Sanders, Bhattacharya discuss Congress control on Face the Nation

Face the Nation aired Sunday with Sen. Bernie Sanders and NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the center of a guest list CBS News framed around the race for control of Congress. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy was also listed for the Aug. 9 broadcast, while CBS News homeland security and justice correspondent Nicole Sganga widened the hour beyond campaign talk.

CBS News said the program airs Sundays at 10:30 a.m. ET on CBS and 12:30 p.m. on the CBS News app. Search results tied to the Aug. 9 episode included a transcript of Sanders’s interview with Sganga and another transcript page that referenced Cassidy and Bhattacharya, with Margaret Brennan hosting the hour.

The lineup pointed to three pressures now running through Washington: public health authority, populist politics and domestic security. Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, and Bhattacharya, who leads the National Institutes of Health, sat on opposite sides of the federal health-policy divide, while Cassidy, the Republican senator from Louisiana, added another Senate voice at a moment when control of Congress is already a central political prize. Sanders has already used Bhattacharya as a test case for federal vaccine policy, a sign that the public-health fight is moving well beyond agency walls and into the 2026 political battle.

Sganga’s role sharpened the security thread. Identified by CBS News as a homeland security and justice correspondent, she brought a beat centered on law enforcement, border questions and federal security into a broadcast otherwise framed by elections and health policy.

The result was a Sunday lineup that looked less like a routine talk hour than a snapshot of the week’s governing fights, with Sanders representing insurgent pressure, Bhattacharya embodying institutional health authority and Sganga anchoring the domestic-security lens that now runs alongside both.