Former Nebraska Sen. Sasse faces terminal diagnosis

Nick Eskow, CQ-Roll Call on Dec 23, 2025

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WASHINGTON — Former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican, has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, he announced on social media Tuesday.

“This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die,” Sasse wrote.

Sasse spoke of appreciating the time he has left with his wife and three children and said he was “not going down without a fight.”

“Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived,” he wrote.

First elected to the Senate in 2014, Sasse became known for an independent streak and as a leader of the “never Trump” GOP faction — including as one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

He resigned from office in 2023 to take a job as president of the University of Florida, although his short tenure in that role was marred by a spending scandal uncovered by student journalists at the Independent Florida Alligator. Sasse unexpectedly resigned from in July 2024, less than two years into the position, citing his wife’s struggles with epilepsy.

Sasse had formerly served as president of Midland University, in Fremont, Neb.

His first experience with Washington came in 1996, when he was a tutor for the House page program. He later served as the Office of Legal Policy chief of staff at the Department of Justice and briefly as former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry’s first chief of staff. He was a Health and Human Services assistant secretary under President George W. Bush.

Sasse grew up in Fremont, Neb., a city of 26,000 about 30 miles west of Omaha on the Platte River and in his words, “grew up walking beans and detasseling corn” — weeding rows of beans and pulling the flowers off corn to control pollination. He was high school valedictorian and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.

Sasse’s announcement was anchored in his Christian faith and the season’s tidings: “There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.“.