Scott Gottlieb’s departure leaves the health of millions at stake

“ONE OF the Trump administration’s most competent, careful and effective senior officers will soon leave government. At stake is the health of millions of Americans.

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb will departwithin a month. He heads one of the nation’s most powerful government agencies, responsible for overseeing a fifth of the U.S. economy. Many of President Trump’s early hires were mediocrities or worse. Mr. Gottlieb quickly proved himself an exception. He deserves credit for bucking the administration’s otherwise pervasive penchant for knee-jerk deregulation and reality denial.

In particular, Mr. Gottlieb advanced the federal government’s decades-long fight against tobacco with a vigor that one would not have expected from a Trump appointee. Congress in 2009 empowered the FDA to radically reshape the tobacco industry, and the agency made slow but steady progress during the Obama years. Mr. Gottlieb at first seemed to sympathize with business and anti-regulatory voices decrying federal rules on e-cigarettes and other products, delaying Obama-era rules on vaping products.”