Lone Biden official breaks silence on cognitive decline as cabinet stays mute
Only a single member of former President Joe Biden's cabinet responded to a massive outreach effort from Fox News Digital asking if the more than two dozen cabinet-level officials stood by previous remarks that Biden was mentally and physically fit to serve as president.
And even that lone statement, from former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, skirted addressing head-on whether he had witnessed instances of Biden's now widely acknowledged cognitive issues.
"I met with President Biden when needed to make important decisions and to execute with my team at HHS," Becerra said. "It's clear the President was getting older, but he made the mission clear: run the largest health agency in the world, expand care to millions more Americans than ever before, negotiate down the cost of prescription drugs, and pull us out of a world-wide pandemic. And we delivered."
Roughly four months after Biden's Oval Office exit, a handful of political books detailing the 2024 campaign and Biden administration have hit store shelves and are painting a bleak picture of Biden's health. Adding fuel to the fire, audio recordings of Biden's October 2023 interview with former Special Counsel Robert Hur showed the former president tripping over his words, slurring sentences, taking long pauses between answers and struggling to remember key moments in his life, including the year his son Beau died of cancer.
Fox News Digital has written extensively dating back to the 2020 presidential campaign about Biden's cognitive decline and his inner circle's role in covering it up.
Becerra's statement stood in marked contrast to the silence emanating from the rest of his former colleagues. Fox News Digital reached out to 26 Biden administration officials with cabinet-level positions — from former Vice President Kamala Harris to former Chief of Staff Jeff Zients — asking whether they still believe that Biden was fit to serve as president, or whether they've had a change of heart amid the cascade of damning evidence and anecdotes portraying a mental decline.
If a majority of those cabinet-level officials believed Biden to be unable to perform his duties, they could have attempted to remove him from office through the 25th Amendment. Instead, those officials repeatedly said at the time that Biden was competent and in command.
That talking point hasn't abated among the former officials.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg weighed in on Biden's presidential health earlier in May during a town hall with veterans and military families in Iowa.
When asked during the event whether Biden experienced cognitive decline, Buttigieg told reporters that "every time I needed something from him from the West Wing, I got it."
"The time I worked closest with him in his final year was around the Baltimore bridge collapse," he added. "And what I can tell you is that the same president the world saw addressing that was the president I was in the Oval with, insisting that we do a good job, do right by Baltimore. And that was characteristic of my experience with him."
Buttigieg did not elaborate when responding to a separate inquiry from Fox News Digital.
Biden's office recently revealed that the former president was diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer that had metastasized and was undergoing treatment.
The diagnosis sparked an outpouring of well-wishes from political leaders across both aisles, and shock from some doctors who said such cancer should have been caught before it advanced and metastasized.
None of Biden's annual physical health reports as president tested for prostate cancer, Fox News Digital previously reported, with a representative confirming Biden's last-known prostate blood test was conducted in 2014.
The 2024 presidential debate between Biden and President Donald Trump opened the floodgates of criticism surrounding Biden's mental acuity after the 46th president's poor performance, which included Biden losing his train of thought and stumbling over his words.
Concerns over Biden's mental acuity had simmered for years among conservatives, but it wasn't until the June 2024 presidential debate that traditional Democrat allies and media outlets began questioning Biden's health and openly called for him to drop out of the race.
Despite mounting concerns, members of Biden's cabinet vowed he was of sound health and mind.
Then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement in September 2024, for example, that he has "full confidence in President Biden's ability to carry out his job."
"As I've said before, I come fully prepared for my meetings with President Biden, knowing his questions will be detail-oriented, probing, and exacting," he said. "In our exchanges, the President always draws upon our prior conversations and past events in analyzing the issues and reaching his conclusions."
Conservatives in 2024 floated calling for the invocation of the 25th Amendment to remove Biden, which would have required Harris and the majority of the cabinet to declare him unfit to lead. Harris and the cabinet did not take such steps during the administration, and instead defended his health.
In July 2024, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo called Biden "one of the most accomplished presidents in American history and continues to effectively lead our country with a steady hand."
