Robert F. Kennedy Jr. returns to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for back-to-back Senate hearings that could mark a sharp turn in his relationship with the Republican who cast the deciding vote to confirm him as health secretary.
Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, secured a series of written commitments from Kennedy before voting for his confirmation last year. Kennedy pledged to preserve federal vaccine recommendations and appear regularly before the committee. Neither has happened.
Kennedy's vaccine overhaul, announced in January, slashed the childhood immunization schedule from 18 recommended diseases to 11, removing protections against hepatitis A, hepatitis B, RSV, dengue and two types of bacterial meningitis. Cassidy, who is running for reelection, denounced the move on social media as something that would "make America sicker."
A federal judge blocked those changes in March and halted Kennedy's new appointees to the CDC's vaccine advisory committee. The administration has not appealed. But Kennedy has signed off on new rules for the committee that could circumvent the court's decision.
This is Kennedy's first appearance before Cassidy since a tense Finance Committee hearing in September. Wednesday's session will show whether the senator intends to publicly challenge the health secretary over his broken commitments or continue limiting pushback to social media posts and written statements.
Cassidy's office declined to say what questions the senator plans to ask. A spokesperson for the department called criticism of Kennedy "baseless" and said it "doesn't match reality."
Kennedy will testify before the Finance Committee in the morning, then the HELP Committee in the afternoon. He faces a second potential problem in the afternoon session: Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican retiring next year who has said he plans to speak more freely about concerns regarding Trump cabinet members. During the September hearing, Tillis suggested Kennedy had contradicted his earlier statements on vaccines, asking pointedly, "The fact that you're a Republican doesn't mean that you need to blindly accept" Kennedy's positions.
Tillis did not respond to requests for comment on his plans for Wednesday.
Kennedy has already testified at five congressional hearings over the past week, facing withering criticism from Democrats over vaccine policy and his overhaul of federal health agencies. At one hearing, he claimed the U.S. has "done better" at preventing measles than any other country, a statement made even as measles cases are spreading.
Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, predicted Kennedy would continue "gaslighting" the committees. "He continues using terms like 'world-class science,' 'rigorous evidence,' and 'radical transparency,' when in fact he has done the opposite," Gostin said.
Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy expert at UC San Francisco Law School, said she hopes Cassidy will force Kennedy to account for his actions. "There's a raging measles outbreak," she noted. "Kennedy may have given lukewarm endorsements to the MMR vaccine but, as far as I know, hasn't made any efforts to call on people to vaccinate or to do anything practical to reduce the risk."
Kennedy could also field questions about his recent comments calling for an overhaul of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which makes recommendations on preventive services including cancer screenings, as well as Trump's executive order on psychedelic research.
Author Sarah Mitchell: "Cassidy's silence so far has been deafening. If he doesn't press hard Wednesday, his constituents will know he's more concerned with staying on Kennedy's good side than keeping his promises to them."
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