A former top Trump health adviser accused White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Joe Rogan’s podcast of putting midterm fundraising ahead of Americans’ health, hours before President Donald Trump announced he was replacing her.
Calley Means, who until last month served as a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services and was a central figure in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” push, said during the two-hour interview that Wiles bowed to “unrelenting” pressure from industry lobbyists, The New York Times reported.
According to the Times, Means said Wiles told him “many times” that “We need money for the midterms, Calley.” When he pushed a policy on sugar in children’s diets, he said, she told him, “I need the sugar industry money.”
He also said Wiles’ team caved to kratom industry lobbyists and loosened planned limits on the products, which are sometimes called “gas station heroin.” And he claimed that any corporation that hired her daughter, lobbyist Katie Wiles, “was getting a high priority.”
On the podcast, Means called Wiles “the most powerful chief of staff in modern American history” and said, “no policy decision gets done without her office giving it the okay.” He claimed the lobbying firm where her daughter works, Continental Strategy, went from almost no revenue to roughly $30 million a year after Trump took office.
“If you’re a special interest and you want to get something done, the secret’s out,” he said. “You pay Susie’s daughter.”
Means spared Trump and Kennedy, aiming nearly all of his criticism at Wiles, according to the Times. Wiles and the White House were not immediately available for comment, the paper reported.
Means resigned from HHS in October after growing frustrated that he could not advance his MAHA agenda inside the administration, NBC News reported at the time.
Trump said Friday that deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of his mass deportation campaign, would take over Monday. Trump said Wiles “has done an outstanding job” and would move to his political operation, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Miller is widely regarded as one of the most hardline voices around Trump, and he takes over a White House that insiders describe as demoralized and splintering.
Democrats reclaimed both chambers of Congress on Tuesday, powered in part by a sharp Latino swing. Democrats carried heavily Hispanic South Texas counties by an average of more than 40 points, Bloomberg reported, two years after Trump swept them.