Former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse said Tuesday that he has been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.
Sasse, 53, announced the news on social media, saying he learned about the disease last week and was “now marching to the beat of a faster drummer.”
“This is a difficult post to write, but since some of you are already suspecting something, I’ll get right to the point,” Sasse wrote. “Last week I was diagnosed with metastatic stage four pancreatic cancer and I’m dying.”
Sasse was first elected to the Senate in 2014 and won re-election in 2020. He resigned in 2023 to become the 13th president of the University of Florida after a controversial approval process. He left the position the following year after his wife was diagnosed with epilepsy.
Sasse, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict the former president of “incitement of insurrection” following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Sasse, who holds degrees from Harvard, St. John’s College and Yale, served as assistant secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. Before running for the Senate, he served as president of Midland University. Midland is a small Christian university in eastern Nebraska.
Sass and his wife have three children.
“I will not give up without a fight. The amazing advances science has made over the past few years in areas such as immunotherapy are part of God’s grace,” Sasse wrote. “Death and dying are not the same – the process of dying is still something worth experiencing.”