A spate of health scares in Washington has raised a central question about public office: How transparent do elected officials need to be with their constituents?
Recent medical episodes involving lawmakers have thrust the issue of health disclosure into the spotlight, simultaneously sparking a debate about personal privacy and the public’s right to know.
Rep. Thomas Kean Jr. (R-NJ), 57, has been absent from Capitol Hill due to a health matter since March and missed over 100 votes, but few details have been shared with the public. He’s set to return on Tuesday and is expected to provide more details about his absence then.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wouldn’t share the details of Kean’s illness, but told reporters his health condition is “very common.”
“I do know what his health issue is, but he’s asked me not to disclose that, and I’m going to honor that,” Johnson said earlier this month. “I should do that. That’s my job. I’ll do the same for anyone.”
Johnson went on to say that he told Kean there is “nothing untoward or scandalous at all in having a health issue,” and that “People are entitled to get sick.”
“This happens, and that’s the most we can say about it,” Johnson told reporters on June 3. “He’s gonna give full transparency and full explanation when he gets back, and I’ve encouraged him to do that.”
But Kean isn’t the only lawmaker to have struggled with a health matter in recent years while serving in public office.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), 84, was recently hospitalized for an undisclosed condition, with a spokesperson telling ABC News in a statement that the senator is “fully engaged with staff on Senate business and Kentucky matters.”
A spokesperson for McConnell did not provide more details when reached for comment by the Washington Examiner.
Washington was roiled back in 2024 with the discovery that a top member of Congress, then-Texas Rep. Kay Granger was living in an assisted-living facility and struggling with dementia. Granger, the former appropriations chairwoman, had missed months of votes before a local outlet reported her absence.
Most notable of all, former President Joe Biden’s apparent cognitive decline while in the Oval Office became a lightning rod during the 2024 election, leading the then-president to drop his reelection bid.
A majority of Americans believe that the public does not get enough information about lawmakers’ health, according to an Ipsos poll released in 2025. The majority also disagreed that elected officials are honest about their health.
“We are, as a public, as constituents, as voters, we are owed a bit more transparency,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette with the Project On Government Oversight told the Washington Examiner. “We’re talking about elected officials whose job it is to represent specific constituencies and voters who elect them, and so when they’re not able to perform their duties, or if in the case of Congressman Kean, they just randomly disappear for extended periods of time and are not like voting or not doing the things that a member of Congress is supposed to be doing then what’s actually happening, kind of at the end of the day, is constituents, Americans are being deprived of their representation in the government, that’s the fundamental problem.”
Hedtler-Gaudette argued that while people don’t need to know the “nitty gritty kind of personal private details of these individuals,” if a health matter will make them unable to perform the role they have been elected to do, “they owe us the transparency of telling us what’s going on, telling us where they’re going.”
Rep. Brad Knott (R-NC), a member of the House Ethics Committee, said that he left the decision of health transparency to the discretion of a member, saying it’s “very sensitive.”
Rep. Suhas Subramanyan (D-VA), another member of the House Ethics Committee, said there needed to be consistency when calling for transparency from public officials, saying “whatever we do should be consistent and apply to Democrats and Republicans equally.”
But Subramanyan also said that “personal health information is just that, it’s personal.”
“I think if they’re unable to perform the job, then they need to make a personal assessment of whether their constituents are best served by someone else, but that is a decision between them and their constituents,” Subramanyan said.
A nationwide debate about cognitive tests and age concerns in presidents picked up steam after Biden dropped out of the 2024 election following a poor debate performance against now-President Donald Trump, during which former first lady Jill Biden admitted she thought her husband might be having a stroke.
In the Ipsos poll, a large majority of respondents agreed that presidents should be required to undergo cognitive tests and disease screenings, and that there should be age limits for elected officials.
But while the majority of voters may want reforms to health transparency from elected officials, doing so would face an uphill battle because Congress would have to regulate itself, Hedtler-Gaudette explained.
“I think kind of analogous to the congressional stock trading issue, right, where that’s a clear matter, like you know, a matter in desperate need of reform that the American people, you know, have been crying out for years … by 80% margins, you know, people think that Congress should not be able to trade stocks, and yet, you know, we haven’t seen any resolution to that issue,” Hedtler-Gaudette said.
Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD), a member of the House Ethics Committee, told the Washington Examiner that the challenge of implementing reforms regarding health transparency from lawmakers becomes “figuring out how you decide whether it’s a health issue that should merit some kind of action.”
“Who would decide, and then what’s the decision?’ Ivey posed. “So, let’s say, just to think it through, like you essentially expel somebody because you think there’s health reasons. Who makes that decision? Let’s say it’s a dementia issue or something. I mean, is that the doctor here in the Capitol, or somebody watching it on TV, or what do you do? And then how do the voters who put that person in place, you know, what happens to their democratic authority to make that decision for themselves? I haven’t heard good answers to those questions.”
