The most damaging question for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the first day of his confirmation hearings to be secretary of Health and Human Services wasn’t about his anti-vaccine views or past embrace of conspiracy theories. It was about how Medicare and Medicaid work. After pointed questions from Democrats, he seemed relaxed when Republican Bill Cassidy, an unprepossessing physician from Louisiana, took his turn.
Kennedy had no suggestions for how to reform the programs outside vague ideas about “telemedicine and AI” and seemed to believe that people on Medicaid pay both premiums and deductibles — not the case for almost anyone using the program. Needless to say, if confirmed, he would oversee both programs, which are used by over 100 million Americans, along with the entire public-health infrastructure of the United States. Botching these answers was potentially dangerous, given Cassidy has been long considered a potential swing vote on the nomination.
It was a particularly noteworthy moment in what was an unusual confirmation hearing. After all, even for Washington in 2025, the politics of Kennedy’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services are weird. A scion of a Democratic political dynasty who’s spent much of his career as an advocate for left-wing causes, ranging from environmental protection to the false claim that John Kerry was the victim of election fraud in 2004, is now a leading avatar of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
The room was packed, mostly with Kennedy supporters who hooted and hollered throughout the hearings. Even his guests, seated directly behind him, joined in. One sneered after a pointed question from Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, saying “What a little penis head,” while others booed at the very mention of the Gates Foundation. The critics in the audience included doctors in white coats and Hawaii governor Josh Green, who had flown halfway across the world to express his opposition. Green, a doctor, had been involved in treating a 2019 measles outbreak in American Samoa that was fueled in part by Kennedy’s anti-vaccine rhetoric and killed 83 people.
Kennedy’s migration to the MAGA world started during the pandemic. A longtime conspiracy monger about vaccines, he became one of the most prominent opponents of the COVID vaccine, going so far as to say the hazards of being unvaccinated in the U.S. were worse that those faced by Anne Frank when hiding from the Nazis. In 2023, he launched a primary challenge against Joe Biden as a Democrat, but it quickly failed, and he switched to run as an independent before eventually endorsing Trump in the final months of the campaign; his slogan “Make America Healthy Again” appealed to a tranche of voters who otherwise might have been skeptical of Trump. His nomination to head HHS was his reward.
The list of reasons for Republicans to vote against Kennedy’s nomination is long. They range from his vaccine skepticism to his past support of abortion rights and beyond: The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has warned against his confirmation, calling him a tool of trial lawyers, while the New York Post’s editorial page skewered him as “a radical left lunatic who is anti-energy, a ‘big time’ taxer and completely incoherent about our nation’s health.”
Democrats repeatedly grilled Kennedy on his past support for abortion rights in an effort to expose further daylight between the former Democrat and his new ideological compatriots on the right. He repeatedly said he would follow Trump’s lead and dodged a more fulsome answer, simply repeating the mantra that “every abortion is a tragedy.”
There were also pointed examinations of Kennedy’s past statements. Michael Bennet of Colorado simply read Kennedy’s own quotes and asked him, for example, if he had said COVID was genetically engineered to target Blacks and whites but spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Kennedy, who made the comments at what the Post called at the time “a raucous booze and fart filled dinner,” insisted he was merely citing a study. (The study did not come to those conclusions). Bennet also asked Kennedy about his claim that exposure to pesticides causes children to become transgender, which Kennedy outright denied saying, despite the fact that, when the remarks were first reported, a spokesperson said Kennedy was just calling for more research into the topic.
There was a somewhat absurd moment when Bernie Sanders quizzed Kennedy about anti-vaccine onesies sold by Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit group he founded. The Vermont senator thundered, “Are you supportive of these onesies?” in tones that that would been appropriate for Joe McCarthy asking if a witness was now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party. Even here, Kennedy dodged.
Despite all of this scrutiny, Kennedy appears to be on track for nomination. Assuming every Democrat votes against his nomination, he can lose support from three Republican senators and still be confirmed. Following the hearing, Vice-President J.D. Vance, who would break such a tie in the Senate, tweeted, “To reject their confirmation is to reject the idea that President Trump decides his cabinet.”
Kennedy will face another day of questions on Thursday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which may be harder for Kennedy: It includes two of the most centrist Republicans in the Senate — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, both of whom have frequently broken with Trump — and its chair is Bill Cassidy.
