During a raucous hearing before the Senate Finance Committee today that included both heckling and applause (neither of which are standard), Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) asked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to explain his Make America Healthy Again vision.
“Something is poisoning the American people and we know that the primary culprits are the changing food supply, the switch to highly chemical-intensive processed foods,” Kennedy said. “We need to fix our food supply, and that’s the number one.” In his opening statement, he also said he “will scrutinize the chemical additives in our food supply.”
Despite those comments, Kennedy’s potential oversight of the FDA—which regulates food additives, food safety recalls, and antibiotic use in agriculture—was barely mentioned throughout the hearing. Instead, Republican senators generally praised his overall commitment to investigating the root causes of chronic diseases, while Democrats hammered him on his past false statements on vaccines and anti-vaccine advocacy, his actions tied to a deadly measles outbreak, and his recent about-face on the issue of abortion and how that might impact access to the medication mifepristone. Medicare and Medicaid were also popular topics.
And while no one asked him much of anything about the FDA, the USDA—an agency he will not oversee—came up several times, with several farm-state Republicans asking Kennedy to commit to working in collaboration with farmers and the agency that supports and regulates them. Kennedy said President Trump “has specifically instructed me that he wants farmers involved in every policy and that he wants me to work with Brooke Rollins at USDA to make sure that we preserve American farmers, that all of our policies support them.”
Later, he said that while he won’t have regulatory power over farms, he thinks the government should incentivize a transition to what he called “regenerative agriculture, no-till agriculture, and to less chemically intensive. And by the way,” he added, “I’ve also met with the chemical industry and the fertilizer and herbicide companies, and they want to do the same thing.”
(In our investigative reporting last year, we extensively documented the pesticide industry’s tactics for keeping chemicals in use despite documented health and environmental risks. Just this month, Bayer, one of the world’s largest agrichemical companies, hired Ballard Partners, a D.C. lobby firm with multiple ties to Trump’s inner circle.)
Kennedy also said he believes SNAP should not pay for unhealthy foods and that processed foods should not be served in school meals. Both of those programs fall under the USDA.
At the very end of the hearing, as Senators rushed through final questions, Senator Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) asked him about how he would approach the CDC’s response to bird flu, which so far is not a serious health risk for everyday Americans but is spreading quickly on farms and changing in alarming ways. Kennedy said he would devote “the appropriate resources” to preventing pandemics. Earlier in the hearing, he was grilled on a petition he submitted in 2021 to stop the rollout of COVID vaccines for children.
Tomorrow, Kennedy will face a second hearing in front of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. (Link to this story.)
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