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Much of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first of two confirmation hearings to run the Department of Health and Human Services focused on the root of his controversial appointment: His provocative past statements on vaccines, mainstream medicine, and public health, and—for Republicans—his long pro-choice history and targeting of mass food production.
The contentious, lively hearing, though, also shone a spotlight on another significant issue with Kennedy’s nomination that’s been underdiscussed relative to his more peculiar outbursts: his qualifications to administer a major department overseeing a quarter of what the federal government spends.
The atmosphere in the Senate Finance Committee room was unlike any other confirmation hearing I’ve been to.
During the hearing, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis would describe the polarizing nomination as a “shirts and skins game” between Democrats and Republicans on the panel. That was also true of the public attendees. Devotees of his “Make America Healthy Again” movement—and say what you will about RFK Jr., but it is a movement—packed one side of the room and the immediate rows of chairs behind Kennedy. The supporters’ standing ovation when Kennedy was escorted into the room by his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, would not be the day’s last standing ovation, and it didn’t take much for the section to erupt in applause every few minutes. As Kennedy would say, many of them were “MAHA Moms.” When Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson delivered a speech encouraging the country to come together to solve the American epidemic of chronic sickness, I watched one MAHA Mom reach the verge of tears and hold a heart-shaped hand gesture in the air.
On the other side, meanwhile, were medical professionals and activists, many of them in lab coats, cheering or snickering whenever Democrats on the committee would land a blow. A couple of anti-RFK protesters, too, interrupted early in the hearing and were dismissed. The alternating outbursts made it feel more like a prize fight over competing visions of public health than a staid Senate examination of a presidential appointee. In other words, it was appropriate.
Republicans on the panel, while supportive of Kennedy to varying degrees, had their own work to do in their rounds of questioning. Kennedy has a couple of liabilities on the right: his lifelong support for legalized abortion, for one, and his attacks on the practices of Big Agriculture, aka the economic bedrock of many rural red states, for another.
Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford used his time to hold Kennedy’s hand as the nominee explained that “every abortion is a tragedy,” and that he would serve at the pleasure of the president and would implement his policies. And regarding mass food production, Kennedy insisted that “American farms are the bedrock of our culture, of our politics, of our national security,” and said that he wanted to “remove burdensome regulations and unleash American ingenuity.” Some Democrats on the committee would, nevertheless, use their time to reiterate some of Kennedy’s past statements on these issues in likely failed attempts to drive a wedge among Republicans.
Kennedy’s argument, overall, was that he wasn’t trying to ban vaccines, medications, or food products, just to provide more transparency on what the government knows about them.
If you like “a McDonald’s cheeseburger, Diet Coke, which my boss loves, you should be able to get them,” he said to chuckles. “If you want to eat Hostess Twinkies, you should be able to do that, but you should know what the impacts are on your family and on your health.” Similarly, he said that “I support the measles vaccine. I support the polio vaccine. I will do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking anything.”
But Kennedy’s record as an activist, author, lawyer, and candidate running in protest of vaccinations or other settled elements of public health is long. The easiest work for Democrats on the panel was to simply read his quotes and ask him whether he said them or not.
“Did you say that COVID-19 was a genetically engineered bioweapon that targets Black and white people but spares Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people?” Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet began in a testy exchange.
Kennedy said he was quoting a study, and that he didn’t say it was “deliberately” targeted.
“Did you say that Lyme disease is highly likely a militarily engineered bioweapon?” Bennet continued.
“I probably did say that,” Kennedy said.
“Did you say that exposure to pesticides causes children to become transgender?”
“No, I never said that,” Kennedy responded. He’s repeatedly suggested that a certain herbicide can contribute to “gender confusion” in kids.
Plenty of Democrats had such exchanges with Kennedy. One of the most notable, though, was Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Sanders has been a particular question mark among Democrats on Kennedy, repeatedly praising Kennedy for his views against processed foods and federal nutrition policy. But Sanders—who will lead Democrats in Thursday’s second hearing—did not seem to be on the fence Wednesday.
Sanders showed two posters of onesies that Children’s Health Defense, founded by Kennedy, was selling in its merch shop. (“These are little things, clothing for babies,” Sanders explained.) One onesie said “Unvaxxed, Unafraid,” and the other “No Vax, No Problem.”
“Are you supportive of these onesies?” Sanders said, in the line of the hearing. Hearing the chuckles, Sanders then said, “Are you supportive of these … this clothing, which is militantly anti-vaccine?”
And yet the most important round of questioning in the raucous hearing was one of its calmest.
Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Republican chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, will run the second Kennedy hearing with Sanders on Thursday. In his capacity as a Finance Committee member on Wednesday—and Finance is the committee that would vote to advance Kennedy’s nomination—Cassidy just asked Kennedy some very basic questions about Medicaid and his plans for reforming it. It may have been the most Kennedy stumbled all day.
Kennedy said he’d like to better integrate Medicare and Medicaid, but when pressed for specifics—Does Medicare pay more or less? Medicaid more or less?—Kennedy said he didn’t know. More importantly, he got key facts about Medicaid wrong, claiming that Medicaid was “fully funded by the federal government” when its costs are shared between the federal government and states. He also claimed—twice during the hearing—that people on Medicaid aren’t happy because “the premiums are too high” and the “deductibles are too high.” Most Medicaid enrollees don’t pay either premiums or deductibles. Much of Cassidy’s turn, with specific questions about reforms to the major programs Kennedy would oversee, yielded few tangible answers—and seemed to catch Kennedy off guard.
It wasn’t only like this with Cassidy.
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner asked Kennedy whether he would freeze funding for community health centers.
“Are you talking about the Indian health centers?” Kennedy asked. No, Warner was not, and Kennedy iterated the White House’s talking points that no individual benefits were frozen under existing executive orders. Warner, though, had to explain to him how community health center funding—like a lot of HHS funds—works, in that the federal money is granted to the states and then distributed to specific programs. And that that money was frozen.
“I don’t feel like you approach this job with the knowledge,” Warner said.
Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto later would have to inform Kennedy that HHS had the authority—or, as she would say it, the obligation—to investigate and enforce Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act violations. It was news to Kennedy.
No one suspected that Warner or Cortez Masto would support Kennedy. But Cassidy’s vote could be determinative. The three most likely Republicans to vote against Kennedy would be Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell. (While McConnell is primarily focused now on national security, he’s a polio survivor with a special loathing for vaccine skepticism.) Those were the three Republicans who voted against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and the through line between their opposition wasn’t Hegseth’s personal provocations or scandals. It was his lack of qualification. That’s the axis on which Cassidy’s questioning of Kennedy rotated, and the limits it exposed.
Even if Kennedy grinds through, he may regret not simply requesting and receiving a nonconfirmed job as Make America Healthy Again Czar in Trump’s White House. The HHS secretary is, as so many of these questions show, responsible for a whole lot of bean-counting, over trillions of beans. The job is not to sit in the Secret HHS Vault all day reading the classified truth about Lyme disease or transgender chemicals. It’s an administrative role, not an activist one. But that’s not what gets him excited.
