RFK Jr. admits he has no clue about cuts to vital HHS programs

Touring the country, doing media interviews, and promoting quack therapies for measles amid an epidemic, he's a dangerous megalomaniac and figurehead who's not actually in charge of the agency.

Amid all the attention on Donald Trump’s attack on the global economy, there have been draconian cuts to vital programs at the Health and Human Services Department.

Thousands of employees have been fired—over 10% of the agency. And vital programs fighting infectious diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, and hepatitis B have been decimated.

The deep cuts to HIV research, treatment and prevention alone could halt decades of progress, scientists say. And so much of this is driven by the Trump administration's callous disregard for queer people and minorities, who are disproportionately affected by HIV. Finding cures for illnesses that affect people of all kinds worldwide but which might affect queer people more is now seen as bowing to the dreaded DEI. Trump would just rather see us die. In total, the administration has cut $125 billion in LGBTQ health funding.

The National Institutes of Health’s new director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, said the agency is “committed to supporting research aimed at improving the health and well-being of every American,” but would not be focused on “politicized DEI and gender ideology studies.”

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Yet the NIH also killed grants for immensely important research on cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other illnesses. Do straight white people not get cancer? Do Republicans and MAGA not get cancer? It’s totally insane that Trump’s supporters would back ending medical research that saves their own lives and the lives of their grandparents, and their own kids.

CNN reported on the firings and program cuts earlier this month, and quoted RFK. Jr.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that 10,000 full-time employees would be cut on top of thousands who had already left and probationary employees currently on leave. He said the changes would make fighting chronic disease the priority and reduce “bureaucratic sprawl.” Kennedy promised that the department would do more with less.

After weeks of worry from agency staffers, job cuts — known as a reduction in force, or RIF — were sweeping across offices at multiple agencies, hitting leadership, longtime staffers, scientists, administrators and communications staff.

“It’s a bloodbath,” one US Food and Drug Administration employee said.

Except now it appears that RFK Jr. doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on—or couldn’t care less, wrapped up in his own celebrity.

In an interview on CBS this week it became clear that he’s a figurehead, traveling the country, being the face of his bogus Make America Healthy Again Movement which pushes dangerous conspiracy theories, and that he doesn’t know or care what’s happening at HHS.

“You proposed more than $11 billion to local and state programs addressing things like infectious disease, mental health, addiction, and childhood vaccination. Did you personally approve those cuts?” Dr. Jon LaPook, CBS News’ chief medical correspondent, asked Kennedy.

“No, I’m not familiar with those cuts.” Kennedy responded, as LaPook pointed to 50 pages of cuts.

When Kennedy responded that, “the cuts were mainly DEI cuts, which the president ordered,” LaPook pointed to a University of Michigan grant studying adolescent diabetes.

Kennedy responded that he “didn’t know that,” and that he “will look at it.”

The interview went on like that, with Kennedy either admitting he didn’t know things or feigning ignorance, both of which are disastrous. Meanwhile, he’s been on a chronic disease tour pushing his MAHA agenda.

The most outrageous trip he took was to Texas to visit the parents of the second unvaccinated child who’d died from measles. Having been an anti-vaxxer, this was callous and cruel. He claimed that the MMR vaccine is the “most effective” way to fight measles—which too much of the media saw as a flip on his position when it was not full-throated support. At the same time—perhaps to quell the anger from anti-vaxxers among his supporters—he supported quack doctors pushing unproven, dangerous therapies.

RFK Jr. is dangerous on so many levels. He not only is promoting deranged ideas, and attacking science, which we expected; he’s not even really in charge of HHS. He’s allowed Musk to cut programs even for health issues he believes are vitally important.

And that’s because he doesn’t care, using the HHS secretary position to promote himself and his crackpot ideas, reveling in being at the center of attention while abdicating his responsibility as the leader of a massive government health agency mandated to protect all of our lives. Putting him in this role was one of the most dangerous things Trump has done.