For nearly two years, Donald Trump and his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have been systematically gutting public health in the US: defunding research, spreading disinformation, throwing millions off their health coverage, and cutting vital federal functions like food safety and disease monitoring.
Can the new, Democratic-controlled Congress fix the damage? Will they?
They can’t fix everything with Trump and Kennedy still in office, but they can make a real start, one that could well save lives. And there’s little doubt voters want them to.
A detailed analysis of voter survey data by San Francisco nonprofit health org KFF shows voters clearly unhappy with Trump administration health policies. Roughly six out of 10 voters said they were “very concerned” about the cost of healthcare, and a solid majority said the administration had made healthcare costs worse.
When asked which party can do a better job on health, Democrats led by a 20 percentage point margin. And 58% said the administration had had a negative impact on Americans’ health, compared to just 21% who said it had made our health better.
So Democrats absolutely have a mandate to fix things. What can they do? And will they do it?
I’m not an impartial observer here. As regular readers know, I’ve been volunteering with Defend Public Health since Kennedy’s appointment was announced, and the group has already floated some ideas while continuing to solicit input from members. Lots of others have also weighed in.
Path One: Legislation
Two paths are available: legislation and hearings/investigations. Much can be done on both fronts, though legislation has more obstacles. Democratic committee chairs can hold hearings and conduct investigations on whatever they want, and neither congressional Republicans nor the president can stop them. Legislation could face a Senate filibuster by Republicans and a veto by President Trump, which would require a two thirds majority in both houses to override.
That doesn’t mean nothing can pass, but it does mean it will take some clever strategizing. And the really big stuff, like actually enacting Medicare for All or some similar form of national healthcare plan, probably can’t happen with Trump in office.
Still, legislative progress may be possible. Democrats absolutely must do everything they can to repeal the brutal cuts enacted in the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” including cuts to SNAP food assistance plus the Medicaid work requirements that kick in starting in January.
As many advocates have noted, since 92% of Medicaid recipients either work or are unable to work, “these requirements are not so much work requirements as they are paperwork requirements”—designed to prune people off the rolls by miring them in difficult-to-navigate bureaucracy.
The SNAP cuts had already cost 3.5 million their food assistance as of early in 2026—even as RFK Jr. lectures Americans to “eat real food.”
The next Congress also needs to restore the Affordable Care Act subsidies cut by the current Congress. Those cuts have cost over four and a half million people their health coverage.
Notably, some of these changes can likely be passed through a legislative procedure called reconciliation, a mechanism that lets budget and financial measures pass without being filibustered, allowing passage with just 50 Senate votes.
So, legislation to roll back the cuts to Medicaid, ACA and SNAP just might pass. With a solid Democratic Senate majority, it’s not unimaginable that they could peel off enough Republicans to get it through over a filibuster in cases where reconciliation can’t be used, and even a veto override might not be beyond reach.
Having just gotten clobbered in an election that revolved to a large degree around the cost of food and healthcare, a meaningful number of surviving Republicans may not want to go to the mat to defend letting children go hungry and denying people the medical care they need. And if they do, let them run on that in 2028 and see how their constituents like it.
Enacting a long-overdue national healthcare plan along the lines of “Medicare for All” (a great slogan but an imperfect policy, as Medicare’s significant gaps would need to be addressed) will take longer, but the new Congress can start laying the foundation for the effort.
Congress also needs to reclaim its constitutional authority over spending, which the Trump administration has largely ignored. That means permanently quashing the infamous OMB rule attempting to politicize federal grants (for now temporarily blocked by Congress), as well as stopping the efforts by several federal departments to implement key portions of the rule piece by piece.
But it could also mean more. Congress might build more detailed, specific language into future funding bills designed to ensure that Kennedy or other officials can’t arbitrarily cancel vital research on things like health disparities just because they think it’s “woke.”
And beyond reversing cuts to Medicaid, etc., Congress must undo the administration’s arbitrary slashing of CDC personnel monitoring disease outbreaks and performing other life-saving tasks. It should also restore the drastically cut food safety staff and rebuild USAID, which both assists poor countries and helps keep health problems originating abroad from coming here. At least some of these items should be passable by a veto-proof margin.
A potentially harder lift, but worth trying, would be legislation to block the administration’s arbitrary, unscientific attacks on gender-affirming care. That will likely require getting a few Democrats on board who chose to throw trans people under the bus for political purposes during the campaign (looking at you, Dr. Annie Andrews). But it’s time for Democrats to grow a spine on this.
