Dr. Mehmet Oz is speaking now to the press in the White House briefing room.

“It’s like I’m talking to a classroom,” he joked.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz will lead today’s White House press briefing.

He previously hosted The Dr. Oz Show from 2009 until 2022. The show ended so Oz could launch a senate campaign in Pennsylvania.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio hit out at Sen. Jacky Rosen after she grilled him over his role in negotiations with Iran.

“I’d like to remind the American people that, as the Secretary of State, your main duty as America’s chief diplomat is to maintain our relations with foreign nations. This is why I was shocked to see that you were at a party with President Trump in Miami, instead of accompanying Vice President [JD] Vance to Pakistan for negotiations,” Rosen said.

“What party was I at? … That’s an absurd statement. I was not at a party,” Rubio shot back.

He went on to call Rosen “100 percent wrong.”

“I was not at a party, where I was is next to the president, because in the midst of those negotiations, I was in communications with them. In fact, I think there is media reporting from that evening on how multiple occasions I went into a back room, I came back out and spoke to the President and was constantly updating him,” he added.

Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada, asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio how she can get answers about President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace.”

“My team’s been asking for a contact with the Board of Peace for several months, just to do our due diligence, but we’ve received no response. Can you tell me exactly who my team should be reaching out to, please?” she asked.

“Well, I can now, because the Board of Peace has finally hired some staff. It’s going to be a very lean operation. They’re working out of the Institute of Peace building,” Rubio replied.

Trump first announced the board in September. Read more about his initiative below:

Sen. Chris Coons sparred with Secretary of State Marco Rubio over NATO.

“Is it not true that some of the challenges in our NATO relations have only come after President Trump threatened to seize territory from a trusted and reliable … partner?” Coons asked.

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Rubio shot back.

“I think he publicly said both. He used tariffs to coerce Denmark into giving up Greenland,” the senator said.

“If you go back and study the history of it, NATO tensions and debates on whether the U.S. should be in NATO. In the 1970s, it was the reverse: it was the administration trying to stay in NATO and Congress trying to get us out. … My point is that these debates about NATO have been ongoing for a long time,” Rubio replied.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen hit out at Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the Iran war and called President Donald Trump’s foreign policy a “dumpster fire.”

“Mr. Secretary, this is your first public hearing since President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu launched an illegal war against Iran. Netanyahu said he’s been waiting 40 years to do this — turns out he finally found a president who was both stupid and reckless enough to join him,” Van Hollen said.

“Let’s face it, Mr. Secretary, the Trump foreign policy has become a dumpster fire,” he added.

Merkley cited experts from top universities, including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Boston University School of Public Health, who estimate “over 500,000 children have died from that sudden shutdown.”

“If you were to walk across this country, you would see one dead child equivalent every roughly 30 feet. That’s the level of carnage,” Merkley said.

At least 201 people have been killed in a U.S. military campaign against alleged drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean and Pacific.

Sen. Tim Kaine, who has been briefed behind closed doors about the attacks, says the “presence of narcotics” on the boats is not among the criteria for targeting them.

“Why would the administration not include the presence of narcotics on the boat” as part of the criteria, he asked Rubio.

The months-long attacks have reportedly done little to combat the flow of illicit drugs into the country, raising questions about the effectiveness of an operation that law of war experts say amounts to extrajudicial killings and war crimes. The military is simultaneously intercepting suspected drug boats, suggesting that the U.S. can deploy law enforcement to stop the flow of drugs into the country without killing everyone on board. And top military officials — including the commander in charge of the campaign — have testified to members of Congress that lethal airstrikes are not the way to stop drugs from coming into the country.

The cost of the operations has exploded to at least $4.7 billion, according to research from the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy lashed out at Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the war with Iran.

Murphy argued that the Trump administration’s war and blockade “has now held the entire world economy and the U.S. economy hostage to the ability to negotiate an agreement with Iran.”

He went on to ask Rubio what it would take to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

“Well, what needs to happen is very simple … they need to announce that they will no longer fire on commercial ships that are going through or threaten to fire on ships because in many cases ships just won’t move, they won’t go, not because they got fired on, but because of the risk of being fired upon,” Rubio replied.

“And so they have to announce very clearly the straits are now open — we’re not charging a toll, we will help remove the mines that they put in there, and they will not fire on ships,” he added.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers the Iranian navy is “at the bottom of the ocean.”

“Today, there is no Iranian navy. There is no such thing. There’s a bunch of Boston Whalers with machine guns on them, but there is no navy. There is no Iranian navy. It lies at the bottom of the ocean, and will soon, within a number of years, be prime fishing spots, because they’ll turn into reefs,” he said.

Today marks Rubio’s first public testimony since the war with Iran began in late February.