Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday faced federal lawmakers for the first time since September as he sought to defend a more than 12% proposed cut to his department’s budget and dodge arrows from angry Democrats along the way.
In his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, kicking off an expected sprint of seven budget hearings he’ll attend across congressional committees and subcommittees over the next week, Kennedy emphasized the administration’s work to reform dietary guidelines and crack down on waste, fraud and abuse.
Republicans on the committee praised Kennedy as a “breath of fresh air” and asked him to promote his department’s recent actions. Democrats, who have been furious over Kennedy’s sweeping overhaul of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, largely had a different agenda.
They needled Kennedy on what they viewed as the Trump administration’s hypocrisy on fraud, demanded to know why he was cutting budgets for various programs and slammed his efforts to pull back vaccine recommendations and messaging, which they said have caused unnecessary deaths.
Kennedy fired back, often raising his voice as he accused the Democrats of misrepresenting his work and past statements.
Here are three standout moments from Thursday’s hearing:
A standoff over measles
One heated exchange early in the hearing came between Kennedy and Rep. Linda Sanchez. The California Democrat decried recent measles outbreaks across the U.S. and asked Kennedy to answer for the fact that under his leadership, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled back public health messaging supporting vaccination.
“As a mother, this horrifies me,” Sanchez said. “Did President Trump approve your decision to end CDC’s pro-vaccine public messaging campaign?”
Kennedy repeatedly refused to answer, saying first he wanted to respond to the “misstatements that you’ve made” and later praising the Trump administration’s record on preventing measles, although protections against the disease have eroded in some parts of the country as vaccination rates have dropped.
“That’s not answering my question,” Sanchez said as the two talked over each other.
But Sanchez also got Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist before he entered politics, to acknowledge that a 6-year-old who died of measles last year in West Texas could have potentially been saved with vaccination.
“Do you agree with the majority of doctors that the measles vaccine could have saved that child’s life in Texas?” she asked.
“It’s possible, certainly,” Kennedy said.
RFK Jr. denies talking about Black children being ‘re-parented’
A fight erupted between Kennedy and Rep. Terri Sewell, a Democrat from Alabama, when Kennedy vehemently denied making remarks he’d said in 2024.
The comments dated back to when Kennedy was a presidential candidate. On the “High Level Conversations” podcast last July, he said, “Psychiatric drugs — which every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented to live in a community where there’ll be no cellphones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.”
“Have you ever re-parented, or parented, I should say, a Black child?” Sewell asked, as her staff held up a poster featuring an abbreviated version of the quote.
“I don’t even know what that phrase means,” Kennedy said. “I’m not going to answer something I didn’t say.”
“You’re making stuff up,” he later claimed.
A recording of the podcast shows he made the comments during a conversation about free rehabilitation facilities he was proposing opening at the time in rural areas around the country.
Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard said Kennedy before joining the administration was referring to spaces where young people facing alienation, mental health challenges and despair could get re-parented, which she said was a psychotherapy term for “developing the emotional regulation, discipline, boundaries, and self-worth that may not have been established in childhood.”
For Kennedy and his former party, civility is the exception
Kennedy spent most of his life as a Democrat, the scion of one of the nation’s most famous political families. Both Republicans and Democrats during the hearing began their remarks by expressing their admiration of Kennedy’s relatives, among them former President John F. Kennedy.
But again and again throughout Thursday’s hearing, the fraying of bonds between Kennedy and his former party was on full display as spiteful comments were passed back and forth.
The Health secretary grew defensive and visibly agitated. He repeatedly criticized Democratic lawmakers for not giving him a word in edgewise.
“They’ve all shut me up,” Kennedy said at one point. “They give a little speech that they can go and market, you know, for fundraising, and they don’t allow me to answer the question.”
On a few rare occasions, the exchanges were civil. One representative, Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, used humor to make that happen.
“I promise to give you easy, comfortable questions if you don’t yell at me and hurt my feelings,” she told Kennedy. He promised he wouldn’t.
Swenson writes for the Associated Press.
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