COMMENT ILL ADVISED

Last month, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, demanded that Susan Monarez, the newly confirmed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fire senior officials at her agency and accept wholesale the recommendations of a handpicked panel of vaccine advisers whom he had installed. Monarez refused, and Kennedy asked for her resignation, just weeks after saying that he had “full confidence” in her “unimpeachable scientific credentials.”

- —Dhruv Khullar

She appealed to G.O.P. lawmakers, including Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate health committee and who had cast a crucial vote in favor of Kennedy’s confirmation after receiving what one can only imagine were extremely believable assurances that he wouldn’t do what he is now doing. The White House resolved the standoff by showing Monarez the door. (A headline in “Intelligencer” captured Cassidy’s posture: “Key Republican Almost Annoyed Enough at RFK Jr. to Act.”)

Then the C.D.C., which has bled thousands of employees since Kennedy took office, was further roiled by the resignations of several high-ranking officials. Nine former C.D.C. directors and acting directors published an essay in the Times arguing that Kennedy’s actions “should alarm every American,” and more than a thousand current and former Health and Human Services employees called for Kennedy’s resignation. On Thursday, at a contentious hearing before the Senate finance committee, Kennedy accused Monarez of lying, in a Wall Street Journal oped, about why she was fired. She wrote that his agenda “isn’t reform. It is sabotage.”

There won’t be a day when Americans awake to news that vaccines are prohibited, or that the National Institutes of Health has been shuttered. No agent will come knocking on your door to make sure that you’re drinking raw milk and cooking with beef tallow. But Kennedy has already propagated an insidious revolution within the agencies under his control, using a playbook familiar to illiberal leaders—culling expertise, silencing critics, and weaponizing administrative procedure to grant a veneer of legitimacy to his actions.