WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans and Democrats alike on Wednesday questioned the deep staffing cuts, research funding freezes and drastic policy changes that U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made in a few short months at the helm of the nation’s health department.
Kennedy testified before the Senate HELP Committee on Wednesday afternoon. Watch in our video player above.
Kennedy defended the White House’s requested budget for his agency in back-to-back hearings before the Senate’s health committee and the House’s appropriations committee. The request includes a $500 million boost for Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative to promote nutrition and healthier lifestyles while making deep cuts to infectious disease prevention, medical research, maternal health and low-income heat assistance programs.
Watch Kennedy’s testimony in the House Appropriations hearing from Wednesday morning in the video below.
Kennedy described his downsizing of the sprawling $1.7 trillion-a-year agency — from 82,000 workers to 62,000 — as necessary cost-cutting measures that have reduced redundancies. He argued that he’s merely consolidating several existing offices that work on women’s health, minority health and sexually transmitted disease prevention.
“When we consolidate them, Democrats say they’re eliminating them,” Kennedy said.
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Kennedy revealed on Wednesday that the Trump administration would back down from one major cut: Head Start. Kennedy said he “fought very hard” to restore funding to Head Start in the proposed budget, which provides preschool funding for millions of low-income families across the country.
But Democrats argued other cuts and thousands of job losses will ultimately impact how the federal government works to reduce overdose deaths, provide cancer treatments, or provide heating assistance to poor Americans.
One Washington state mother, Natalie, has faced delays in treatment for stage 4 cancer at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray. The clinical center is the research-only hospital commonly known as the “House of Hope,” but when Murray asked Kennedy to explain how many jobs have been lost there, he could not answer. The president’s budget proposes a nearly $20 billion slash from the NIH.
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“You are here to defend cutting the NIH by half,” Murray said. “Do you genuinely believe that won’t result in more stories like Natalie’s?”
Democrat Bonnie Watson-Coleman of New Jersey asked “why, why, why” Kennedy would lay off nearly all the staff that oversees the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides $4.1 billion in heating assistance to needy families. The program is slated to be eliminated from the agency’s budget.
Kennedy said that advocates warned him those cuts “will end up killing people,” but that President Donald Trump believes his energy policy will lower costs. If that doesn’t work, Kennedy said, he would restore funding for the program.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican of Alaska, said those savings would be realized too late for people in her state.
“Right now, folks in Alaska still need those ugly generators to keep warm,” she said.
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Murkowski was one of several Republicans who sprinkled hints of concerns about Kennedy’s approach to the job throughout the hearings.
Like several Republicans, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee praised Kennedy for his work promoting healthy foods. But he raised concerns about whether the secretary has provided adequate evidence that artificial food dyes are bad for diets. Removing those food dyes would hurt the “many snack manufacturers” in his district, including the makers of M&Ms candy, he said.
Rep. Mike Simpson, a dentist from Idaho, said Kennedy’s plan to remove fluoride recommendations for drinking water alarms him. The department’s press release on Tuesday, which announced the Food and Drug Administration plans to remove fluoride supplements for children from the market, wrongly claimed that fluoride “kills bacteria from the teeth,” Simpson noted. He explained to Kennedy that fluoride doesn’t kill bacteria in the mouth but instead makes tooth enamel more resistant to decay.
“I will tell you that if you are successful in banning fluoride … we better put a lot more money into dental education because we’re going to need a lot more dentists,” Simpson added.
Kennedy was pressed repeatedly on the mixed message he’s delivered on vaccines, which public health experts have said are hampering efforts to contain a growing measles outbreak now in at least 11 states.
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Pressed by Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, Kennedy refused to recommend that parents follow the nation’s childhood vaccination schedule, which includes shots for measles, polio and whooping cough. He, instead, wrongly claimed that the vaccines have not been safety tested against a placebo.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican of Louisiana who extracted a number of guarantees from Kennedy that he would not alter existing vaccine guidance and work at the nation’s health department, later corrected Kennedy. Cassidy pointed out that rotavirus, measles and HPV vaccines recommended for children have all been tested in a placebo study.
As health secretary, Kennedy has called the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine — a shot given to children to provide immunity from all three diseases — “leaky,” although it offers lifetime protection from the measles for most people. He’s also said they cause deaths, although none has been documented among healthy people.
“You have undermined the vital role vaccines play in preventing disease during the single, largest measles outbreak in 25 years,” Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders said.
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