“Make America Healthy Again”: The Future of HHS Under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Source: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

SARA MEDINA: The U.S. Senate voted on Feb. 13 to confirm environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), a decision with the potential to instigate reforms that will fundamentally change the U.S. health system and America’s position as a global leader in the biomedical sciences. 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK) is the son of former Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy. He spent the majority of his career as an environmental lawyer “fighting corrupt corporations and government agencies” in favor of environmental issues such as compliance with the Clean Water Act, mandates to clean up spilled oil, and more.

While coming from a generational political legacy of Democratic leaders, RFK has pivoted away from the party over the past decade. This culminated in his candidacy as an Independent for President of the United States in 2024, followed by his endorsement of Republican President Donald Trump, and most recently his confirmation as HHS Secretary.

The HHS encompasses several agencies responsible for coordinating many aspects of the national health system, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

RFK’s platform centers around the slogan “Make America Healthy Again,” a slogan which mirrors Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” The wording of the slogan implies an upheaval of the current health system to restore the country to a former state under which Americans were allegedly healthier.

Trump issued an executive order on Feb. 13 establishing the “Make America Healthy Again Commission.” The order cites important concerns about the state of America’s public health, including the rising chronic disease and mental illness epidemics and the lagging of U.S. health measures such as life expectancy and cancer incidence behind other comparable countries. It calls for “fresh thinking” on healthy lifestyles and overmedication, highlighting that the system should “promote health rather than just managing disease.”

The necessity for this kind of change is undeniable. However, the means by which Trump and RFK seek to accomplish this is more questionable, seeking to “restore the integrity of the scientific process” by thoroughly investigating federally-funded biomedical research. This "investigation", primarily of the NIH, has included thousands of layoffs and the freezing of federal research grants. Such a drastic blow to the NIH will have severe consequences on global biomedical research, even if the situation is temporary.

The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, with an annual budget of $48 billion. In 2022, the organization spent 25 times more on grants than the next largest funder. The NIH also towers over any other global public or private organization in terms of the quantity of biomedical papers produced. More than 1.3 million papers in the PubMed database contain NIH acknowledgements. Historically, many advances in biomedical science can be accredited to the NIH. Research for 99% of drugs approved between 2010 and 2019 were partially or fully NIH-funded. 

Beyond upheaval of federal biomedical research, a central part of RFK’s platform is fighting children’s chronic disease through his nonprofit organization Children’s Health Defense, a topic also emphasized in Trump’s executive order. The mission of the Children’s Health Defense is “ending childhood health epidemics by eliminating toxic exposure,” and is widely known for its opposition to vaccination.

In 1998, The Lancet published a landmark study linking the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism in children. The study was later found to be falsely drawing a causative conclusion, and was retracted in 2010. However, despite its official retraction, it has sparked a slew of disinformation about vaccines over the past decade. RFK has been pushing to conduct federally funded research on this link, though there is a wide consensus among the scientific community (including the new NIH director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya) that such studies would be a waste of time and resources.

However, his claims have lacked consistency; for example, in the midst of the current measles outbreak in the U.S., RFK admitted that “vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity” without addressing his earlier arguments against vaccination. 

On a similar note, RFK also denied that COVID-19 vaccines were safe or that they were effective at all in containing the pandemic, despite well-established, internationally checked monitoring systems proving that COVID-19 vaccination saved millions of lives. The resistance of RFK to accepting widespread scientific knowledge is particularly concerning. 

The new administration is moving quickly, and health policy remains at the forefront of public discourse given issues of equitable access to healthcare, abortion, and more. Health has also become increasingly politicized following the COVID-19 pandemic, as public health efforts have gained more visibility (and thus scrutiny) among Americans. The administration’s first major blow to the health sphere was the NIH freeze. Given RFK’s focus on chronic disease and denial of mainstream science, coupled with Trump’s efforts to critically dissect federal agencies, it will be interesting to see how the health system changes in the next several months.

Sara Medina is a sophomore majoring in Global Health and minoring in Government, interested in the impact of world politics on population health. She is from Southborough, Massachusetts.