Chris Klomp, vying for the health department’s No. 2 slot, and Timothy Westlake, the pick for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, will also face questioning.
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Senators are expected to quiz Nicole Saphier, President Donald Trump’s pick for surgeon general, and two other high-profile nominees on vaccines, grant cancellations and the nation’s opioid crisis at a hearing Wednesday morning, according to two Democratic aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal planning.
In the spring, Trump selected Saphier — a former Fox News contributor and radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center — to be the nation’s top doctor, marking his third attempt to fill the role.
Two other nominees are also slated to appear before the Senate HELP Committee on Wednesday: Chris Klomp, who is vying for the health department’s No. 2 slot, and Timothy Westlake, Trump’s pick to lead the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. However, the decision on whether to advance the nomination of Klomp, who came into the administration as the top Medicare official and has been serving as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s chief counselor since February, will go through the Senate Finance Committee.
The nominations come as Trump officials have swapped some of Kennedy’s handpicked deputies this year for people with more traditional experience. The changes have frustrated some supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement championed by Kennedy, which was built on the notion of ushering in new health department leaders who challenged the medical establishment.
The move to elevate Saphier put an end to the nomination of Casey Means, who is influential within the MAHA movement, as her nomination stalled in the Senate. Trump earlier withdrew the nomination of Janette Nesheiwat, his first pick to serve in the role. The position of surgeon general has a powerful bully pulpit — helping fight HIV, smoking, obesity and addiction — but has a more limited role in policymaking.
Before being nominated, Saphier had criticized some actions that HHS had taken under Kennedy’s leadership.
Last year, the CDC revised its website to contradict the long-settled scientific conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism. On a November episode of her podcast, Saphier said that the website sounded like “someone without a science background wrote it.” In March, a federal judge halted Kennedy’s vaccine overhaul; Saphier wrote on X that “the system needed reform, but not chaos.” It does not appear that every previous tweet of hers is available.
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“Dr. Nicole Saphier is an accomplished physician who has practiced radiology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and has been an outspoken voice on breast cancer prevention, intrusive COVID-19 mandates, the politicization of science, and the federal government’s role in America’s chronic disease epidemic,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. “She has been a powerful asset for President Trump and works tirelessly to deliver on every facet of his MAHA agenda.”
She will be divesting her holdings in an array of companies, some of which impact Americans’ health and which Kennedy has accused of helping fuel chronic diseases. This includes but is not limited to the soda and food industries, as well as pharmaceutical companies, according to financial disclosure and ethics forms.
Her ethics agreement notes the positions she will step away from or take an unpaid leave of absence. This includes resigning, upon confirmation by the Senate, her position from DropRx — her company that sells dietary and herbal supplements — and Empower MD, which owns DropRx. Medical experts have raised questions about the supplement industry given it is not strongly regulated.
Meanwhile, senators are also poised to question Klomp and Westlake. On Tuesday, Klomp appeared before the Senate Finance Committee where several Democrats quizzed him on vaccines as the country deals with ongoing measles outbreaks that have reached historic highs. He called the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine “the single most effective public health tool that we have against measles.” He said he doesn’t believe based on the “preponderance of evidence” that he has seen that the shot causes autism, while adding that the country doesn’t know what causes autism.
This comes as Trump last month said that the MMR vaccine, taken together, could be “quite lethal;” he did not cite scientific evidence for that claim. Trump has called for breaking up the immunization into three separate shots, which are not currently available in the United States.
The third panelist, Westlake, has been serving as chief of staff at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the agency leading policy efforts on mental health and addiction. He is a board-certified emergency physician.
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