As the Trump administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., presses forward with a mass firing in a sweeping effort to downsize the agency tasked with safeguarding the nation’s well-being—including removing top leaders from key programs, including from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—a Republican Senator who cast the pivotal vote that enabled the controversial anti-vaccine activist to take the helm of the massive public health agency is facing scrutiny and backlash.

During Kennedy’s confirmation process U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana became an important voice and crucial vote in persuading his fellow Republicans to support what many saw as an extreme candidate. Cassidy, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, is a medical doctor who worked for decades in public hospitals, and is an active vaccine advocate.

Senator Cassidy “ultimately provided the one-vote margin needed to advance Kennedy’s nomination to the full Senate,” as the Los Angeles Times had reported.

Defending his vote to confirm Kennedy, Senator Cassidy said the scion of the American political family had made assurances to him that convinced him to support his nomination.

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Cassidy “said he was swayed by Kennedy’s commitments to support the immunization schedules recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, maintain systems used to vet new vaccines and monitor their safety, preserve statements on the CDC website assuring the public that vaccines don’t cause autism, and meet with Cassidy ‘multiple times a month,’ among other things.”

“I will watch carefully for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines,” Cassidy said.

STAT News reported that Senator Cassidy “said he would be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s keeper.”

Over the weekend, Cassidy was sharply criticized—and blamed—when HHS forced out Dr. Peter Marks, the head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration division responsible for assuring the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, as CNN reported. Dr. Marks resigned but was “given the choice to resign or be fired.”

On Tuesday, The Hill reported that Kennedy “won’t acknowledge the scientific consensus that childhood vaccines do not cause autism.”

“That skepticism over seemingly settled science appeared to come to a head over the weekend when the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) top vaccine official was forced out and issued a fiery public letter blasting Kennedy.”

That official was Dr. Marks.

Cassidy appeared to express concern, but nothing more.

“I thank Dr. Marks for his dedicated service to the health of our country,” the Senator wrote. “His departure is a loss to the FDA. Commissioner Makary and Secretary Kennedy should replace him with someone of similar stature and credibility amongst the scientific community, who will lead without bias.”

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Tuesday afternoon, CNN’s Manu Raju reported that he asked Cassidy about the firings of 10,000 HHS employees.

“I’m trying to understand it,” Cassidy said. “They say that they are consolidating duplicative agencies.”

Asked if he supports the firings, Cassidy replied: ‘Like I said I’m investigating.”

Back in January, Cassidy had asked RFK Jr. if he could “trust” him, as Politico reported.

Asked “if he thinks RFK Jr is backsliding on his commitments,” Raju reported, Cassidy said: “We’re in dialogue about that.”

Kennedy had told Cassidy that he was “not going to go into HHS and impose my preordained opinions on anybody at HHS. I’m going to empower the scientists to do their job.”

Many of those scientists were fired on Tuesday at 5 AM.

MSNBC analyst and Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief David Corn blasted Cassidy, writing: “Sen. Bill Cassidy, you violated the Hippocratic oath when you supported RFK Jr.’s nomination and you own this—and all the horrific consequences to come.”

Corn added a screenshot of a post from a popular epidemiologist, Katelyn Jetelina, detailing a few of the consequences of Tuesday’s firings.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, you violated the Hippocratic oath when you supported RFK Jr.’s nomination and you own this—and all the horrific consequences to come. pic.twitter.com/C0PWDUnDjD

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) April 1, 2025

Cassidy also came under fire on Tuesday for telling CNBC, “Is there some way that we can cut Medicare—excuse me—reform Medicare—so that benefits stay the same, but that it’s less expensive, more efficient?”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Well, Republicans finally told the truth.

They’re coming for Medicaid.
They’re coming for Social Security.
And they’re coming for Medicare. https://t.co/UG015Qlvg0

— Katherine Clark (@WhipKClark) April 1, 2025

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Image via Reuters 

The United States is reportedly on pace for its worst year of measles infections this century, with 483 confirmed measles cases across 20 states. At the same time, 70 human cases of bird flu have been identified in 13 states. As these outbreaks of potentially deadly diseases escalate, with no clear resolution in sight, the Trump administration has begun the process of firing an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 employees at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Amid the ongoing bird flu outbreak, the “top FDA veterinarian working to help the Trump administration fight bird flu has been let go,” according to Wall Street Journal health reporter Liz Essley Whyte.

Medical and public health experts are in shock and sounding the alarm.

“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed,” remarked Dr. Robert Califf, who served twice as Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, under presidents Obama and Biden. He calls this “a dark day for public health” that history will see as “a huge mistake.”

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Dr. Califf says he is now hearing that firms are preparing to move research and development to Europe and China. He added, “maybe there’s a plan to nurture the profound advances in medicine & tech on the horizon rather than promote unproven remedies like cod liver oil and supplements for serious diseases.”

The Washington Post points to the “purge of leadership” at the U.S. health agencies that make up HHS. They include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), among others.

“At the National Institutes of Health, a nearly $48 billion biomedical research agency, at least five top leaders were put on leave,” according to the Post. “Among those offered reassignment were the infectious-disease institute director Jeanne Marrazzo,” who “had succeeded Anthony S. Fauci as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an institute that helped lead the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and that later became a target of Republicans.”

