If You Can Believe It, Senate Republicans Are Probing a Trump Scandal

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For several hours on Wednesday, a fired public health official went before Congress and aired Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s dirty laundry. Former Centers for Disease Control director Susan Monarez laid into the Health and Human Services secretary’s management of vaccines, his disregarding of career experts, and his plans for remaking public health according to his own bullheaded vision.

Monarez, who was fired^[2] as CDC director only 29 days after her confirmation to the post, also gave her account of why she was fired. Her explanation departed significantly from Kennedy’s; he testified earlier this month that Monarez had responded^[3] “no” when asked if she was a “trustworthy person.” Instead, she said, Kennedy told her that he couldn’t trust her.

“If you cannot trust me,” Monarez said, “then you can fire me.”

It was a remarkable display of discord of within the administration. Even more shocking, though, was that it was taking place at all.

Try to remember all the way back, several millennia ago, to Jan. 20, 2025. How many two- or three-day story arcs have there been about ousted, or forced-out, government employees and appointees? Let’s run through a few, just from the top of my head. There was David Lebryk, a career civil servant^[4] who oversaw direct federal payments at the Treasury, after refusing access to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency staffers. Senior USAID leadership.^[5] FBI agents and officials were purged, some of whom are now suing.^[6] More than a dozen inspectors general.^[7] Federal Trade Commission commissioners.^[8] The librarian^[9] of Congress. And depending^[10] on the Supreme Court, a governor of the Federal Reserve. And personnel controversies only make up a small portion of the overall daily, hourly, second-by-second drama that this White House stokes.

In theory, it’s Congress’ job to do oversight on just about all of this, to provide key checks on an overeager executive branch. But this may have been the first real oversight hearing into a Trump administration scandal, and the first in which those on the losing end of it were invited to Congress to tell their story. It was organized specifically to probe an episode that the Trump administration would like to sweep under the rug, and typically does.

So why did this hearing come to order? The reasons are political and personal.

There’s recognition among Republicans in both Congress and the White House that Kennedy’s hostile posture toward certain vaccines, just before a critical deadline to determine the children’s vaccination schedule, is wickedly unpopular. Weeks ago, a memo from Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio had circulated on the Hill reinforcing^[11] that “that there is broad unity across party lines supporting vaccines such as measles (MMR), shingles, tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis (TDAP), and Hepatitis B.” That preceded a difficult hearing for Kennedy in which several Republican senators^[12] joined the Democratic pile-on.

But it takes a Republican committee chairman to convene a hearing on antics within a Republican administration. And Bill Cassidy is the only Republican who’s been humiliated enough to go through with it. Cassidy agonized over his critical vote to confirm Kennedy, only to later see Kennedy ignore all the “assurances” he’d made to the senator in return. Cassidy is also not just a doctor by profession, but a hepatologist specifically, and the vaccine recommendation that appears to be on Kennedy’s chopping block ahead of Thursday’s meeting is the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns. He spoke about the need to preserve that recommendation in his closing remarks at the hearing. The timing was not a coincidence.

Cassidy, who still needs Trump’s help (or, at least, neutrality) to survive a primary next year, twisted himself into knots trying to argue that this investigation into the Trump administration was actually good for the Trump administration. “This hearing is a direct response to President’s Trump’s call for radical transparency in how we conduct governmental affairs,” he said at the top of his opening remarks.

With that throat-clearing out of the way, though, the hearing was otherwise an odd, rare congressional moment in the Trump II era. The chairman and ranking member (in this case, Sen. Bernie Sanders) did not spending half an hour bickering about process at the start, and both were on the same page about getting to the bottom of this. Members did not scream at each other, and the witness did not scream back at them.

Even the Republicans on the committee who were there to toe the administration’s line, though, had little to offer. Several senators, including Florida Sen. Ashley Moody and Indiana Sen. Jim Banks, spent most of their time hassling Monarez^[18] for retaining the “anti-Trump” lawyer Mark Zaid, or suggesting that she planned this whole spectacle (getting fired from her job) all along. The oddest moment came when Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin said that there was a recording of the meeting in which she was fired, and that she wasn’t telling the truth about what happened. Mullin,^[19] and HHS^[20], later walked that statement back after Cassidy and Sanders asked why they hadn’t been given this recording, and why there was a recording in the first place.

Oversight hearings like this aren’t soon to be replicated. Trump’s polling is bad, but the bottom hasn’t fallen out in a way that would send the GOP scrambling from him and his administration. (And the bottom would really have to fall out for them to risk going against Trump and putting themselves in primary danger.)

But the hearing served as a reminder of how oversight can puncture Trump’s greatest skill: He’s a master of overwhelming the news cycle, and making it hard to for the concerned public to focus on any single statement or action for more than a minute. Oversight keeps the focus alive. So when you see Trump working all of his political muscle to maximally gerrymander red states ahead of the 2026 midterms, it’s not just because he frets at the prospect of low legislative productivity in a divided Congress. It’s because Democratic gavels would provide some—some—competition to his monopoly on attention management.

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