Washington’s anger over the corrosion of American institutions was palpable on Thursday as the nation’s most powerful skeptic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was on Capitol Hill.
Ahead of Thursday’s meeting of the Senate Finance Committee, Democrats were clearly energized. The mass firings at Health and Human Services (HHS), as well as a seemingly political takeover of top brass at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), elicited scathing criticism from a party which (due to unified Republican majorities) has been largely unable to do much else.
Having been divided for months on issues of strategy and tone, America’s opposition party was unified this week in their revulsion and fear. Ahead of Thursday’s hearing, a group of senators and House members gathered outside the Capitol and denounced the HHS chief’s cuts to vaccine research, politicization of federal agencies and disruptions to public health initiatives as setting the U.S. up for catastrophe.
What was unexpected was how far that unity extended across party lines at the hearing, where RFK Jr met a bipartisan firing squad.
Republicans joined with their Democratic colleagues and ratcheted up the pressure on Donald Trump’s cabinet member — for the first time under his second presidency displaying a clear notion to check the Executive Branch’s power. Kennedy was put on notice as the GOP Senate majority whip, John Barrasso, warned that he risked ruining “decades of progress” and putting America in harm’s way.
Some of the strongest questioning of the day came from Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican physician from Louisiana, around whom there was significant scrutiny and pressure before the hearing. Cassidy, who ultimately voted in favor of RFK Jr.’s confirmation, was one of the secretary’s biggest skeptics on the right and had elicited a promise from Kennedy to “work within” existing standards and procedures for approval of vaccines if confirmed.
Cassidy and two other GOP senators on the panel, Barrasso and Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, all directly implied in their questions that they thought it was possible the secretary had misrepresented his goals during his confirmation process.
Tillis told the secretary that he pledged to do nothing that “’makes it difficult or discourages people’ from taking vaccines,” adding: “There seem to be several reports that would seem to refute that.”
The retiring senator added that he thought the secretary’s mass firings and subverting of longstanding public health guidelines around vaccines bore the risk of “diminishing the credibility of the U.S. government in terms of keeping kids safe.”
Tillis had previously remarked to a reporter on Wednesday: “I guess I need to know why his words at his confirmation hearing aren’t matching up with some of the deeds.”
Barrasso, a member of GOP leadership, was measured but asked how Kennedy would ensure that vaccine guidance from the federal government was “clear” and “trustworthy”. Cassidy, meanwhile, pressed the secretary to explain why he and others praised Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” while participating in a campaign to undermine its result.
“Do you agree that the president deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed?” asked Cassidy, eliciting an affirmative response from Kennedy. The senator then asked why, in a remark to a Democratic senator’s question, Kennedy had said that the vaccine and others posed serious health risks to young people, and could even cause death.
Kennedy denied saying this, to which Cassidy shot back that they could check the record, because it was a fact.
But what was equally striking was the tenor with which Kennedy defended his vaccine skepticism to the panel, especially during exchanges with Democratic members. Kennedy and members of the committee grew heated in several instances, including one when Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state called him a “charlatan”. The secretary blasted Bennet for insufficiently standing up to pharmaceutical companies, and attacked Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota for supposedly “just making stuff up” as she referenced his comments about antidepressant usage among children in the wake of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting.
Even Cassidy was not spared the secretary’s vitriol, and was accused of grandstanding by Kennedy: “Is this a question, Senator Cassidy, or is this a speech?”
His tone was a sign that Kennedy knows or at least believes he has the continued support of the White House and Trump, who more now than during his first term is taking a direct role in ensuring a team of loyalists remains around him at all times.
The White House did offer a meek defense of Kennedy on Thursday afternoon as the hearing drew to a close.
“Secretary @RobertKennedyJr is taking flak because he’s over the target. The Trump Administration is addressing root causes of chronic disease, embracing transparency in government, and championing gold-standard science,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, before asserting: “Only the Democrats could attack that commonsense effort.”
Given that Republican criticism of Kennedy on Thursday included multiple members of the committee and a member of Senate GOP leadership, it will be very difficult for the White House to keep up that facade for long.
The question for the administration in the months ahead may be whether a political gambit that Donald Trump made to secure an ally during the 2024 campaign season will end up resulting in the first Cabinet secretary of his second term to bow out under bipartisan pressure. Such fates in Trump’s first term befell former allies Scott Pruitt and Tom Price.
But in the case of HHS and CDC, Kennedy’s critics on the left in particular are worried that such a political consequence may only come as a result of disaster.
“The nation’s defenses are down,” declared Sen. Jon Ossoff on Thursday, in response to a question from The Independent after a press conference. “We are more vulnerable to deadly disease outbreak than at any time in recent history because of the demolition of the CDC. We are also falling behind by years or decades in clinical health research because of what’s happening at NIH. I’ve heard from constituents who were in cancer trials that were thrown off those trials because they were suspended.”
“Part of the painful recovery from all the damage that’s already been done is going to be building back our health research so that we’re developing cures and therapies that save lives,” he added.
