Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced fresh criticism this week as questions mounted over whether his reforms are helping restore public trust in America’s health institutions and surprisingly, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana did not hold back this week when asked about RFK. Speaking with reporters ahead of a heated Senate hearing, Kennedy said he has yet to see the secretary restore faith in public health after the disasters of the Covid era.
“I’m not saying that Secretary Kennedy is wrong or right. I’m not a medical doctor. I’m not qualified to say. I’m just saying that when I met with Bobby in my office, I told him, I said, ‘your job number one is to restore the confidence of the American people and the institution of public health in America.’ And so far, he hasn’t done that. All I see is chaos,” the senator explained. He later added that what he sees at HHS looks like “a multiple vehicle pileup.”
His comments landed just before Thursday’s Senate hearing, where Democrats hammered the secretary for overhauling the Centers for Disease Control and revising vaccine schedules. Their criticism focused on what they see as an erratic approach that undermines trust in the nation’s top health agencies. Democrats who spent the pandemic defending policies such as “15 days to slow the spread” and prolonged mask mandates accused Kennedy of being unqualified and “out of touch” with scientific consensus.
The secretary has argued that reform is long overdue. Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, he claimed the CDC’s dysfunction was a central reason the United States fared so poorly during the pandemic. The agency’s bureaucratic sprawl, he said, led to irrational policies that caused the country to record disproportionately high death rates compared to the rest of the world.
“This failure was no anomaly,” Kennedy wrote. He accused the CDC of presiding over decades of worsening chronic disease, which he described as “a true modern pandemic.” His new focus on combating chronic illness has shifted resources inside HHS and reduced staffing in divisions he considers redundant.
The clash highlights a fundamental divide. Republicans like Trump and many of his allies view Kennedy’s reforms as a necessary correction after the government lost credibility during the pandemic. Democrats, however, seem eager to defend the same institutions that left Americans with confusing, contradictory guidance. Whether Secretary Kennedy succeeds in his mission remains to be seen, but the pushback he is getting shows just how much the fight over public health is still shaping U.S. politics.
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