RFK Jr. Is Losing His Grip on the CDC

Updated at 7:40 p.m. ET on March 25, 2026

Today, Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya said something that no other prominent health leader in the Trump administration has. “I think it is vital that every kid in this country get the measles vaccine. Absolutely vital,” he told CDC staff at a meeting this morning.

That declaration went further than Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s previous tepid endorsement of the vaccine did—and is in line with what past CDC directors have said about immunization. In fact, the whole point of the meeting seemed to be to signal a turn toward normalcy, away from the more extreme elements of Kennedy’s agenda. Bhattacharya told the CDC’s beleaguered employees that the agency needed to “move on” from the chaos of the past year. He encouraged employees to “remove politics” from their work and “focus on what we know how to do.” He echoed Kennedy’s slogan while acknowledging the limits of his position, but also seemed to contradict it, saying, “You can’t just snap your fingers and make people healthy again.”

By tomorrow, Bhattacharya’s position may be even more limited. Thanks to some complicated laws about federal governance, if President Trump does not nominate anyone for the role of CDC director by the end of the day today, no one can serve in that role in an acting capacity. Right now, all signs point to the administration missing the deadline. Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, told me that Bhattacharya “will continue to oversee the CDC by performing the delegable duties of the CDC director” until a nominee is found. He also said that Bhattacharya and Kennedy are “aligned to refocus the CDC on its original mission of infectious diseases,” and pointed me to a post in which Bhattacharya said he learns much from “respectful conversations” about his disagreements with Kennedy.

The nomination delay comes at a moment when the Make America Healthy Again movement and, by extension, Kennedy appear to be on the ropes. MAHA supporters are angry that Trump recently signed an executive order shielding the makers of the weed killer glyphosate from legal liability. The confirmation of Casey Means, the wellness influencer whom Trump nominated to become surgeon general, appears to be stalled in the Senate. The FDA’s vaccine chief, Vinay Prasad, will leave his position for the second time at the end of April, following a tumultuous tenure. Last week, a federal judge ruled that the CDC’s January shrinking of the childhood-vaccine schedule was probably illegal, and that Kennedy likely broke the law, too, when he remade the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel in his own image. All of the decisions made by that panel, the judge ordered, should be put on hold. The committee’s vice chair, Robert Malone, a Kennedy ally and a popular figure in the MAHA movement, resigned yesterday.

[Read: A new level of vaccine purgatory]

Each of these events individually is bad news for Kennedy’s agenda; together, they suggest that his grip on power is waning. Kennedy has a history of advocating against glyphosate, and has indicated that he’s disappointed with that decision. The White House no doubt knew that the executive order would cause problems for Kennedy among the MAHA base—and the president signed it anyway. Means is a like-minded Kennedy ally, and her rejection would be a defeat for the movement. After Kennedy, Prasad is the senior official most antagonistic toward pharmaceutical companies. (An HHS official told me that Prasad had planned to return to his academic job after a year at the FDA.) And as my colleague Katherine J. Wu has written, Kennedy may struggle to find new vaccine advisers who support his agenda and can get through the traditional vetting process.

Meanwhile, a December poll seems to have scared the White House off Kennedy’s vaccine agenda. The survey, conducted by the longtime Republican strategists Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward, forecasted “electoral downsides” for candidates who supported doing away with vaccine recommendations. The Washington Post has reported that the White House subsequently pressured HHS to avoid any more vaccine-policy changes and installed a new chief counselor, Chris Klomp, to rein in the department. All of this likely explains why Kennedy has retreated from commenting on vaccine issues in public; instead, he has spent this year celebrating his inverted food pyramid and making vague threats to companies that sell highly processed snacks. At an “Eat Real Food” rally in Austin this month, Kennedy said that his department would ask Dunkin’ and Starbucks to prove that their high-sugar drinks are safe. A week later, HHS posted an AI-generated video of a shirtless Kennedy body-slamming a man in a Twinkie costume.

[Read: The meme-washing of RFK Jr.]

Before and after taking charge of HHS, Kennedy called the CDC corrupt and maligned its officials as beholden to pharmaceutical companies. This may be one reason that he and the White House have had trouble finding a permanent leader for the agency. The first nominee was Dave Weldon, a doctor and a former representative from Florida who shares some of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. But Weldon’s nomination was pulled by the White House before his Senate confirmation hearing because he clearly didn’t have the votes.

The second nominee, the microbiologist and immunologist Susan Monarez, got the Senate’s approval; less than a month later, Kennedy pushed her out. Monarez testified in front of a Senate committee that she was removed because she refused to go along with Kennedy’s request that she dismiss certain public-health experts and approve the recommendations of the agency’s remade vaccine advisory board. Kennedy said she was fired because Monarez had told him that she wasn’t trustworthy. In the aftermath of Monarez’s ouster, several top CDC officials resigned, including Debra Houry, the agency’s chief medical officer, who told me at the time that she and her colleagues couldn’t stay “if there was not a scientific leader at CDC.”

[Read: ‘It feels like the CDC is over’]

Since then, the CDC has been led by acting directors. The first, Jim O’Neill, is a biotech entrepreneur who lacks a degree in medicine or public health and was widely seen as a yes-man for Kennedy. He was removed from the position last month with little explanation and was instead nominated to be director of the National Science Foundation. (He doesn’t have a degree in science either.) O’Neill was replaced with Bhattacharya, who is also the director of the National Institutes of Health, which means that he oversees roughly 30,000 people at agencies that are approximately 650 miles apart.

Bhattacharya’s brief tenure has felt, to some CDC researchers I’ve spoken with, like the beginning of a return to reason. Bhattacharya is contentious in his own right: He does not practice medicine, has no formal training in infectious disease, and has been criticized by health experts within and outside the government for his contrarian pandemic convictions. Daniel Jernigan, the former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases who resigned after Monarez’s firing, texted me that since Bhattacharya was put in charge, he’d heard a “general sigh of relief from staff” after a strange and dispiriting year. During a measles outbreak last spring in West Texas that claimed the lives of two girls, Kennedy offered mixed messages, eventually endorsing the measles vaccine—to the chagrin of his fellow anti-vaccine activists—while privately telling the father of one of the girls that “you don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore.” (Nixon would not confirm Kennedy’s statement.) In August, a 30-year-old man who was upset about COVID vaccines fired close to 200 shots at the agency’s Atlanta headquarters, killing a police officer. Kennedy visited the campus in the aftermath and expressed his condolences, but a letter signed by hundreds of CDC officials accused him of “endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information.” (In 2021, Kennedy falsely called COVID shots “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”)

Nixon said that Klomp and Kennedy are working together to find the next CDC director. According to reporting by Bloomberg and The Washington Post, a few candidates are on the shortlist. At least one of them, Joseph Marine, has defended Kennedy and expressed support for the MAHA movement. Another, Daniel Edney, Mississippi’s state health officer, has been an advocate for childhood vaccination and would be a more conventional choice.

[Read: A new level of vaccine purgatory]

The nomination of a director with public-health bona fides and mainstream views on vaccines could mean a return to normalcy at the CDC. But whoever is confirmed as director will take over an agency in need of a reset. At today’s meeting, one employee told Bhattacharya that “we’re missing a lot of trust in our leadership” and asked how he planned to rebuild that trust. The question prompted nearly 30 seconds of applause. In response, Bhattacharya said the agency should “deescalate scientific disagreement.”

The new director, if confirmed, will also face pressure to continue pushing forward the MAHA agenda. At least, as long as Kennedy sticks around.