RFK Jr ‘not remotely qualified’ to be health secretary says Schumer before Senate vote – US politics live

The Senate judiciary committee will at 10am convene to vote on advancing Kash Patel’s nomination to lead the FBI.

The vote is excepted to succeed, despite concerns from Democrats that Patel would direct a purge of the FBI and use its powers to retaliate against Donald Trump’s political enemies. This week, Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, said that he has evidence Patel directed the firing of top FBI officials, and lied to the committee about it. But the Republican judiciary committee chair Chuck Grassley has shown no interest in those allegations, writing on X in his signature style:

Another day another attack against Kash Patel by the Democrats These latest allegations r nothing more than hearsay & dont hold a candle to Patel’s character+ credibility which over half a million law enforcement officers hv vouched for

Here’s more about what Durbin says Patel has been doing:

All signs point to the Senate’s Republican majority confirming Robert F Kennedy Jr as secretary of health and human services. But Democratic senators nonetheless used their floor time yesterday to decry his nomination, with Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, describing Kennedy as a terrible choice for the job.

“Robert F Kennedy Jr is not remotely qualified to become the next secretary of health and human services. In fact, I might go further. Robert F Kennedy Jr might be one of the least qualified people the president could have chosen for the job,” Schumer said.

He continued:

It’s almost as if Mr Kennedy’s beliefs, history, and background were tailor-made to be the exact opposite of what the job demands.

A few weeks ago, it seemed like maybe Senate Republicans would have drawn the line on nominees like Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard.

But the past few days have been a stunning capitulation by Senate Republicans. At this point they’re just rubber-stamping people, no matter how fringe they are.

If the Senate had a secret ballot, I bet you that Robert F Kennedy Jr would never have come close to confirmation.

His unfitness for the job is simply too obvious and too glaring.

Amid the daily troubling news coming from the United States are the ongoing and increasingly damaging efforts by President Donald Trump, supported by secretary of state Marco Rubio and Elon Musk, to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAid). Musk has called it a “criminal organization” and said that it was “time for it to die”. The agency website is down, so little official information is available. But in the week since funding to the agency was frozen, and the majority of staff placed on leave, thousands of public health and development programmes worldwide have been thrown into turmoil, and now face an uncertain future.

USAid is the main federal agency that works to provide foreign aid assistance to the poorest countries and people in the world. On Friday, a US judge prevented about 2,000 USAid employees from being placed on leave, and ordered the reinstatement of about 500 more. But Trump and Musk appear to want to move forward with a plan that would see its global workforce reduced from about 10,000 staff and contractors, to just over 600.

It’s hard to overstate how disruptive this has already been to humanitarian work worldwide: most programmes have just been shut overnight with staff laid off, drugs and food left in warehouses, and patients and others not able to access services. The people affected live in some of the most vulnerable countries like Ukraine, Jordan, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Afghanistan.

You can read the full opinion piece here:

More than 350 rabbis, alongside additional signatories including Jewish creatives and activists, have signed an ad in the New York Times in which they condemn Donald Trump’s proposal for the effective ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.

The ad, which was signed by rabbis including Sharon Brous, Roly Matalon and Alissa Wise, as well as Jewish creatives and activists including Tony Kushner, Ilana Glazer, Naomi Klein and Joaquin Phoenix, says: “Trump has called for the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza. Jewish people say no to ethnic cleansing!”

The ad follows Trump’s proposal to “take over Gaza” and leave 2 million Palestinians who have survived Israel’s deadly onslaught against the narrow strip with “no alternative” but to leave their homes.

Trump has called on Jordan, Egypt and other Arab countries to take in Palestinians – a proposal that has been met with widespread criticism from Arab countries and other allies while being condemned as an ethnic-cleansing plan.

Robert F Kennedy Jr has mass appeal despite his extreme ideas. This theory explains why

Darren Loucaides

“Back at home in the United States, the newspapers are saying that I came here today to speak to about 5,000 Nazis,” Robert F Kennedy Jr told a large crowd in Berlin. Estimated at 38,000 people, the crowd was a mix of hippies, anti-war types, Green party voters and anti-vaxxers, rubbing shoulders with a smattering of skinheads. It was late August 2020 and a group called Querdenken had rallied this motley crew together in defiance of Covid-19 restrictions.

“Governments love pandemics,” Kennedy said. “They love pandemics for the same reason they love war – it gives them the ability to impose controls that the population would otherwise never accept.”

Last month, in Senate confirmation hearings for his appointment as the US secretary of health and human services, Kennedy was questioned on having previously compared the Center for Disease Control’s work to that of “Nazi death camps”, calling Covid-19 a bioweapon genetically engineered to target black and white people while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, and blaming school shootings on antidepressants. “He has made it his life’s work to sow doubt and discourage parents from getting their kids life-saving vaccines,” said the Democratic senator Ron Wyden. “It has been lucrative for him and put him on the verge of immense power.”

