President Trump’s nominee for U.S. Surgeon General, an ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Casey Means, testified this week before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and said her medical license is “voluntarily placed on inactive status” as she is not and has not been treating patients for several years.
Dr. Georges Benjamin, CEO of the American Public Health Association, said of the Stanford Medical School graduate: “She is less qualified professionally than any other surgeon general in history. There’s no question about that.”
As a former U.S. Surgeon General who held an active medical license and practiced medicine while in the role (at Walter Reed and aboard the USS Comfort) it is incomprehensible that the Senate is even considering a nominee for this role who lacks any active license and has never…
— Jerome Adams (@JeromeAdamsMD) February 26, 2026
Former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams — who served during Trump’s first administration and throughout the coronavirus pandemic — also shared his opinion of Means as a nominee.
He wrote: “As a former U.S. Surgeon General who held an active medical license and practiced medicine while in the role (at Walter Reed and aboard the USS Comfort) it is incomprehensible that the Senate is even considering a nominee for this role who lacks any active license and has never practiced unsupervised.”
As seen below, Adams also called out the four physicians in the Senate: Republicans John Barrasso (WY), Rand Paul (KY), Bill Cassidy (LA), and Roger Marshall (KS). Adams wrote: “All of them completed a residency and subsequently practiced medicine. I just don’t see how any of them can vote for a ‘top doctor’ who hasn’t done the same.”
Here are the physicians in the Senate. All of them completed a residency and subsequently practiced medicine. I just don’t see how any of them can vote for a “top doctor” who hasn’t done the same.
pic.twitter.com/3PYEepuig1 — Jerome Adams (@JeromeAdamsMD) February 26, 2026
After serving all four-years of the first Trump administration as surgeon general, Dr. Adams joined Purdue University in October 2021 as a Presidential Fellow and its first executive director of health equity initiatives, professor of practice in the departments of Pharmacy Practice and Public Health.
On her own website, Means’ uncommon medical path and incomplete residency is positioned as a plus: “After completing four years of surgical residency in Otolaryngology–Head and Neck surgery, Dr. Means resigned from her residency in late 2018 to focus on reforming the ‘sick care’ paradigm in American healthcare. Her work centers on introducing a systems-thinking perspective to clinical medicine, highlighting the interconnected physiological root causes of many of the most common Western chronic diseases.”