President Donald Trump promised to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” on health. He’s following through.
After the health secretary said Wednesday that he wanted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez gone less than a month after the Senate confirmed her, Monarez said she needed to hear it directly from the president.
A few hours later, a White House staffer in the personnel office told her she was terminated.
The move prompted dismay from both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill as well as the public health establishment, but it was just the latest instance in which Trump has had Kennedy’s back when he makes controversial decisions. Earlier this month, Trump agreed to rehire one of Kennedy’s top vaccine advisers after firing him on the request of MAGA enforcer Laura Loomer. Likewise, Trump didn’t bat an eye when Kennedy said he wanted to defund research into mRNA vaccines – the type Trump’s Operation Warp Speed developed in record time during the Covid pandemic.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated the administration’s support for Kennedy in a briefing Thursday, saying Monarez didn’t align “with the president’s mission to make America healthy again,” referencing the MAHA movement Kennedy started.
Leavitt gave no ground to Monarez’s charge that Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist before allying with Trump, is pursuing “unscientific, reckless directives” related to vaccine policy.
“It was President Trump, who was overwhelmingly reelected on November 5,” Leavitt said. “This woman has never received a vote in her life, and the president has the authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission,” she told reporters.
As POLITICO has reported, Trump loyalists have long believed Kennedy helped deliver the popular vote for Trump last year and that keeping Kennedy’s MAHA enthusiasts in the GOP tent is crucial to ensuring the party holds onto power in the midterms.
The Monarez affair shows nothing has changed. Trump bucked Loomer earlier this month in rehiring Vinay Prasad to his job regulating vaccines at the Food and Drug Administration after Kennedy asked. And after Kennedy said he was pulling $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine research on Aug. 5, Trump was nonplussed. “That was now a long time ago, and we’re onto other things,” the president told reporters at the time.
The firing of Monarez set off a chain reaction at the CDC, which fights infectious disease and has come under heavy criticism from Kennedy for how it handled the pandemic.
Other top career CDC officials resigned Wednesday in protest of Kennedy’s policies, with one warning that Kennedy’s moves to cast doubt on the safety of vaccines will result in the deaths of vulnerable people.
The upheaval also prompted rare criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill, with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who leads the Senate’s health panel and was the deciding vote in confirming Kennedy as secretary of health and human services in February, calling for oversight of the CDC departures. Pointedly, he said the administration should reject future vaccine recommendations from a panel of advisers hand-picked by Kennedy.
Cassidy will get a chance to question Kennedy publicly next week, when the health secretary is scheduled to testify before the Finance Committee about the administration’s health agenda.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who chairs the Appropriations Committee, seconded Cassidy’s call for congressional oversight and said she was alarmed by Monarez’s firing.
Trump was unmoved. “I think it’s fair to say the president trusts Secretary Kennedy,” said a White House official granted anonymity to share internal information.
The president praised Kennedy at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday. The health secretary was the first Cabinet member Trump turned to during the meeting, inquiring about Kennedy’s push to find the cause of autism.
Trump said he agreed with Kennedy that something in the environment must be triggering a big increase in autism cases. Kennedy has said he thinks it has to do with the number of vaccines children get. “There has to be something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something and I know you’re looking very strongly at different things,” Trump said at the meeting.
The health secretary, who’s been in Texas the past two days to celebrate the signing of state bills aligned with his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, refused to discuss Monarez’s firing with reporters. He did criticize the CDC, referencing its Covid response, calling it “very troubled,” and suggesting that he might need to continue cleaning house.
“There’s a lot of trouble at CDC, and it’s going to require getting rid of some people over the long term in order for us to change the institutional culture and bring back pride and self-esteem and make that agency the stellar agency that it’s always been,” he said during a Thursday press conference with Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
Kennedy picked Monarez, a career official who’d been principal deputy director, to lead the CDC because she was expected to follow orders, said one person familiar with the appointment who was granted anonymity to share the administration’s thinking.
“They didn’t love her but the understanding was she would do the job without being a pest,” the person said.