Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared before the House Appropriations committee Wednesday to defend the Trump administration’s plan to make sweeping cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services.
But at times, even he seemed to accept that the cuts bordered on overkill — and that when it came to medical expertise, he said he wasn’t necessarily the best person for Americans to turn to.
“I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me,” Kennedy said when asked by Rep. Mark Pocan whether he would vaccinate his own children from measles, chickenpox or polio right now. “My opinions on vaccines are irrelevant.”
It was a striking admission from the leader of the country’s public health apparatus. But Kennedy’s goals for remaking HHS in his image has tended of late to take a backseat to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s goals of reducing government spending.
“There were many decisions where I pushed back,” Kennedy admitted when questioned by Rep. Steny Hoyer on how much say he really had when dealing with cuts proposed by DOGE and Musk.
The current plan? “To do more — a lot more — with less,” Kennedy said.
Calling public debt a “social determinant of health,” Kennedy argued in his opening remarks that the major funding and staff reductions proposed in his plan to restructure HHS would actually help make Americans healthier — despite the fact that the cuts have already shuttered a number of public health programs, many of which were mandated by Congress.
“We will shift funding away from bureaucracy toward direct impact,” Kennedy said in his opening remarks, adding that the department has already begun to take advantage of the “AI revolution.”
But both Republican and Democratic committee members were not so easily convinced. Several grilled Kennedy on cuts he’s made to funding appropriated by Congress to the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other HHS divisions.
To some, Kennedy’s response was unsatisfying.
“I’ve been advised by my attorneys not to talk about” the reorganization, Kennedy said, citing a court order.
But even with the reorganization off the table, members of the committee still found much to criticize about Kennedy’s first few months on the job.
Rep. Mike Simpson, a Republican who practiced dentistry before being elected to Congress, told Kennedy that if he continued to press for states to ban fluoride supplementation, “We better put a lot more money into dental education because we’re going to need a lot more dentists.”
And Republican Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia thanked Kennedy for reversing cuts to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health that had impacted programs for coal miners. Over 100 NIOSH employees were called back to work in Morgantown after being laid off in early May.
At times, the conversation turned adversarial. After a pointed inquiry from Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman on why HHS has told researchers to remove references to minorities from their research — “How exactly will HHS banning the words we use to describe ourselves make us healthy?” — Kennedy brushed off the question by saying, “My time has expired.”
“So has your legitimacy,” Watson Coleman replied.
Kennedy did share one important preview on something on this year’s HHS agenda: New dietary guidelines. Kennedy said the department is “rewriting” the Biden administration’s guidelines draft, describing it as captured by industry and “incomprehensible.”
“We’re going to have four page dietary guidelines that tell people, essentially, to eat whole foods,” said Kennedy.
—
Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.