Will congressional Republicans get serious about restraining Kennedy’s perverse policies or forcing his resignation?View this email in your browser [link removed]

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****SEPTEMBER 17, 2025****

****On the

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A recent report says abandoned oil infrastructure could cost the state up to $1.6 billion in coming years. This is how.

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****Kuttner on TAP****

**Trump’s fraying alliance with RFK Jr.**

**Will congressional Republicans get serious about restraining Kennedy’s perverse policies or forcing his resignation?**

This morning, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), **Dr. Susan Monarez** [link removed], testifying before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, confirmed what was widely known. After HHS Secretary RFK Jr. demanded on August 25 that she commit in advance to accepting recommendations of Kennedy’s new crackpot vaccine panel and to dismissing several career officials, she refused—and was promptly fired.

Following the meeting with Kennedy, **Monarez immediately phoned Sen. Bill Cassidy** [link removed] (R-LA), a physician, who had reluctantly voted to confirm Kennedy after getting assurances from Kennedy that he ignored once he narrowly won confirmation. Cassidy, who faces a MAGA challenger in 2026, was upset, but continues trying to straddle the fence, defending both Trump and Monarez.

The Senate hearing came a day before the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, with Kennedy’s newly appointed vaccine skeptics, starts a two-day session in Atlanta to discuss vaccine policy on COVID, hepatitis B, and chicken pox, anong other diseases. The ACIP first recommended universal hepatitis B vaccinations in 1991, and since then that has been national policy. But as our **former colleague Jonathan Cohn reports** [link removed], Kennedy has long been a critic of hepatitis B vaccinations. The expectation is that the ACIP will vote to delay hepatitis B vaccines from newborns to at least age four. Before the 1991 policy recommendation, some 20,000 young children contracted hepatitis B every year. Now the number is close to zero.

At today’s hearing, several GOP senators, led by Rand Paul of Kentucky, argued the anti-vax case, contending that the benefits of most vaccines were unproven compared with the risks. Sen. Cassidy tried to have it both ways. He lavishly praised Trump for supposedly promoting “transparency” at the CDC, but his line of questioning of Monarez was basically sympathetic. When Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida attacked Monarez for disloyally complaining about Kennedy in her phone call to Sen. Cassidy, Chairman Cassidy indignantly praised Monarez for keeping Congress informed.

The day’s other witness, former CDC chief medical officer Dr. Debra Houry, one of three senior officials who left after Monarez was fired, said that Kennedy’s policies were killing children and he should resign.

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**THE CONSEQUENCES OF KENNEDY’S WRECKAGE** are that fewer Americans will get vaccines, and fewer new vaccines will be developed. The CDC has already narrowed recommendations on COVID vaccines for pregnant women and children. The FDA has approved the latest COVID vaccines for the omicron variant LP.8.1, but only for people over 65 and others at serious health risk. That in turn could affect what insurance will cover and whether pharmacists may give COVID injections. Several states have now begun their own vaccine approval systems, circumventing the CDC and FDA.

Under Kennedy, the National Institutes of Health has illegally withheld billions of dollars in grant funding. One notable NIH decision canceled half a billion in funding for mRNA technology, the same technology that allowed “warp-speed” development of COVID vaccines that saved millions of lives. Operation Warp Speed was one of the very few positive achievements of Trump’s first term. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine policy will deny millions of Americans not just COVID shots, but yet-to-be-developed vaccines against new plagues such as avian flu, and easily preventable ones such as measles.

All this raises the question of what exactly Trump gets out of his alliance with RFK Jr. Trump is proud of the success of Operation Warp Speed, and keeps insisting against all evidence that Kennedy is actually a supporter of vaccines. Some of the MAGA base is libertarian as well as anti-science and opposed to mandatory vaccination. Trump’s support for Kennedy reinforces that theme.

But when ending mandatory vaccination for a range of contagious diseases is actually turned into policy, as was recently done in Florida, the vast majority of citizens are appalled. **A recent**

**Washington Post**

**-KFF** [link removed] poll found that 82 percent of Florida parents want mandatory childhood vaccinations to continue.

The simplest explanation for Trump’s continuing support of Kennedy is that both men resist science, because science is evidence-based. And when you habitually make up supposed facts, evidence gets in the way. This is true of everything from global climate change to public health.

A secondary explanation is that the antics of RFK Jr. are part of Trump’s general strategy of creating maximum chaos for the sake of theater and distraction. But while Trump may find this convenient and amusing, it should be a political embarrassment to Republican legislators who have to face the voters.

Even Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, a blend of fringe ideas and sensible ones, is losing its good ideas because of industry pressure on Trump. After several meetings at the White House with MAHA Commission leaders, agriculture lobbyists secured a private promise that Trump would not permit Kennedy to restrict the use of chemical pesticides. Drug companies will likely come away unscathed as well.

Yesterday, some 400 medical research groups, representing every major clinical specialty and every leading group committed to eradicating particular diseases, took out a two-page ad spread in

**The Wall Street Journal** publicizing a **Rally for Medical Research at the Capitol** [link removed] tomorrow, September 18, that will call for full funding of NIH. On July 31, the Senate Appropriations Committee **voted to increase NIH funding** [link removed] for next year by $400 million, defying Trump’s demand for a 40 percent cut.

What Kennedy is targeting is American science at its finest, a monumental achievement that Kennedy wants to destroy. Trump may go along, but Republican legislators don’t have to. Kennedy will be fired only if key Republicans in Congress demand it.

**~ ROBERT KUTTNER**

Follow Robert Kuttner on Bluesky [link removed]

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