Trumps health picks: Whos moving, whos stalled | Edit ShortsCars

By Sophie Gardner and Kelly Hooper

With help from Carmen Paun

Senate HELP Chair Bill Cassidy, right, and ranking member Bernie Sanders will preside over three hearings next week to determine the fates of several HHS nominees. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

STATE OF PLAY — The Trump administration appears to be pushing to get a handful of its health nominees through the Senate confirmation process ahead of the midterms, though some remain in limbo.

On Wednesday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee announced that it would hold hearings for three of President Donald Trump’s health nominees next week: Chris Klomp, Trump’s pick to be Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s second-in-command; Nicole Saphier, Trump’s third nominee for surgeon general; and Timothy Westlake, Trump’s nominee to lead the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Klomp and Saphier’s nominations had seen little movement for months.

Klomp will also appear before the Senate Finance Committee, which will vote on his nomination. Ge Bai, whom Trump nominated for assistant secretary of HHS, will also appear before the Finance Committee for her confirmation hearing next week, Carmen reports.

Still no movement: Trump’s nominee to lead the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, the agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that focuses on emergency preparedness, has yet to receive a floor vote.

Sean Kaufman appeared for his confirmation hearing in July, alongside the nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Erica Schwartz. Both advanced out of committee that same month, mostly on party lines, but only Schwartz was confirmed by the full Senate in early August. Kaufman’s nomination has yet to be brought up for a floor vote.

During his confirmation hearing, Kaufman was pressed about his past comments questioning vaccine safety. However, he ultimately won the votes of every Republican on the HELP committee, including its chair, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.). During the confirmation hearing, Cassidy accused Kaufman of previously repeating “lies” about vaccination, but later voted to advance his nomination, saying he was offered certain assurances, including that Kaufman wouldn’t play a role in setting vaccine policy.

Heidi Overton, who Trump nominated last month to run the Food and Drug Administration, doesn’t yet have a confirmation hearing on the books. She’s expected to face tough questions from Democrats and Cassidy about her role in Trump’s August executive order, which reiterated the administration’s desire to reduce the number of routine shots included in the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule.

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In the latest episode of On the Road, Jonathan Martin sits down with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox to discuss his new book, Off Ramp, the future of the Republican Party, immigration reform and what he says it will take to rebuild trust and community in American life.

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CASSIDY’S REWRITE — Senate HELP Chair Bill Cassidy is revising his No Surprises Act, the law he authored six years ago to protect patients from out-of-network medical bills after they receive emergency care, POLITICO’s Simon J. Levien reports.

Two people familiar with his plans, granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to reveal them, said the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee plans to hold several roundtables Tuesday with stakeholders, including doctors, insurers and employers.

Committee staff will also meet with independent arbitrators who, under the law, determine how much insurers must pay out-of-network doctors when disputes arise. Later this month, Cassidy plans to convene his committee’s members for a roundtable. A November hearing is also in the works with the hopes of taking testimony from the Department of Health and Human Services.

A HELP Committee spokesperson said Cassidy has roundtables in the works but declined to comment on the details.

Why it matters: Cassidy, who’s departing at year-end after losing his Republican primary, hopes to preserve the law, which he views as a legacy item. It’s come under fire from doctors, who complain that insurers still don’t pay, and insurers, who point to exorbitant judgments against them. Arbitrators are handling millions more disputes than Congress had anticipated.

The HELP Committee is considering provisions to reduce the dispute backlog by blocking ineligible claims and enforcing payout timelines.

Also on our radar: The House Ways and Means Committee is talking through its own overhaul of the No Surprises Act, though members and staff increasingly see a fix as a task for the next Congress, according to the two people who spoke with POLITICO.

Despite Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's friendly overtures toward MAHA activists, the president of MAHA Action warns the group's supporters not to trust what she says. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

AOC ‘NOT OUR ALLY’ — A close ally to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday that New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’s reached out to Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement ahead of the midterm elections, “is not our ally.”

Tony Lyons, the president of MAHA Action — a nonprofit group supporting Kennedy’s agenda — argued in a weekly call with supporters Wednesday that Ocasio-Cortez voices positions the movement agrees with but takes actions contrary to what MAHA wants, Carmen reports.

