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Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is urging senators to not support an amendment that would allow a federal ban on most hemp-derived products to take effect in November. In a Friday letter, Oz noted he had “grave concerns” about the amendment from Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), which would strip from a government funding bill a one-month delay of the ban. (Weixel, 8/7)

A federal ban on most hemp-derived THC products is set to be delayed for a month after a last-minute effort to keep the original timeline failed. The Senate voted 61-32 to table a bipartisan amendment from Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and about a dozen other senators to strip the delay from a stopgap government funding bill. Opponents of the delay had been holding up consideration of the funding bill until GOP leadership allowed a vote on the amendment. (Weixel, 8/8)

US lawmakers this week introduced a bipartisan bill that would aid efforts to develop new antibiotics. The Stop Superbugs Act, introduced this week by Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), would authorize the National Institutes of Health's Antimicrobial Resistance Leadership Group to facilitate clinical trials for new antibiotics to address the rising threat of drug-resistant infections. (Dall, 8/7)

Key members of the Senate’s health committee are renewing their push for the Justice Department to prosecute former Steward Health CEO Dr. Ralph de la Torre. Dr. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chair, and ranking member Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asked the agency Thursday about the status of a criminal contempt referral for de la Torre. (Court, 8/7)

The push to charge former COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci with contempt of Congress is full of pitfalls for prosecutors, should the Justice Department choose to take up the case. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved the criminal referral Thursday, arguing that Fauci’s assertion of his Fifth Amendment rights 111 times during a hearing the week before amounts to contempt. The resolution, spearheaded by the committee’s chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.), has not been vetted by the full Senate, something former prosecutors say is key in building a contempt case. (Beitsch, 8/9)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Saturday that she is freezing her eggs. “Usually, I keep my private life quite private, but I have made the decision to start freezing my eggs, and I want to share that with anyone who is — and I want to share this because I was weighing it for a very long time, and I think that, you know, I was saving for it for a very long time, and there just isn’t a ton out there, I feel, and sometimes it can feel very daunting,” the New York Democrat said on Instagram. (Suter, 8/9)