Path Two: Hearings and Investigations
Unlike legislation, the Democrats who will run the House and Senate can pursue whatever hearings and investigations they want without needing any Republican cooperation. And the ongoing catastrophe that is the Department of Health and Human Services and its various agencies under RFK Jr.’s leadership needs a thorough public airing in so many areas it’s hard to list them all. Here are a few—not necessarily in the sequence they should occur.
RFK Jr.’s conflicts of interest: Given the prominence of corruption as an issue in the recent midterms, Congress needs to dig into the close ties that Kennedy his top advisors have to the “wellness” industry, a motley collection of companies and entrepreneurs that regularly promote pricey, unproven and likely bogus products alleged to improve health.
It also needs to dig into Kennedy’s profiting from anti-vaccine lawsuits. His record prior to taking office is well documented, and more recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been looking into a newer potential conflict of interest in this area. Once they are in charge, Democrats will be able to use their subpoena power and hold hearings that could get really interesting really fast.
Government-sponsored disinformation: Under RFK Jr., government health agencies have unleashed a torrent of misleading and dishonest claims. For example, a CDC page on vaccines and autism states, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Sorry, that’s not how science—or reality—works.
If I claim that you, the reader, are an AI-generated simulation and not an actual human, it is NOT up to you to prove you’re not fake. The onus is on me to provide evidence for my claim, and decades of research on vaccines and autism consistently indicates no causal link. Congress must air the origins of this torrent of nonsense thoroughly, subpoenaing relevant records and bringing in real experts to set the record straight.
Measles: Eliminated here decades ago, measles is out of control in the US—well over 5000 cases so far this year. In 2024, the last year before Kennedy became HHS secretary, we had just 282 cases for the entire year. Now we sometimes see that many cases reported in a week. By the time you read this, we may well have officially lost that elimination status—and if we don’t, it will be on a technicality.
Amazingly, news outlets have reported that leaders emerged from a recent CDC meeting on measles wondering whether CDC Director Erica Schwartz would be “authorized” to promote vaccination. Measles, because it is highly contagious, is considered a canary in the proverbial coalmine of disease outbreaks, the first signal of broader problems. Congress must dig into this breathtaking malfeasance, subpoena internal communications between HHS honchos and CDC staff on vaccination campaigns and bring in experts to debunk official disinformation.
Impact of CDC cuts: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has faced severe staff cuts as well as political interference, and an anonymous survey of staff found almost universal agreement that the cuts have badly damaged the CDC’s ability to respond to health emergencies. Bring in some of these personnel to lay out the danger this has created.
Research: The National Institutes of Health issue tens of billions of dollars in research grants each year. Cuts, delays and political interference with this funding have caused what has been described as “chaos for researchers and patients alike.” Congress must not just hear from researchers, but also from patients participating in studies that were abruptly cut off.
And it should dig into cuts specifically aimed at so-called “DEI” or “woke” studies. Many of the cuts to research (and to other related programs as well) focused on work aimed at understanding health disparities: Black, Latino and Native American communities fare worse on nearly every measure of health than their white counterparts. Trump and Kennedy have been systematically destroying nearly everything the government was doing to try to fix that injustice.
Suppression of mRNA research: This is a subset of research but deserves its own hearing. As my Defend Public Health colleague, virologist and University of Pennsylvania professor emeritus James Alwine, constantly reminds me, mRNA vaccine research not only gave us the COVID-19 vaccines that have saved millions of lives, it offers the best hope for quickly containing the next outbreak of a new disease before it becomes a pandemic. Kennedy cut funding for this vital line of research for entirely bogus reasons.
Trans youth care: Will the Democrats have the nerve to tackle this? They sure as hell should. Let trans youth and their families testify about the struggles they’ve been put through by restrictive state laws and HHS’s attempts to blackmail healthcare institutions into stopping such care—an action that courts have blocked in some states, but not all.
Bring in real experts to debunk Kennedy’s nonsensical claim that gender affirming care is “malpractice.” Lay the groundwork for putting an end to this cruel, pointless charade.
All of these hearings and investigations can and should point in one direction: the impeachment and removal of Kennedy. Yes, that’s a heavy lift, but Kennedy is becoming toxic enough that it’s not impossible.
This agenda will take a little time and yes, the new Congress has other issues to address as well, like a certain misbegotten war. Parts of it will be tough. But the Democrats who will be calling the shots need to remember that lives are literally at stake.
