The people who elect the president Donald Trump have chosen to lead federal health agencies in his second administration, including a retired congressman, a surgeon and a former talk show host.

All of them can play a central role in fulfilling a new policy agenda that could change the way government goes about protecting Americans’ health — from health care and medicines to food safety and scientific research. And if Congress approves, at the helm of the team as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services will be a prominent environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine organizer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The nominees have largely no experience in running large bureaucratic agencies, but they know how to talk about health on TV. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid selects Dr. Mehmet Oz hosted a talk show for 13 years and is a well-known wellness and lifestyle influencer. The choice for the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, and for the Surgeon General, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, is a frequent Fox News contributor.

Many on the list were critical of COVID-19 measures such as masking and booster vaccinations for young people. Some of them have ties to Florida like many of Trump’s other cabinet nominees: The CDC chose Dr. Dave Weldon represented the state in Congress for 14 years and is affiliated with a medical group on the state’s Atlantic coast. Nesheiwat’s brother-in-law is Rope. Mike WaltzR-Fla., tapped by Trump as national security adviser.

Here’s a look at the nominees’ potential role in carrying out what Kennedy says is the task of “reorganizing” agencies, which have a total budget of $1.7 billion; employ 80,000 scientists, researchers, doctors and other officials; and impact the lives of all Americans.

The Atlanta-based CDC, with a core budget of $9.2 billion, is tasked with protecting Americans from disease outbreaks and other threats to public health.

Kennedy has long attacked vaccines and criticized the CDC, repeatedly alleging corruption at the agency. He said in a 2023 podcast that there is “no vaccine that is safe and effective,” and urged people to resist CDC guidelines on if and when children should be vaccinated.

Decades ago, Kennedy found common ground with Weldon, the 71-year-old candidate to lead the CDC who served in the Army and worked as an internal medicine physician before representing a central Florida congressional district from 1995 to 2009.

Beginning in the early 2000s, Weldon figured prominently in a debate over whether there was a link between a vaccine preservative called thimerosal and autism. He was a founding member of the Congressional Autism Caucus and sought to ban thimerosal from all vaccines. Kennedy, then a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, believed there was a link between thimerosal and autism and also accused the government of hiding documents showing the danger.

Since 2001, all vaccines manufactured for the US market and routinely recommended for children 6 years of age or younger have contained no or only trace amounts of thimerosal, with the exception of inactivated influenza vaccine. Meanwhile, study after study after study found no evidence that thimerosal caused autism.

Weldon’s congressional voting record suggests he may go along with Republican efforts to cut the CDC, including eliminating the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which works on subjects such as drownings, drug overdoses and fatal shootings. Weldon also voted to ban federal funding for needle exchange programs as a way to reduce overdoses, and the National Rifle Association gave him an “A” grade for his pro-gun rights voting record.

Kennedy is extremely critical of the FDA, which has 18,000 employees and is responsible for the safety and effectiveness of prescription drugs, vaccines and other medical products — as well as overseeing cosmetics, electronic cigarettes and most foods.

Makary, Trump’s pick to run the FDA, is closely aligned with Kennedy several subjects. The Johns Hopkins University professor, who is a trained surgeon and cancer specialist, has denounced the overprescribing of drugs, the use of pesticides on food and the undue influence of pharmaceutical and insurance companies over doctors and government regulators.

Kennedy has proposed gutting our “entire” FDA departments and also recently threatened to fire FDA employees for “aggressively suppressing” a host of unsubstantiated products and treatments, including stem cells, raw milk, psychedelics and discredited covid-era treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

Makary’s opposing views during the covid-19 pandemic including the need to mask and give young children covid vaccine boosters.

But anything Makary and Kennedy want to do in terms of dismantling FDA regulations or revoking long-standing vaccine and drug approvals would be challenging. The agency has lengthy requirements for removing drugs from the market, which are based on federal laws passed by Congress.

The agency provides health care coverage for more than 160 million people through Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, and also sets Medicare payment rates for hospitals, doctors and other providers. With a $1.1 trillion budget and more than 6,000 employees, Oz has a huge agency to run if confirmed — and one that Kennedy hasn’t talked about much when it comes to his plans.

While Trump tried to scrap the Affordable Care Act during his first term, Kennedy hasn’t set his sights on it yet. But he has been critical of Medicaid and Medicare for covering expensive weight-loss drugs — though they are not covered by either.

Trump said during his campaign that he would protect Medicare, which provides insurance for older Americans. Ounce has approved expanding Medicare Advantage — a privately run version of Medicare that is popular but also a source of widespread fraud — in an AARP questionnaire during his failed 2022 bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania and in a 2020 Forbes op-ed with a former CEO of Kaiser Permanente.

Oz also said in a Washington Examiner op-ed with three co-authors that aging healthier and living longer could help fix the US budget deficit because people would work longer and add more to the gross domestic product.

Neither Trump nor Kennedy has said much about Medicaid, the insurance program for low-income people. Trump’s first administration reshaped the program by allowing states to impose work requirements on recipients.

Kennedy does not appear to have said much publicly about what he would like to see from the surgeon general position, which is the nation’s top doctor and oversees 6,000 US Public Health Service Corps members.

The surgeon has little administrative power, but can be an influential spokesperson for the government about what counts as a public health hazard and what to do about it—suggesting things like warning labels for products and issuing advisories. The current Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, declared gun violence a public health crisis in June.

Trump’s pick, Nesheiwat, is employed as the New York City medical director of CityMD, a group of urgent care facilities in the New York and New Jersey area, and has been at City MD for 12 years. She has also appeared on Fox News and other TV shows, written a book about the “transformative power of prayer” in her medical career, and endorses a brand of vitamin supplements.

She encouraged covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic, calling them “a gift from God” in a February 2021 Fox News article, as well as antiviral pills like Paxlovid. In a 2019 Q&A with Women in Medicine Legacy FoundationNesheiwat said she is a “firm believer in preventive medicine” and “could give a dissertation on hand washing alone.”

As of Saturday, Trump had not yet named his choice to lead the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research through grants to researchers across the country and conducts its own research. It has a budget of 48 billion dollars.

Kennedy has said he would Pause drug development and infection research to shift the focus to chronic diseases. He would like to keep NIH funding from researchers with conflicts of interest, criticizing the agency in 2017 for what he said was not doing enough research on the role of vaccines in autism — an idea that has long been dismissed.

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Associated Press writers Amanda Seitz and Matt Perrone and AP contributing editor Erica Hunzinger contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. AP is solely responsible for all content.