Sam Stein at The Bulwark calls Tuesday’s firings a “bloodbath,” and a “mass culling.”

“Multiple officials who work in the department told The Bulwark that entire offices were being eliminated, the conservative media outlet reported. “To get a fuller sense of the despair, head over to the NIH’s Reddit forum; or the HHS forum. It’s bleak. That’s what happens, we suppose, when a weeks-old administration decides that it will eliminate 10,000 full-time employees from one of its most critical departments.”

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“Generation of scientists, health care officials being wiped out,” Stein wrote on social media.

Dr. Rob Davidson, executive director of the nonprofit Committee to Protect Health Care wrote: “Slashing 20,000 HHS jobs is reckless. Pairing that with Medicaid cuts? That’s not reform—it’s sabotage. You don’t ‘fix’ healthcare by gutting its core. People will suffer.”

Claiming “streamlining,” and “efficiency,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the layoffs late last week, declaring he “will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This overhaul will improve the health of the entire nation — to Make America Healthy Again.”

Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency room physician who treated Ebola patients and subsequently contracted the often deadly disease but survived, blasted the firings.

“Thousands of the best experts at FDA, NIH, and all across HHS are being terminated right now,” Dr. Spencer wrote. “These are the people who make sure the medications you and your children take are safe. These are the people who perform and oversee research on cancer, infant health, and so so so much more. These are the people who make sure new devices that physicians and patients use are effective. These are the people who keep workers safe on the job and help prevent devastating injuries for workers all around the country. These are the people who track what drugs and medications are experiencing shortages so we can adapt. These are the people who help tackle HIV and other infectious diseases, asthma, lead poisoning, and everything else that makes many Americans sick. And now, thousands of them are gone. There is no way this makes Americans healthier. We will regret this.”

STAT News reports that about twenty-five percent of the entire HHS workforce is expected to be eliminated:

“As of last week, it was estimated that the FDA would take the biggest cut, losing roughly 3,500 employees, or about 19% its workforce, followed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was expected to lose … about 18% of its staff. The National Institutes of Health was projected to lose about 1,200 employees, or about 6% of its workers.”

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who served as FDA Commissioner during President Donald Trump’s first administration, did not appear to directly address the firings, but chose the day they are happening to warn about the destruction of the ecosystem that works to create new drugs, which includes HHS agencies like the FDA and the NIH.

“Twenty-five years ago, it was common to hear complaints about a ‘drug lag’—the perception that Europeans routinely enjoyed medical advances years before their American counterparts. Through a generation of congressional actions, investments in expertise and hiring, and careful policymaking, we built the FDA into the most efficient, forward-leaning drug regulatory agency in the world—and established the U.S. as the global center of biopharmaceutical innovation. Today, the cumulative barrage on that drug-discovery enterprise, threatens to swiftly bring back those frustrating delays for American consumers, particularly affecting rare diseases and areas of significant unmet medical need.”

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President Donald Trump has dubbed April 2 “Liberation Day”—the date he’ll unveil his sweeping and controversial tariff package—but behind the scenes, White House officials are quietly admitting it could be anything but liberating for America’s farmers.

Trump’s tariffs are expected to cost Americans tens of billions of dollars annually, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The cost to farmers could be “financial devastation,” The New York Times reported on Monday. And since the White House is mulling a necessary bailout for the American agricultural industry, the ultimate cost of Trump’s tariffs could grow even more expensive.

The Trump administration “is weighing a new round of emergency aid to farmers, who are likely to be caught in the middle if America’s trading partners retaliate.”

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“The early discussions offer a tacit acknowledgment that Mr. Trump’s expansive tariffs could unleash financial devastation throughout the U.S. agricultural industry, a crucial voting base that the president similarly tried to safeguard during his 2018 trade war with China,” the Times reports.

The American taxpayer ended up paying farmers about $23 billion during the first Trump administration’s trade war with China. Trump’s new tariffs could push that number far higher, if he decides to protect the agriculture industry.

This quiet acknowledgement that Trump’s tariffs could be calamitous to farmers, likely requiring billions to offset their losses, would appear to destroy his claims that tariffs will enrich the government’s coffers. A top aide, Peter Navarro, has claimed, in what has been described as “Orwellian” remarks, that tariffs are a “tax cut.”

The Times explains that “an expensive federal bailout threatens to cut deeply into one of Mr. Trump’s signature reasons for pursuing protectionist policies in the first place: a desire to rake in ‘lots of money,’ as the president himself has said. Mr. Trump and his Republican allies say the new tariffs could help pay for their still-forming plan to expand and extend a set of expiring tax cuts, which could cost into the trillions of dollars.”

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Trump’s tax cuts are expected to disproportionally benefit the rich, some say.

Meanwhile, critics are blasting the news.

“Farmers feed the world,” noted Wisconsin Democratic state Senator Brad Pfaff, a former acting agriculture secretary. “But Trump’s tariffs will hurt farmers and drive up consumer food costs. This is not sound economic policy.”

“Trump’s first government bailout for farmers cost way more than what DOGE has claimed to save,” writes HuffPost senior political reporter Igor Bobic. “Now we’re doing another liberation bailout.”

“He has barely launched his trade war that was gonna make us rich, and it’s already going to cost the taxpayers billions,” adds former Biden and Obama administration official Brian P. McKeon.

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