Senate expected to vote on RFK’s bid to be health secretary – US politics live

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. 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. Denver Public Schools became the first US school district Wednesday to sue the Trump administration challenging its policy allowing ICE immigration agents in schools. Colorado’s largest public school district argued in the federal lawsuit that the policy has forced schools to divert vital educational resources and caused attendance to plummet, Associated Press reports.

“DPS is hindered in fulfilling its mission of providing education and life services to the students who are refraining from attending DPS schools for fear of immigration enforcement actions occurring on DPS school grounds,” the lawsuit states. 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 ….