Graeme Sloan/AP
180 shots fired, 150 broken windows. Tumultuous firings and resignations at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The installation of a techno-optimist with a history of pushing unproven medical treatments. The month of August 2025 may go down as the worst in the history of the US Health and Human Services Department.
It’s against this chaos that Democrats are demanding that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. be removed from his post as the nation’s top public health official. “The reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines,” Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote in a scathing editorial on Saturday. “Now, as head of HHS, he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health, and on truth itself.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also joined the calls, lambasting Kennedy’s attacks on well-established science as “stubborn, pigheaded, conspiracy-based.”
“By keeping Robert Kennedy in charge of HHS, Trump is doubling down on his own failure,” Schumer wrote. “President Trump must admit his mistake and remove Kennedy now.”
Kennedy’s leadership has long been a source of acute concern from virtually everyone in the scientific and medical community. (An avowed vaccine skeptic with notoriously dangerous views on everything from autism to HIV, Kennedy is about to have personal authority over who gets kicked off Medicaid.) But this month, after a vaccine conspiracy theorist opened fire on the CDC building in Atlanta, Georgia—a shooting Kennedy was conspicuously slow to respond to—and Kennedy’s abrupt dismissal of CDC Chief Susan Monarez this week, the clear menace presented by the secretary has become clear.
Yet, it remains nearly impossible to see a scenario that will prompt his removal. On Friday, White House Deputy Chief Stephen Miller called Kennedy a “crown jewel of this administration.” Meanwhile, the one Republican senator, who at one point seemed slightly concerned over Kennedy’s views, Rep. Bill Cassidy, doesn’t seem too fussed.