"As someone who is actually in the room when the President meets with the cabinet and foreign leaders, I can tell you he is an incisive and extraordinary leader," Raimondo said at the time.
Since Biden's exit from the White House in January, political journalists have published a handful of books arguing that, behind the scenes of the administration, staffers were concerned about Biden's health.
"Biden's physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn't do so until after the election," according to a new book written by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again."
"Given Biden's age, (his physician Kevin O'Connor) also privately said that if he had another bad fall, a wheelchair might be necessary for what could be a difficult recovery," the authors wrote.
While another newly released book by longtime D.C. reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, "Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House," investigated Biden's mental decline in the lead-up to the general election, calling him a "shell of himself."
"All of them," Parnes told Vanity Fair in April of who in Biden's inner circle was most to blame for covering up his mental decline when he was in office.
"It's pretty remarkable how they kept him very closed off," Parnes said. "He was a shell of himself. When he entered the White House, he was so, so different from the man who I covered as vice president, a guy who would hold court in the Naval Observatory with reporters until the wee hours."
"We'd been watching Biden's decline for a long period of time and, honestly, thought he had lost his fastball some when he was running in 2020," Allen added of Biden's mental decline. "And it was still so shocking to see the leader of the free world so bereft of coherent thought."
Earlier in May, hours of Biden's October 2023 interview with Hur's office were released to the public and underscored the president's apparent mental decline from his days as a senator from Delaware.
Hur led an investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents after Biden's departure as vice president during the Obama administration. The then-special counsel announced in February 2024 he would not recommend criminal charges against Biden for possessing classified materials after his vice presidency, saying Biden is "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
Hur came under fire from Biden, Harris and other Democrats in 2024 for suggesting in the report that Biden could not remember when his son Beau died. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015.
In February 2024, following the release of the report, Biden shot back at Hur: "There's some attention paid to some language in the report about my recollection of events. There's even a reference that I don't remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that?"
Harris called the report "gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate."
The recently released audio recordings show it was Biden who brought up his son and could not remember when Beau died.
"So, during this time when you were living at Chain Bridge Road and there were documents relating to the Penn Biden Center, or the Biden Institute, or the Cancer Moonshot or your book, where did you keep papers that related to those things that you were actively working on?" Hur asked Biden in the interview.
"Well, um … I, I, I, I, I don't know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?" Biden responded.
"Yes, sir," Hur said.
"Remember, in this timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president," Biden continued. "I'm not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she (Hillary Clinton) had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn't, I hadn't, at this point — even though I'm at Penn, I hadn't walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I'd be running for president. And, and so what was happening, though — what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th."
Others present during the interview responded that Beau Biden died in 2015.
Trump has called an alleged cover-up of Biden's health a "scandal" and has argued that White House staffers were controlling the administration through the use of an autopen.
Autopen signatures are automatically produced by a machine, as opposed to an authentic, handwritten signature. The conservative Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project first investigated the Biden administration's use of an autopen earlier in 2025 and found that the same signature was on a bevvy of executive orders and other official documents, while Biden's signature on the document announcing his departure from the 2024 race varied from the apparent machine-produced signature.
"Whoever had control of the 'AUTOPEN' is looking to be a bigger and bigger scandal by the moment," Trump posted to Truth Social in May.
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Nixon did not address a written question about recommendations for pregnant women. Kennedy's decision to bypass the the advisory panel and announce new COVID-19 recommendations on his own prompted a key CDC official who works with the committee – Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos – to announce her resignation last Friday. 'My career in public health and vaccinology started with a deep-seated desire to help the most vulnerable members of our population, and that is not something I am able to continue doing in this role,' she wrote in an email seen by an Associated Press reporter. Signs are mounting that the CDC has been 'sidelined' from key decision-making under Kennedy's watch, said Dr. Anand Parekh, the chief medical adviser for The Bipartisan Policy Center. 'It's difficult to ascertain how we will reverse the chronic disease epidemic or be prepared for myriad public health emergencies without a strong CDC and visible, empowered director,' Parekh said. 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