
Conservative's hardest question
The argument that firing Makary is merely normal executive accountability breaks down hardest on the flavored vapes question — if the reported framing is accurate, Trump wanted a regulatory approval specifically to appeal to young MAGA voters, which is exactly the kind of political capture of a scientific agency that destroys institutional credibility across administrations. A conservative who genuinely believes in rule of law and not rule of faction should find that uncomfortable, and it is genuinely difficult to dismiss.
Liberal's hardest question
The argument that Makary's ouster proves systematic politicization is somewhat complicated by the fact that Makary was himself a political appointee who reportedly slow-walked the mifepristone safety study — suggesting his commitment to scientific independence was selectively applied depending on which political constituency was being served. Critics can reasonably ask whether the objection is to politicization in principle or only when the politics run in one direction.
The Divide
*Trump's personnel moves reveal a conservative civil war over whether the Pentagon should serve America First or traditional alliance commitments.*
MAGA/POPULIST-RIGHT
Supports Trump's pressure on Pentagon and FDA leadership to deliver on administration priorities and transform bloated bureaucracy.
ESTABLISHMENT/HAWKISH-GOP
McConnell, Cole, and Calvert are breaking with Hegseth and the administration over NATO commitments and weapons stockpile depletion.
“America First has never meant America alone.” — Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK)
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides accept that FDA commissioners serve at the president's pleasure and can be removed for failing to execute administration priorities — the disagreement is whether those priorities can legitimately include political calculations about voter appeal.
The real conflict
Conservative argues that Trump firing Makary is normal executive accountability to a mandate; Liberal argues it proves the president will destroy any scientific institution that resists political capture — this is a factual disagreement about whether Makary's removal was triggered by performance failure or by resistance to specific policy orders.
What nobody has answered
If Makary was willing to delay a congressionally mandated safety study on mifepristone to serve one political constituency, and Trump fired him for resisting flavored vape approvals to serve another, what institutional mechanism would actually prevent future commissioners from simply choosing which scientific findings to suppress based on whoever appointed them?
Sources

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