Speaker Mike Johnson is facing bipartisan criticism—and public ridicule—after abruptly shutting down the House of Representatives on Tuesday afternoon for the rest of the week. The move came after a Republican proposal with bipartisan support, which would allow members with newborns to vote remotely, disrupted his legislative agenda. Johnson, who often portrays himself as a devoted family man, opposed a rule change to accommodate new parents.

Democrats voted for the rule change unanimously, and nine Republicans joined them. Johnson effectively poisoned the rules package to block remote voting, or proxy voting, and sent members home.

“House is now paralyzed,” reported CNN’s Manu Raju (see video below). “GOP leaders, after suffering an embarrassing defeat after 9 Rs joined with Ds to keep alive the effort to allow new parents to vote by proxy, have sent the House home for the week. Steve Scalise told us they’re gonna try to kill the rules change again.”

“It’s a brutal loss for Johnson, who poured considerable political capital into trying to snuff out Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s (R-Fla.) efforts,” Axios reported. “In a rare move, Johnson tied a provision killing the vote to unrelated Republican legislation prohibiting non-citizens from voting in federal elections.”

Johnson’s decision to shut down the House thwarted President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“Well, it’s a very disappointing result on the floor there,” Johnson told reporters. “A handful of Republicans joined with all the Democrats to take down a rule. That’s rarely done.”

Calling it “very unfortunate,” Johnson claimed the vast majority of House Republicans “believe it’s unconstitutional and they agreed that it would open a Pandora’s box.”

During COVID, voting by proxy was allowed in certain circumstances, and many House Republicans took advantage of it. U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) was accused of “voter fraud,” when he allegedly recently voted by proxy. There are currently no rules allowing it.

Johnson added that since he has shut down the House, this week they “will not be voting on the SAVE Act for election integrity. We will not be voting on the rogue judges who are attacking President Trump’s agenda. We will not be taking down these terrible Biden policies with the CRA votes. All that was just wiped off the table.”

But Punchbowl news co-founder Jake Sherman says Johnson could have put those bills on the floor for a vote.

“This is a choice, of course. They can bring up the SAVE Act at any time without a rule. They can go back to rules. It’s only Tuesday!! But they’re done for the week…”

U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) mocked the Speaker: “They broke Johnson,” he said.

“So let me get this right,” the Florida Democrat continued, “they opposed proxy voting for pregnant women because they said they should be in dc for work, and their response is to send us home and not work at all?”

“It’s only Tuesday,” lamented U.S. Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO). “Yet House Republicans just canceled votes and decided to go home for the week. Inflation is rising. The stock market is tanking. The President is starting a trade war. Congress has work to do. Shameful.”

“Mike Johnson is shutting down the work of Congress for the rest of the week because he’s angry over his failure to discriminate against mothers in Congress,” noted writer Charlotte Clymer.

“I thought they were all about parental rights? Guess it was all BS,” observed U.S. Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-FL).

“MAGA infighting just stopped all progress in the House for the week,” noted Jared Ryan Sears, a Navy veteran who writes The Pragmatic Humanist. “All of Trump’s agenda is on hold because Republican leadership was so afraid to allow a floor vote to proceed, which would determine if new parents could vote by proxy in Congress, that they tried to change the rules to block it; only the rule got blocked instead. As usual, Speaker Johnson is out of his depth. Fortunately, that ineptitude slows down extremist efforts to target judges who protect the rule of law.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

House is now paralyzed. GOP leaders, after suffering an embarrassing defeat after 9 Rs joined with Ds to keep alive the effort to allow new parents to vote by proxy, have sent the House home for the week.

Steve Scalise told us they’re gonna try to kill the rules change again. pic.twitter.com/ixMrsJpL8m

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 1, 2025

Image via Reuters

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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