Earlier this week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told supporters on a Zoom call that Donald Trump pledged to give him control over the the federal government’s entire public-health apparatus. “The key that President Trump has promised me is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others … and then also the USDA,” he said.
If Trump plans to entrust numerous federal agencies whose decisions hold millions of lives in the balance in the hands of a pure kook, it would be enormous news. Of course, the enormity of the news is tempered by the fact that the source of this alarming claim is that selfsame kook.
But Wednesday night, the prospect of this coming to pass became suddenly and terrifingly plausible.
CNN’s Kaitlin Collins interviewed Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick. Collins came in prepared to ask Lutnick about Kennedy’s wild-sounding claims about a high-level administration post. Instead, to Collins’s evident shock, Lutnick proceeded to reveal that he had spoken with Kennedy for more than two hours, and came away from the discussion converted to Kennedy’s deranged worldview and committed to a plan to operationalize it.
In the interview, Lutnick calmly repeated a series of vaccine-skeptic talking points. He did not even limit his vaccine skepticism to the COVID-19 vaccine, which is safe and effective, but to all vaccines, which he painted as unregulated, dangerous, and part of a for-profit conspiracy between the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government. The steps he proposed would be to give Kennedy data about vaccines, and if Kennedy decides they are not safe, which he already has, the FDA could pull approval.
The question of Kennedy’s influence has centered on the prospect he would be appointed to a cabinet-level role. That can’t be ruled out completely. A source close to the Trump campaign told Semafor there “is appetite at the highest levels of the Trump campaign to take on a fight to get Kennedy confirmed.” But unless Republicans overperform in Senate elections, they are likely to have narrow control of the chamber, which would make it hard to move Kennedy through a Senate-confirmed seat. (Many conservative Republicans understand that Kennedy, who spent most of his career as a left-wing conspiracy theorist before transitioning to right-wing conspiracy theorist, is off his rocker.)
What is far more likely, Semafor notes, is that Kennedy could be an “adviser or czar, positions that would not require Senate confirmation. That sort of post would allow Kennedy to wield influence over the broad swath of agencies he has taken an interest in (he has named CDC, FDA, NIH, USDA, and “others”). Kennedy couldn’t shape policy in all these agencies from any one cabinet position, but he could do so as an adviser or czar with a broad portfolio.
The sort of havoc this arrangement could wreak is almost impossible to fathom. The federal government plays an essential role in authorizing vaccines and pharmaceuticals. It is true that the government’s scientific authority is not omniscient, and there are enough cases in which scientific authorities have imposed political judgment in place of evidence to raise ample grounds for treating any of their pronouncements with some skepticism.
But justified skepticism is one thing. Subjecting public-health decisions to RFK Jr.’s cracked worldview is something else altogether. And the process Lutnick proposed to Collins — that the FDA could withdraw approval for a suite of life-saving vaccines because Kennedy decides the data is insufficient — is a glimpse into a public-health nightmare.
The federal government plays many important, largely invisible roles backstopping the safety of everyday life. These functions escape attention because they are routinely handled by sane, competent people in both parties. If you start handing these life-and-death functions over to crackpots, you open the door to unforeseen disasters of all shapes.
Whether RFK Jr. personally gains influence in a prospective Trump administration remains to be seen. What is clear is that the Trump coalition has a large segment of crackpots who expect to staff and influence its policies. The risks this poses to the health and safety of the country can only be vaguely discerned but this in and of itself offers sufficient reason not to give them a chance to hold power.
Update: Trump confirms to reporters that he plans to give Kennedy “a big role” in health care, and that Trump personally agrees “very strongly” with his views.
