A University of New Mexico-trained doctor who grew up in Gallup faced a tense hearing Thursday before a key Senate committee considering her nomination to lead the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Democrats and Republicans questioned Dr. Heidi Overton over her record on vaccines and abortion medication. She provided few clear answers on whether she would resist political interference from President Donald Trump, who nominated her in August.

That raised concerns for Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

The FDA is in “desperate need of stability,” Cassidy said. Democrats and Republicans on the committee agreed the agency has grown increasingly swayed by political whims — rather than scientific evidence — while Americans suffer from major food safety issues and a deadly measles outbreak.

“If confirmed as commissioner of food and drugs, I will immediately set my focus to restoring the primacy of American innovation while furthering the core missions of advancing national security, increasing access to affordable treatments and promoting public health,” Overton told the committee. “President Trump’s direction for me in this role, should I be confirmed, is to go fast.”

The committee did not vote on Overton’s nomination. To become FDA commissioner, she will need majority approval from Cassidy’s committee plus an affirmative vote from the full Senate. If confirmed, Overton would replace former FDA commissioner Marty Makary, who resigned in May.

UNM alumni weigh in

If she makes it through that process, Overton would join a handful of other New Mexicans who hold top roles in the Trump administration — such as Bureau of Land Management Director Steve Pearce and Yvette Herrell, the Department of Agriculture’s assistant secretary for congressional relations; both Republicans have served in New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District seat.

Some in Overton’s home state have voiced concerns about her nomination since it was announced in August. A group of 36 graduates of the UNM School of Medicine’s combined Bachelor of Arts/Doctor of Medicine program submitted a letter for the nomination hearing record, arguing components of Overton’s public policy record “diverge significantly from the evidence-based standards instilled by our shared medical education.”

“We call upon members of the United States Senate to carefully evaluate how Dr. Overton’s record strays from the essential requirements of the marginalized communities served by our healthcare network, thereby guaranteeing that leadership at the FDA remains devoted to proven scientific principles and equitable care,” the letter states.

Overton received her bachelor’s degree and medical degree from UNM in 2015, according to her LinkedIn profile. The Associated Press in 2007 interviewed Overton — then a freshman at UNM — as part of a story about the combined BA/MD Degree Program. She said at the time, “I would love to go back to Gallup and be a doctor.”

But her career took a different path, first to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland, where she did her residency training, and eventually to the White House, where she is currently deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy.

Vaccine policy debate

Cassidy, also a doctor, cast the deciding vote to confirm vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary after Kennedy promised to adhere to existing vaccine approval systems and to maintain information debunking any link between vaccines and autism on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website. Kennedy later broke both promises.

“The secretary gave me guarantees — by extension, this committee, our Congress, the American people. He later backtracked on those,” Cassidy said. “He said he had to because the president told him to do something different.” He asked Overton, “If the president asks you to do something that goes against those guarantees you give us today, what will you do?”

Overton sidestepped that and other questions from the committee about her vaccine record, although she acknowledged the MMR vaccine is safe, effective and “our best tool” to curb measles outbreaks across the U.S.

One of the senators’ principal concerns with Overton’s nomination was her involvement in an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in August that called for fewer immunizations for American children and spacing out doses of the measles, mumps and rubella — or MMR — vaccine into three single-disease shots.

“You were behind the president in the Oval Office when he signed an executive order to break up the vaccine schedule into more doses, completely ignoring the reality of families today struggling to make life affordable,” Cassidy said in his opening statement.

The New Mexico Department of Health has kept existing childhood vaccine guidelines in place, despite the order.

The UNM almuni letter also calls out Overton for “her support for non-evidence-based alterations to immunization guidance.”

“As graduates who trained alongside [Overton] or within the same institutional framework, we were taught that public trust in medical authority depends entirely on an unyielding commitment to scientific integrity, health equity, and patient advocacy,” the alumni wrote.

Access to mifepristone

Several Democratic senators challenged Overton’s record on access to medication abortion drugs.

In her previous position as chief policy officer at the conservative America First Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., Overton wrote a policy brief, published in 2023, that questioned the safety and efficacy of medication abortions. In it, she argued the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol is “dangerous” to women — despite the FDA’s approval of the drug combo as safe and effective more than two decades ago.

Kennedy last year approved an FDA review of mifepristone, a drug typically used in combination with misoprostol to end a pregnancy in its first 10 weeks. The review is still underway, according to discussions during the Senate hearing.

“The FDA agreed that this was safe and effective 26 years ago,” said Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat. “And from where I come from, I really believe that our FDA needs people who put science first. The FDA has said that this is safe.”

After several questions from Murray, Overton acknowledged the drug combo “has met the safety and efficacy standard, according to the FDA review.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the few Republicans who supports abortion rights, said she, too, was concerned about the FDA changing mifepristone’s approved due to political pressure. She argued requiring an in-person doctor’s visit to receive a mifepristone prescription would cut off access for people in rural states.

If that change happens, Murkowski said, “You have effectively taken about … 80% of the communities in the state and put them in a very challenging position in terms of access to providers.”

The UNM alumni slammed Overton’s history of “challenging established reproductive health practices that are backed by decades of safety and efficacy data.”

“When public health policy strays from established clinical evidence, vulnerable communities — such as those across New Mexico that our program was designed to serve — disproportionately bear the burden,” their letter states.

Margaret O’Hara reports on issues affecting healthy communities in New Mexico. Her work is funded by a grant from Anchorum Health Foundation. Anchorum will not have any role in editorial decisions. The New Mexican and its Public Service Journalism Fund retain full editorial control. Philanthropically funded stories by The New Mexican are made available to all readers without a paywall.

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