Hilary Perkins was the Food and Drug Administration’s top attorney for less than 36 hours before she resigned.
Perkins joined the Department of Justice in 2019 as a career lawyer, where she defended the positions of both administrations she served in — the basic tenet of the job. When Johns Hopkins surgeon and researcher Marty Makary was nominated to lead FDA, he picked Perkins to be chief counsel.
But within hours of her promotion being made public, she suddenly found herself the target of online attacks instigated by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) over her role defending the Biden administration’s policies on the availability of the abortion drug mifepristone.
“Marty Makary is trying to sneak a Biden abortion lawyer into a top leadership position at FDA. I can’t imagine anyone who would be more at odds with President Trump’s agenda,” Hawley wrote on the social platform X.
Hawley also pointed to legal briefs Perkins wrote where she defended the administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
“I can’t understand why Marty Makary would want someone who used the government to IMPOSE vaccines on millions of Americans and served as a Biden abortion lawyer to be his chief counsel. It calls into question his judgment,” Hawley wrote.
Perkins told The Hill she reached out to Hawley and his team multiple times for a meeting prior to Makary’s confirmation vote, but was either turned down or did not hear back. Ultimately, she said she resigned because she didn’t want to be an obstacle to Makary getting confirmed, as Hawley was threatening to vote against his nomination in committee.
A representative for Hawley did not return a request for comment. A representative from the Senate Health Committee did not respond to a request for comment.
Republicans hold a one vote majority in the committee, so Hawley’s vote was considered crucial for Makary to advance if all Democrats voted against him.
At the hearing, Hawley said he had decided to vote for Makary because Perkins resigned. Makary advanced through committee with two Democrats voting in favor and was confirmed Tuesday when he picked up votes from a trio of Democrats.
Perkins said she was surprised at Hawley’s attacks, especially since she had already been vetted by the Trump administration before she was offered the job.
“I’m not a Senate confirmed nominee. I’m just a staffing decision, you know, I’m just a lower level staffing decision by the White House,” Perkins said.
Perkins said she is a conservative Christian who is personally opposed to abortion, but she had an obligation under the oath she took to defend the priorities of her bosses at the administration.
She noted some of the administration’s health officials, notably Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., previously expressed abortion-rights views and were still nearly always unanimously confirmed by Republicans.
Perkins said she didn’t set the Biden administration’s policies or advocate for them. Even though she joined the Justice Department during the first Trump administration and voted for Trump in the 2020 election, she said she did not consider quitting when Joe Biden won.
“As an attorney, I’m …. not opining on whether abortion, for example, is right or wrong. That’s not my job. My job as an attorney is to simply argue the government’s legal positions,” she said.
“DOJ’s policy is that attorneys must sign briefs regardless of their personal views. … You can’t opt out of cases that you personally disagree with.”
In the mifepristone case, the Biden administration was defending the current access to the drug after being sued by anti-abortion groups and physicians. The administration argued the plaintiffs had no legal standing to sue, and the Supreme Court ultimately agreed and dismissed the case in June.
The plaintiffs were represented by Hawley’s wife, Erin, an attorney for the conservative Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom.
Perkins said she considered herself nonpartisan, so even though she may have personally objected to the Biden administration’s position, her job was to defend it.
Indeed, a memo issued by Attorney General Pam Bondi on the day she took office said the job of a DOJ attorney is to “zealously defend the interests of the United States.” The memo stated DOJ attorneys do not have the “latitude to substitute personal political views or judgments for those that prevailed in the election.”
Bondi went further and suggested that any attorney who declines to sign a brief or appear in court or otherwise “delays or impedes the Department’s mission” will be disciplined, if not fired.
Since the start of the administration, many DOJ lawyers have been purged or reassigned, while others have resigned as the White House exerts greater control over the agency.
Perkins said she worked on five abortion pill-related cases across both the Trump and Biden administrations. In all but one of them, she defended the FDA against abortion-rights groups that wanted to ease restrictions on mifepristone.