“She attacks Big Pharma with one breath and defends their products with the next,” Lyons said. If she believes in the MAHA goals, the progressive Democrat should support Kennedy in his work to improve school lunches and hospital food rather than criticize him, Lyons added.

“She’s just another double-talking politician who’s preparing to run for president on a platform of lies, slogans, and propaganda, and it’s the same trap that the whole modern left is caught in,” Lyons said.

Ocasio-Cortez’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Why it matters: The Democrat said this summer that she has met with MAHA activists. One of them is Zen Honeycutt, executive director of the activist group Moms Across America and a Kennedy ally, who told POLITICO that the movement is “eager to see her platform if she runs for president and welcome continued conversations about what that might look like.”

OPIOID ALTERNATIVES? Federal officials are eyeing psychedelics as they consider ways to reduce the clinical use of opioids, POLITICO’s Amanda Friedman reports.

The agency convened the meeting with the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA — a nonprofit organization Congress established to support FDA initiatives. Officials specializing in opioid medication policy and research discussed a variety of potential regulatory pathways to help reduce patients’ reliance on opioid medications like methadone and buprenorphine to treat drug addiction e and oxycodone to manage pain.

During the meeting, Wilson M. Compton, deputy director for the National Institute of Drug Abuse, expressed enthusiasm about emerging therapies like psychedelics. The former leader of NIDA’s Division of Epidemiology said he was “very excited” about the Trump administration’s focus on psychedelics and their potential as an alternative to opioid medications for addiction treatment and certain pain conditions. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in April directing federal agencies to boost research efforts into psychedelic medicine.

Yet, Compton cautioned that psychedelics remain “an area where the science is not yet proven.” The FDA will hold a public debate on the potential future therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs on Sept. 14.

Even so: Officials stressed that alternatives shouldn’t come at the expense of patients who benefit from opioid medications.

“We’ve learned that the risk of suicide or overdose may increase with nonconsensual tapers or abrupt discontinuations of opioid therapy,” said Timothy J. Atkinson, acting director of opioid safety at the Veterans Affairs Department.

Key context: The meeting is part of the federal government’s implementation of the 2025 reauthorization of the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, a bipartisan law aimed at targeting the nation’s addiction crisis.

AUTISM INITIATIVE PUSHBACK — Last year, the Trump administration launched an initiative intended to fund researchers as they investigate what could be causing a rise in autism cases.

The Autism Data Science Initiative awarded 13 projects — run by researchers at top universities, including Johns Hopkins University, and hospitals, including Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Boston Children’s Hospital — millions of dollars.

But an executive at the anti-vaccine nonprofit that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. founded before joining the Trump administration is disappointed that none of the projects focus specifically on investigating vaccines as a potential cause of autism.

“This is $50 million of taxpayer-funded deflection,” wrote Brian Hooker, the chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, in an open letter this week to National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya about the initiative. In the letter, Hooker argues that, because several of the researchers leading the projects have previously said vaccines don’t cause autism, they can’t be trusted to research the topic objectively.

Decades of research have found no evidence pointing to vaccines as the cause of autism, including a recent large-scale Danish study involving more than 1 million children.

An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Why it matters: The incident reflects growing frustration within certain sects of the Make America Healthy Again movement that believe Kennedy has not done enough to investigate vaccine harms.

Brayden Woods has joined the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as a senior adviser in the Office of the Administrator. He most recently served as legislative director for Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas).

Jacqueline Thomas has joined the Department of Health and Human Services as deputy assistant secretary for strategic communications. She was previously director of strategic communications at the USDA.

The Washington Post’s Christopher Rowland, Lydia Sidhom and Ariana Eunjung Cha report that drug companies are paying doctors to promote weight-loss drugs.

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Amanda Chu @amandalanchu Amanda Friedman @amandasfriedman Lauren Gardner @Gardner_LM Sophie Gardner @sophie_gardnerj Kelly Hooper @kelhoops Robert King @rking_19 Simon Levien @simonjlevien Alice Miranda Ollstein @aliceollstein Carmen Paun @carmenpaun

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