HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s visit to the FDA Friday was supposed to introduce him as a trusted leader to agency employees. It did anything but.
Over the course of 40 minutes, Kennedy, in largely off-the-cuff remarks, asserted that the “Deep State” is real, referenced past CIA experiments on human mind control and accused the employees he was speaking to of becoming a “sock puppet” of the industries they regulate.
“Because of my family’s commitment to these issues, I spent 200 hours at Wassaic Home for the Retarded when I was in high school,” Kennedy said, in a reference to the Wassaic State School for the Mentally Retarded in Wassaic, New York. “So I was seeing people with intellectual disabilities all the time. I never saw anybody with autism.”
The remark jolted several FDA employees in the audience, who misheard the reference and thought he was making a derogatory remark about people with intellectual disabilities, according to two employees granted anonymity for fear of retaliation.
By the end of the event, billed as a welcome from the new commissioner, Marty Makary, several FDA staffers had walked out of the rooms where the speech was being broadcast at the agency’s headquarters in White Oak, Maryland, according to two employees granted anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“President Trump always talks about the Deep State, and the media, you know, disparages him and says that he’s paranoid,” Kennedy said, according to a transcript and audio of his remarks obtained by POLITICO. “But the Deep State is real. And it’s not, you know, just George Soros and Bill Gates and a bunch of nefarious individuals sitting together in a room and plotting the, you know, the destruction of humanity.”
He said “every institution that’s created by human beings” is inevitably captured by powerful interests, and urged FDA employees to take advantage of a four-year period under his leadership where he vowed that the Department of Health and Human Services would not be subjected to undue influence and would listen to “dissidents.”
“All of us are subject to those gravities of agency capture,” Kennedy said, challenging the audience to “be conscious of that gravity because it’s going to be pulling you every single day of your career. We want to break away from this so we can make our kids healthy.”
The speech alarmed and disheartened FDA staffers reeling from the mass firings carried out across the department just a week ago, according to several FDA staffers who heard or read his remarks. The speech was broadcast from a private room to agency employees who gathered in two of the largest spaces at the agency — the so-called Great Room and an atrium adjoining two central buildings on the FDA’s campus.
In a statement, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said Kennedy was “telling the truth that many Americans already know: for too long, the FDA has been captured by the very industries it is supposed to regulate.”
“Calling this out and encouraging radical transparency is not controversial — it’s leadership,” Nixon said. “The era of rubber-stamping and silence is over.”
Kennedy last week called the culling of roughly 10,000 employees a necessary action, promising that HHS would find ways to “do more with less.”
But in his first visit to the FDA, he offered little in the way of a vision for how the agency would come away from the layoffs stronger — instead devoting much of his speech to railing against the agency’s past failings and repeating his assertions that the U.S. was far healthier during his childhood than it is now.
“This whole generation is damaged,” Kennedy said, according to the transcript, claiming that rising rates of chronic disease, allergies and other illnesses are the result of some “environmental toxin.”
“The information is out there,” he said. “But those studies aren’t done because they may offend the financial interests of powerful entities.”
Kennedy said he’d soon be releasing “new data” from the CDC’s autism monitoring network that shows that 1 in 31 children now have been diagnosed with the neurological condition. The agency’s most recent estimate to date has been that 1 in 36 children have been identified with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
In an apparent effort to encourage FDA employees to stay true to their mission of making Americans healthier, Kennedy later also referenced the CIA’s Project MKUltra — a notorious human experimentation program from the 1960s — and the Milgram experiment, a well-known study meant to test people’s willingness to obey authority even if it meant inflicting pain on others.
Kennedy throughout his remarks made little mention of the layoffs across FDA, which current and former officials have since worried are hampering the agency’s ability to function.
But in his introduction of Kennedy, Makary nodded to the 3,500 agency employees who were recently cut, saying that the changes “have been hard on the ground.” The Johns Hopkins surgeon urged FDA staff to work together, urging fewer “individual empires” and “less territorialism” between the agency’s medical product centers.
“We want to make it very clear that we believe that the scientists, the reviewers, the inspectors, the officers, the administrative staff — all of the people that support the core mission of the agency — we want to make sure you have all the resources you need to do your job well,” Makary said.
CORRECTION: This article and headline have been updated to make clear that Kennedy was referring to the Wassaic State School for the Mentally Retarded where he worked in high school, not using a derogatory term for people with intellectual disabilities.
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