Last week, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced the closest a Senate hearing can look like a firing squad. Kennedy’s firing of Centers for Disease Control Director Susan Monarez, a month after the Senate had confirmed her, rightly caused some to point out that continuous organizational drama is not the expected metier at the federal health department.

His defense, essentially that she had lied to him about her position on vaccine science, was hardly persuasive. To my reading, his mistake was taking on someone whose whole career involved cycling through multiple federal agencies. She was what in the first Trump administration would have been called a deep state operative.

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With no private sector experience, she could never have been expected to champion the reforms that the CDC desperately needs. Again, in the lingo of Trump’s first term, she would never warm to draining the swamp. As a career bureaucrat, it was the only world she knew, somewhat like a fish not knowing what water is.

Republican guns were also aimed at Kennedy. Sens. John Barraso (R-WY) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) appeared to want to show off their physician chops, trying to nail Kennedy down on where he really stands on vaccines of various types. They could be forgiven for not really understanding the secretary’s stance because, whether intentional or not, his accumulated statements are not as clear-cut as he would have it.

Through it all, Kennedy proved a master of the “talk back loud and hard” approach of many Trump appointees, who seem skilled and happy to turn the tables on their Senate inquisitors. A particularly illustrative moment was Kennedy reversing the force field and asking Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) why he had shown no interest in chronic disease, which has risen five times during his nearly 30-year tenure.

The most salient moment in the hearing followed Sen. Mark Warner’s (D-VA) histrionic asking how many people had died from COVID. Kennedy’s answer was spot on and totally out of step with the regular respectful “Let me get back to you on that” answer. “I don’t think anybody knows because there was so much data chaos coming out of the CDC.”

The CDC’s appalling data culture continues to leave Kennedy, the Senate, and the nation in the dark. The pretense of it making its decisions by “following the science,” as was Dr. Anthony Fauci’s canned response to every question since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, was a horrific joke. In 2022, it took the New York Times, not professors in the dozens of the nation’s public health graduate schools, to discover that the CDC purposely failed to disclose significant data relating to COVID deaths and the post-injection health status of persons receiving the vaccine.

Aware that its lack of data resources might eventually become the object of criticism, in 2019, the agency successfully won a supplemental appropriation of $4 billion expressly for “data modernization.” The CDC would post its efforts to improve its data collection and analytic capacity for a while. It reported multiple contracts to Washington consulting firms commissioned to fix the agency’s data problems. Over time, it stopped reporting. Nothing in the way of publicly available data is any better.

Just as during the COVID pandemic, when its data on COVID was never less than ten days old, its data on the measles outbreak is equally flawed. The epidemic, such as it was, is largely contained, but the fearmongering continues. With false alarms on monkeypox, avian flu, and, to a real extent, measles, the CDC continues trying to look relevant again. Just last week, based on two cases, the CDC warned about the coming of the plague. The lack of credible statistical evidence, and importantly, its refusal to let outside scientists analyze its data, permits the CDC’s staff to turn to scare tactics rather than empirically sound data in its efforts to get back into the news.

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In the wake of his appearance, Kennedy should create a snowstorm of reports on the failings of the CDC, sufficient to disturb the lazy culture of Congress, presuming that the agencies it creates will forevermore be committed to their original purposes. The Supreme Court’s recent Loper Bright decision should awaken the Senate to the reality that the CDC, like many agencies, is populated with experts who presume their contemporary judgments should control. Without constant scrutiny, the professional staff of any agency will ignore statutory boundaries, advancing instead bureaucratic purposes they see as more relevant and suited to their personal policy priorities.

Kennedy’s next step should be to undertake a full structural reform of the CDC, including a radical downsizing. Going forward, the agency should focus on preserving and improving the health of the American population, paying exclusive attention to controlling communicable diseases and developing effective interventions for chronic diseases. The preponderance of its other priorities, such as gun control, homelessness, reducing heart disease, and many others, is better attended by other agencies specifically focused on these problems. Simply, we need a new CDC that is actively working to make America healthier again.

Carl J. Schramm is University Professor at Syracuse and a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Instituter for Applied Economics, Global Health and the Study of Business Enterprise. He is the founding director of Public Health Data Labs. His most recent book is Burn the Business Plan.