Read the full piece here:

Peace push ‘not a betrayal’ of Ukraine, US defence secretary Hegseth insists

Jakub Krupa

US defence secretary Pete Hegseth has been speaking to reporters before today’s Nato defence ministers meeting in Brussels, where he denied that Donald Trump’s peace push with Vladimir Putin was a “betrayal” of Ukraine.

Hegeseth said that the Russian aggression on Ukraine was “a factory reset for Nato,” and a moment of “realisation that this alliance needs to be robust, strong, and real.”

“That is why president Trump has called for increased defence spending across the board for Nato, for European countries to recognise this is an urgent, real threat to the continent and this aggression needs to be a wake up call,” he said.

He said that standing up to Russian aggression is “an important European responsibility.”

Confronted by reporters with suggestions that the rapid push to peace and talks with the Russian president who annexed Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine in 2022 could be seen as amounting to a betrayal of Ukraine, Hegseth insisted “That is your language, not mine. Certainly not a betrayal.”

“There is no betrayal; there is a recognition that the whole world and the US is invested in peace, in a negotiated peace,” he says.

Jakub Krupa is following developments with Ukraine on our Europe live blog here: Trump-Putin call ‘not a betrayal’ of Ukraine, insists US’s Hegseth as he heads for Nato showdown

The Senate is expected to vote today on the confirmation of Robert F Kennedy Jr – a prominent lawyer and vocal vaccine critic – as the nation’s health secretary, controlling $1.7tn in spending for vaccines, food safety and health insurance programs for roughly half the country.

Despite several Republicans expressing deep skepticism about his views on vaccines, Kennedy is expected to win confirmation.

Writing for CBS News, Kaia Hubbard noted that “Kennedy’s path to confirmation was once considered among the most fragile of president Trump’s nominees,” but the Senate has cleared the final hurdle to a vote on his appointment 53 to 47 along party lines.

Last week Republican Sen Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, despite having expressed doubts about Kennedy Jr’s votes on vaccines, supported the appointment at the committee stage, and Republican Sen Susan Collins from Maine, who has expressed some disquiet about Trump nominations, also vowed to support Kennedy Jr.

During the pandemic, Kennedy Jr, 71, devoted much of his time to a nonprofit that sued vaccine makers and harnessed social media campaigns to erode trust in vaccines as well as the government agencies that promote them. He has said he is “uniquely positioned” to revive trust in public health agencies.

About 75,000 federal workers accepted the offer to quit in return for being paid until 30 September, according to McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson for the office of personnel management, Associated Press reports.

She said the deferred resignation program “provides generous benefits so federal workers can plan for their futures,” and it was now closed to additional workers.

A federal judge on Wednesday removed a key legal hurdle stalling president Donald Trump’s plan to downsize the federal workforce. The Boston-based judge’s order in the challenge filed by a group of labor unions was a significant legal victory for the Republican president after a string of courtroom setbacks.

American Federation of Government Employees National president Everett Kelley said in a statement that the union’s lawyers are assessing the next steps.

Today’s ruling is a setback in the fight for dignity and fairness for public servants. But it’s not the end of that fight. Importantly, this decision did not address the underlying lawfulness of the program.

She said the union continues to maintain that it is illegal to force citizens to make a decision, in a few short days, without adequate information, about “whether to uproot their families and leave their careers for what amounts to an unfunded IOU from Elon Musk.”

In a “factsheet” issued by the White House earlier this week, the Trump administration claimed that “excluding active-duty military and Postal Service employees, the federal workforce exceeds 2.4 million” people, and that “only 6% of federal workers report to work in-person on a full-time basis.”

Welcome to the Guardian’s rolling coverage of the second Donald Trump administration and US politics. Here are the headlines …

• Donald Trump’s buyout program for federal employees can proceed, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday. The move paves a path forward for the about 75,000 government workers who have volunteered to resign under the president’s plan to shrink the federal workforce

• Robert F Kennedy Jr is set to face a vote on his confirmation as secretary of health and human services early in the Senate, as does Howard Lutnick to be secretary of commerce

• Elon Musk’s so-called Doge “efficiency” agency website has added data from a controversial rightwing thinktank

• Social media platform X –owned by Musk – will pay Trump $10m to settle a lawsuit the president filed after he was banned from the platform following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, according to a report

• The US attorney general announced on Wednesday that the Trump administration is suing New York state over its immigration policies, accusing state officials of choosing “to prioritize illegal aliens over American citizens”

• Trump said he is willing to accept Russia’s longstanding objection to Ukraine joining Nato. “They’ve been saying that for a long time, that Ukraine cannot go into Nato, and I’m OK with that”

• Tulsi Gabbard has been sworn in as Trump’s director of national intelligence

• The White House has again barred an Associated Press reporter from the Oval Office for the agency refusing to adopt the name “Gulf of America” for the Gulf of Mexico