A wave of doctors, scientists and public health professionals is running for office in the United States, seeking to counter what they describe as a systematic assault on evidence-based health policy under the Trump administration. From Michigan to Georgia, candidates with clinical and research backgrounds are arguing that their training equips them to treat ailing governance – and that the cost of staying on the sidelines has become too high.
Few embody that conviction more vividly than Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and public-health PhD who walked into Detroit’s health department in 2015 to find some 85 employees crammed into a municipal parking building. The city had just emerged from bankruptcy. His task: rebuild a 185-year-old institution from nothing.
Within eighteen months, El-Sayed said he expanded the department to 220 staff, opened a new headquarters and launched initiatives that still define his reputation – free spectacles for low-income schoolchildren, a legal battle that forced an energy company to invest $10m in improving air quality, lead testing in every school and daycare in the city, and a peer-mentor programme for new mothers to address a surge in infant and maternal mortality.
“It was a rude awakening,” said El-Sayed, who turned down a medical residency and an assistant professorship for public service. “I went from an ivory tower to the bowels of city government. But it’s because I recognise that so much of what makes us sick and keeps us sick is a function of structures that are downstream of public policy.”
Now he is running for the US Senate from Michigan, part of a wave of Democratic doctors and scientists seeking office in the midterm elections. They share a diagnosis – disinformation, funding cuts, the rollback of research – and believe their training allows them to act on it. They have watched Trump administration health policies play out in exam rooms, laboratories and the communities they serve.
A direct rebuke to Kennedy’s health cuts
The wave is a direct response to the tenure of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who took over the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in early 2025. Since then, he has overseen a sweeping reorganisation that cut the department’s workforce by 20,000 employees. Funding for public health has been reduced by more than $12bn, and more than 2,000 National Institutes of Health research grants have been cancelled. Kennedy has fired or forced out top scientific leaders at every major health agency, including four NIH directors and a CDC director he had himself appointed less than a month earlier – Susan Monarez, who was replaced by Jay Bhattacharya, an NIH director and critic of the CDC’s pandemic response. More than 1,000 current and former HHS employees have called publicly for Kennedy to resign.
In California’s sixth congressional district, Richard Pan – a paediatrician who spent more than a decade in the state legislature, chairing health committees in both chambers and helping reduce the state’s uninsured rate by two-thirds – is running in a primary with a campaign explicitly framed as a counter-offensive against what he calls a systematic attack on evidence-based governance.
“We’ve had a long-term bipartisan consensus that science should drive our health decisions,” Pan said. “The FDA was a scientific agency, NIH was a scientific agency, the CDC was a scientific agency. But this administration has got rid of a lot of the scientists.”
The candidates have placed disinformation at the centre of their campaigns. Measles outbreaks spreading through communities are a direct consequence of falling vaccination rates fuelled by the kind of misinformation Kennedy spent years amplifying, public health experts say. His “make America healthy again” agenda – including attacks on childhood vaccination schedules, unsupported claims linking vaccines to autism and an overhaul of federal dietary guidelines without scientific review – particularly alarms Jasmine Clark, a microbiologist who teaches at Emory University’s nursing school and recently won her Democratic primary for Georgia’s 13th congressional district.
“They’re pushing a narrative that might make them popular among certain people,” Clark said. “But it’s very, very dangerous, and unfortunately costing the lives of children.”
Clark draws a pointed comparison to reports that the administration is testing health protocols of questionable quality on impoverished populations abroad. “It’s very reminiscent of what they did with the Tuskegee project. We all recognise that now as being very bad.”
The administration’s approach has also included decisions not to consider health costs when setting air pollution regulations under the Clean Air Act, a move that critics argue undermines decades of public health progress. Meanwhile, America’s uninsured rate, which had fallen to historic lows, has begun to tick up again, and Medicaid coverage has declined in several states. The country continues to suffer high rates of infant and maternal mortality compared with other wealthy nations, despite its healthcare spending.
