On 29 July 2026, Anthony Fauci returned to Capitol Hill in circumstances strikingly different from those in which he became known. For many, Fauci was the face of America’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic from early 2020. Last month, the 85-year-old physician, immunologist, and former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) appeared before a US Senate Committee where he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer questions about the federal response to the pandemic.
The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing was led by Republican and libertarian Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is also a physician and a long-standing critic of Fauci. Paul has accused Fauci of misleading Congress over federally-funded research linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and failing to preserve government records. Days after Fauci’s appearance, the committee voted along party lines to advance a contempt resolution.
The confrontation was the latest instalment in Fauci’s political experience. He has spent decades advising presidents from both parties, having joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1968, when Rand Paul was five years old. He became director of NIAID in 1984 and remained in post for an astonishing 38 years.
The AIDS crisis led to his first experience of Congressional hearings, federal budgets and negotiations with activists who accused the government of responding too slowly to the epidemic. He developed relationships with campaigners and supported their greater involvement in developing and testing treatments.
He was not party political. Republican President George H. W. Bush twice approached him about becoming NIH director and still sought his advice after he declined. George W. Bush later asked Fauci to devise the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), launched in 2003 to expand HIV treatment and prevention in heavily affected countries. Fauci participated without being partisan.
Underlying that adaptability was a firm idea of where scientific authority should end, and politics begins. In a 1998 NIH oral history, Fauci distinguished routine negotiation over research priorities and funding from politicisation that interfered with scientific judgement, saying that after three decades at the institution he had never been pressured to support a position he considered scientifically unsound.
His experience reflected a much older tension in US government that historian Richard Hofstadter identified in the rise of the professional expert, whose specialised knowledge brought growing influence alongside democratic suspicion of authority concentrated in an educated elite. Fauci, the professional expert, had spent much of his career navigating this uneasy relationship, occupying a powerful position within government while grounding his credibility in the independence of scientific advice.
Communicating uncertainty
Covid-19 tested that model under unprecedented conditions. Scientific knowledge developed rapidly as governments made decisions affecting education, industry, society and individual freedoms. Experts had to communicate uncertainty, as evidence alone could not determine how elected officials should balance public health against competing social and economic priorities.
That separation became harder to preserve as Fauci assumed a prominent role in the US government’s response to the pandemic and repeatedly found himself at odds with President Donald Trump. His task was no longer confined to protecting scientific judgement from political interference. The boundaries of expert advice and the weight it should carry in government decisions were now politically contested.
Fauci initially retained considerable public confidence despite emerging partisan divisions. A study during the 2020 presidential campaign between Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden found that Fauci’s endorsement of a Covid-19 vaccine increased confidence in its safety and willingness to receive it across political groups, with a much stronger effect among Democrats.
As disagreements over the pandemic response were debated in the campaign, the credibility that gave Fauci’s advice unusual reach also made his personal authority a political factor. Responses to his advice increasingly depended not only on scientific evidence but on political identity. Changes in scientific guidance added to the problem as understanding of the virus developed.
