RFK Jr.'s Big Day
Plus: Tragic plane crash in D.C., immigration crackdown fallout, and more...
True to form: Yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—President Donald Trump's pick for secretary of health and human services, which oversees the administration of Medicare and Medicaid, and thus receives a massive chunk of the federal budget—was grilled by senators on the Senate Finance Committee for three hours as part of his confirmation hearings. They interrogated his stance on abortion, his possible role in measles vaccine refusal in Samoa (where an outbreak then killed 83 people), and his collection of fees for clients referred to a law firm suing Merck, the makers of the Gardasil vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer. ("You're making me sound like a shill," he told Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) when she pressed him on that last point.)
Today, he will face questions from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, but yesterday's hearing was much more important since it's the Finance Committee that votes on sending Kennedy's nomination to the Senate floor for a full vote.
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Kennedy appeared to do a good job winning over necessary Republican support and pandering to their interests. When asked "Are you a conspiracy theorist?" he had a fairly smooth response, talking about how the term is used to denigrate people "asking difficult questions of powerful interests."
Later on, it became clear that Kennedy didn't really know much about the programs he would be tasked with overseeing. "The premiums are too high, the deductibles are too high, and everybody's getting sicker," he said of Medicaid, a program for which people by and large don't pay premiums or deductibles.
Tragic collision: Last night, an American Airlines jet carrying 64 people flying from Wichita, Kansas, to D.C.'s Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport collided in midair with a Black Hawk military helicopter carrying three people. Both aircraft went down, and a search and rescue effort in the Potomac River has started. Many are feared dead.
The Black Hawk was doing routine flying exercises before returning to a nearby base. The commercial plane was carrying more than a dozen figure skaters, of American and Russian origin, returning from a training camp in Kansas following the national competition.
"The crash is likely to renew debate over safety at Reagan National Airport. Last year, as part of legislation to fund the Federal Aviation Administration, Congress added five additional round-trip flights at National," reports The Washington Post. "The decision came over the objections of members of the D.C.-area congressional delegation, who have long argued that the airport is at capacity and that adding more flights could compromise its ability to operate safely."
This follows a spate of safety incidents in 2023 and 2024, none of which resulted in a midair crash. Last year, "a fuselage panel blew off an Alaska Airlines flight from Oregon, causing a sudden cabin decompression and leading to a temporary grounding of some of Boeing Co.'s 737 Max 9 aircraft," reports Bloomberg. And in 2023, "there were eight incidents involving airliners on or near runways in January or February ranked by [the Federal Aviation Administration] as a serious risk of a collision or that prompted the National Transportation Safety Board to open an investigation," notes the same publication, adding that such a record is a doubling of the previous five years' annual averages. Toward the end of last year, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that it had met its hiring goal for air traffic controllers—news that's significant primarily because the shortage of controllers had been a huge problem in the years prior.
It's not clear who specifically is to blame for this tragedy, nor have casualty totals been announced yet (though they are presumably high).
Scenes from New York: There's some whisperings that the Justice Department under Trump may be dropping its corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams.
QUICK HITS
- Let's keep that subscriber growth strong over at YouTube. Zach Weissmueller has been reupping our episode with Vinay Prasad in light of the RFK Jr. confirmation hearings, in case you missed it.
- "Given the reality that there are 1.3 million people waiting deportations and 600K convicted criminals, why would [Department of Homeland Security] add to the list hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Venezuelans who will end up in immigration courts for years only to not even be deported?" asks journalist and Manhattan Institute fellow Daniel Di Martino.
- Classic tale: "Prominent critic of Portland area homeless services admits to stealing from one of them," reports Oregon Live.
- "President Donald Trump said he was signing an executive order asking the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to examine creating a facility at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay that could house as many as 30,000 undocumented migrants," reports Bloomberg. "Some of them are so bad, we don't even trust the countries to hold them," said Trump, "because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo," seemingly gesturing at the fact that sending countries won't necessarily take them back and that many folks have nowhere to go. It's not the first time this has happened: In 1991, after some 30,000 people fled in makeshift boats, George H.W. Bush used the base to temporarily house thousands of Haitian refugees who were fleeing the country.
