President Donald Trump has given his son’s hunting pal the reins of the Food and Drug Administration.
Trump, 79, named the FDA’s deputy commissioner for food, Kyle Diamantas, as the acting head of the federal health agency after Dr. Marty Makary announced his resignation on Tuesday.
Diamantas, a Florida lawyer who stepped into his deputy role only a year ago, is a close friend and hunting buddy of the president’s son, Donald Jr., investigative journalist Katherine Eban reported for Rolling Stone.
In 2021, the two posed for a photo after hunting turkeys together in Florida with Osceola Outdoors, a hunting outfit founded by Mike Tussey.
“Don Jr. With his good friend Kyle Diamantas! Kyle’s first Osceola!” Tussey wrote in a 2021 post on X.
The buddies can be seen together with Tussey in another photo on the Osceola Outdoors website, though it’s unclear when the picture was taken.
Diamantas, whom Trump called “very talented,” does not have a medical doctorate, unlike most other past commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration.
“Mr. Diamantas is not an MD. It’s an unusual choice,” Susan Mayne, who previously served as the FDA’s director of food safety and applied nutrition from 2015 to 2023, told Rolling Stone. “But given the circumstances, it’s the logical choice.”
Diamantas will serve as commissioner in an acting capacity while “the search for a new Commissioner is already underway,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday.
The 38-year-old Florida lawyer’s job history is relatively sparse to have acquired such a powerful role, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Eban reported in Vanity Fair last year that Diamantas received his J.D. from the University of Florida in 2013, worked as an associate at the Baker Donelson law firm for nine years, and started as an attorney at the Jones Day law firm in 2021, becoming a partner three years later.
While a partner at Jones Day in Miami, Diamantas defended health technology manufacturer Abbott Laboratories in a lawsuit over the company’s failure to adequately warn patients of the heightened health risks surrounding its specialized baby formula.
The company lost the case and was ordered to pay $495 million, according to The New York Times.
The now-acting FDA commissioner was named as the deputy commissioner for food in 2025—a role that oversees “resource allocation, risk-prioritization strategy and decision making, policy initiatives, and major response activities involving human foods,” which includes baby formula.
Makary’s resignation, which was done over text, followed reports that the Johns Hopkins-educated doctor was next on Trump’s chopping block after he took too long to re-legalize the flavored vapes the president himself banned in 2019.
The MAHA figure is the second to be taken out of the administration’s orbit in two weeks after Trump withdrew the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s top pick for surgeon general, Casey Means.
