RFK Jr. Is in the Wrong Agency

Leading the Department of Health and Human Services seems, at first glance, like a dream job for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., quite possibly America’s most infamous anti-vaxxer. If confirmed, Kennedy will oversee the agencies that play a central role in researching, reviewing, and recommending vaccines. But promoting his own vaccination views will likely be a long push for subtle changes—rulings that Americans may get vaccinated, rather than should—and he’s said, at least, that he’s not aiming to “take away anybody’s vaccines.” Based on his recent public statements, he appears much more interested in cutting down on America’s consumption of seed oils, and frozen school-lunch pizza. In nominating Kennedy to lead the health department, Trump is kneecapping one of the few bipartisan issues he campaigned on this election: improving the diet, and overall health, of Americans. If Trump truly wanted RFK Jr. to fulfill those parts of their pledge to “Make America healthy again,” he should have picked a different job for the would-be health secretary.

Since endorsing Donald Trump for president, Kennedy has pledged that he will “get processed food out of school lunch immediately,” argued that the government must stop subsidizing the crops that make seed oils, and urged Trump to stop allowing people to buy soda with federal food benefits. The “Make America healthy again” agenda also advocates for more comprehensive pesticide regulation, and for regenerative agriculture, which aims to improve soil biodiversity and limit chemical inputs. Kennedy won’t be able to do any of this as the head of the federal health department.

Trump has already signaled that the EPA, which has the power to crack down on pesticides, is off-limits, because RFK Jr. “doesn’t like oil.” But Kennedy could have been an era-defining leader of the USDA, which regulates school lunches, doles out subsidies for oilseed crops, and sets rules for public-assistance programs including SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Before being nominated for HHS, RFK Jr. even posted an Instagram video filmed outside the Department of Agriculture, promising in the caption to enact the MAHA agenda “when @realDonaldTrump gets me inside the USDA.”

At HHS, he’ll still have some influence over his favorite food-related issues, such as banning certain food additives. He’ll also have direct impact on the next round of federal dietary guidelines, which are due to be released in 2025. But HHS’s powers to change Americans’ food intake are either indirect or slow.

To remove a food ingredient as health secretary, for instance, Kennedy would have to pressure the FDA to issue ingredient bans. Because Kennedy would oversee the agency, Marty Makary, Trump’s pick for FDA commissioner, would have to at least entertain that request, but even so, the agency would likely need years to pull any ingredient off shelves. Banning an ingredient requires significant science and legal justification. Earlier this year it banned brominated vegetable oil, a chemical added to certain sodas that has been banned in Europe and the United Kingdom for years. Right now, the agency relies on just a few people to do this kind of work. (The staff reviewing the safety of food additives is small enough that the head of the FDA’s food center recently boasted that he was able to add five full-time staffers.) Speeding up the office’s work—which includes policing new additives that food companies are regularly launching—would require more funding and cut against Trump’s pledge to limit government spending.

But the negative effect of the food additives that Kennedy seems most worried about is felt by only a small subset of eaters. He has spoken, for instance, about a yellow dye known as tartrazine. He has claimed that the dye is tied to asthma, but a 2001 meta-analysis found that avoiding tartrazine “may not benefit most patients, except those very few individuals with proven sensitivity.” (Many of Kennedy’s other claims about the dye’s harms are highly debated among toxicology experts.) By contrast, a program to restrict soda in SNAP, as Kennedy has proposed, might require its own bureaucratic finagling at USDA, but could affect a significant portion of the 42 million people who use the program. Changes to school lunch, similarly, would affect some 28 million young people.  

Putting RFK Jr. at HHS also doesn’t totally make sense as a political decision. Confirmation fights are less contentious when the nominee has bipartisan bona fides; few Democrats support most of Kennedy’s health-care views, and his historically liberal views on abortion could cost him some Republican votes. But plenty of liberals like his take on food and agriculture. As HHS secretary, RFK Jr. is also likely to be dragged into the politics of Trump’s mass-deportation plan, an issue he’s largely steered clear of, because Health and Human Services is in charge of caring for unaccompanied children who are apprehended for being in the United States illegally. Trump’s last HHS secretary, Alex Azar, quickly became what Politico called the “public explainer and punching bag for the migrant crisis.” While Azar was getting tongue-lashed by Congress in 2018, RFK Jr. was tweeting that the policy amounted to immigration officials “forcing beleaguered parents to make Sophie’s Choice at America’s borders.” Trump’s USDA secretary will have to navigate calls from the farm industry to spare agricultural laborers from the administration’s mass-deportation plan, but as health secretary, Kennedy will likely have to be the face of any policy detaining migrant children, or openly criticize his boss.

The person Trump did pick to lead the Department of Agriculture—America First Policy Institute CEO Brooke Rollins—has much less obvious interest in its purview than Kennedy does. Beyond an undergraduate degree in agricultural development, she doesn’t have any direct agricultural experience that prepares her for the job, and her current organization’s related policy work seems focused on concern over U.S. agricultural land being purchased by China.

Trump’s choice to nominate RFK Jr. for HHS seemed like a last-minute decision. After all, in late October, a co-chair of the Trump transition team promised that Kennedy would not be picked to lead the department, only for Trump to name him to that position two weeks later. Maybe it just resonated as a sound-bite to have the head of the “Make America healthy again” movement lead the health department. Maybe Trump wanted to stash RFK Jr. at an agency where he can’t actually do much harm to the big food companies that have historically allied with the Republican Party. Either way, the result is that RFK Jr.’s desires to improve our food supply—the parts of his agenda that have the most bipartisan appeal—will be stymied at HHS. Trump put Kennedy in the position where he will both face the most political friction and be least effective. RFK Jr. might try to nudge or influence Rollins to his way of seeing things, but the health secretary demanding that the agriculture secretary change farm and food policy is the equivalent of the governor of California urging the governor of Texas to change that state’s immigration policy. It just won’t happen.