El-Sayed recalls touring Detroit schools in 2015 and finding a first-grade classroom with an icicle forming on the ceiling because the boiler had been broken for months. “If you cannot fund the school building that kids are in, if you cannot make sure they can see the blackboard, then the other funding conversations miss a lot of the point.” His signature policy – Medicare for All – flows directly from seeing providers turn away pregnant mothers because Medicaid reimbursement rates were too low. “Medicare for All would mean that everybody would be an equal healthcare citizen,” he said.
Adam Hamawy, a combat surgeon running for New Jersey’s 12th congressional district, also campaigns on Medicare for All. Best known for saving the life of Senator Tammy Duckworth after a grenade struck her helicopter in Iraq, Hamawy said his time treating people in war zones and disaster areas – including Gaza – prepared him to defend the idea that healthcare is a human right.
“In an area where there’s killing and misery every day, it feels good to be able to actually help people,” he said. “When you were called to operate – we were on call 24 hours a day and seven days a week for months at a time – you just did it no matter what was happening. You were often the only hope that the person in front of you had.”
The challenge of being a doctor in politics
Physicians in Congress are not new – the current 119th Congress includes four senators and 16 representatives with medical degrees, and doctors were among the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. But for years, Republican physicians have outnumbered Democrats. These new Democratic candidates argue that a medical background has been no guarantee of scientific independence.
Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana senator and gastroenterologist who chairs the Senate health committee, expressed deep reservations about voting to confirm Kennedy as health secretary, but after pressure from the White House he cast the vote that put Kennedy in power. Cassidy, who had already drawn Trump’s ire by voting to convict him in his second impeachment trial, recently lost his Louisiana Senate primary to a Trump-backed challenger.
Cassidy’s fate illustrates a defining question for any physician in elected office, Pan said. “The challenge for physicians is: are you going to be a doctor first, or are you going to be a politician first? Unfortunately, we’ve seen too many doctors who, because of the political pressure, have decided to put aside their training as physicians and the oaths they took.”
The medical-to-political pipeline does not run only to Congress. Amanda Litman, co-founder and executive director of Run for Something – which recruits and supports young progressive candidates for lower-level offices – has watched the same wave emerge at state and local levels. “Basically every elected body touches healthcare in some way,” Litman said, “whether it’s a city council talking about healthcare funding, school boards talking about sex education or state legislatures tackling all kinds of healthcare issues. Having people in these governing bodies that really understand the issue from the perspective of a provider matters deeply.”
Political action committees have been pivotal in supporting these candidates. Run for Something, alongside 314 Action – which aims to elect STEM-educated Democrats and has announced plans to put 100 new physicians in office by 2030 – and Emily’s List, which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights, have provided funding and organisational muscle. Annie Andrews, a South Carolina paediatrician endorsed by Emily’s List, has made the state’s measles outbreak central to her campaign and trails four-term Republican senator Lindsey Graham by only a few points in the polls.
Mixed electoral outcomes
Whether medical credentials will translate into victories remains uncertain. Pan faces a competitive five-person primary in a Sacramento-area district that has been redrawn to include more conservative territory. El-Sayed is running in what observers call Michigan’s first truly competitive Democratic Senate primary in 32 years, against two well-funded, well-known rivals.
Not every candidate has made it through. In Texas’s 15th congressional district, Dr Ada Cuellar, an emergency room physician, lost her March primary to Tejano music star Bobby Pulido, who captured more than 67% of the vote in a district where name recognition proved decisive. Cuellar, who funded much of her campaign herself, said she had no regrets. “I raised issues about healthcare that put pressure on my opponent and the incumbent. Hopefully, I get to run in the future and have an even better campaign and platform.”
Clark, whose primary win stands as the clearest proof of concept so far, faces a general election in November. If elected, she would become the first Black woman with a doctoral degree in science to serve in Congress – a distinction she called “way past due”. She sees something larger than individual campaigns at play. Scientists, she argues, have long ceded politics to others and have only recently recognised the cost of that absence.
“More and more scientists are now realising that we actually do play a role, policy does impact us and we should have some say in the decisions being made,” Clark said. “I was elected when we went through the Covid-19 pandemic, and my constituency really appreciated having a science voice to just explain to them what was going on. It’s not a matter of if, but when, is the next pandemic, and are we going to be prepared? We need those perspectives in the room.”
