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# Trump Team Looking at Non-Medical Person to Lead FDA
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/trump-team-looking-at-non-medical-person-to-lead-fda/
- Published: 2016-12-07T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T21:53:04.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: Drugs, #legacy-id-D5137511

President-elect **Donald Trump** may want to shake FDA up and reform its outdated approval programs, and maybe that is why his transition team reportedly is considering a Silicon Valley investor close to billionaire **Peter Thiel** to lead the agency. **Jim O’Neil**, a managing director of one of Theil’s venture capital firms, is high on the top FDA post list, according to [Bloomberg News](http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-12-07/trump-team-is-said-to-consider-thiel-associate-o-neill-for-fda?ref=fdaweb.com), and previously served at HHS under **George W. Bush**.

O’Neil has no medical background, unlike the past commissioners for over 50 years. And he has advocated for new radical approaches in allowing products on the market, Bloomberg notes. In a 2014 [speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y7oazjaSyE&ref=fdaweb.com), he supported reforming FDA approval rules so that drugs could be given a “progressive approval,” where they are allowed on the market after demonstrating safety. “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized,” he said at a conference called Rejuvenation Biotechnology.

In the speech, O’Neill said that while he was at HHS he opposed FDA’s regulation of direct-to-consumer genomic testing services such as 23andMe. “In order to regulate in this space, FDA had to argue that an algorithm, a series of numbers that match up to things, is a medical device,” he said. “I found that really astonishing — astonishing that someone could say it with a straight face, and astonishing that someone could claim the ability to shut down companies that were never touching a patient but only accurately matching algorithms.” At the same conference, he advocated anti-aging medicine, saying that he believed it was scientifically possible to develop treatments that would reverse aging, though the drug industry’s approach to the idea was “long overdue for innovation.”

Since winning the election, Trump and his transition team have been mum on how FDA would be reformed in the new administration. He earlier said reforms were needed to improve the approval process and make it faster. The drug industry is likely growing nervous following a Trump vow to [go after drug prices](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-07/trump-says-he-ll-bring-down-drug-prices-biotech-stocks-fall?ref=fdaweb.com) after *Time* magazine named him “Person of the Year.”

  
O’Neill did his undergraduate studies at Yale University. He has a masters degree from the University of Chicago.