Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now on a short list being floated by some Trump allies to serve as the next head of the Department of Health and Human Services, multiple people close to the president-elect’s campaign say.
Hopes among Kennedy’s backers that he could be nominated to lead the department have risen in recent days, after Republicans cemented their majority in the Senate.
Kennedy’s odds of clearing a Senate led by Democrats would have been low, given his long record of what the party called “anti-science, fringe public health stances” that outraged Trump’s opponents and a broad array of health experts during the campaign.
That includes a comment that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and his chairmanship of the group Children’s Health Defense, which has claimed that the “parallel between rising disease rates and the increasing number of childhood vaccines is hard to ignore.” Doctors argue statements like these mislead about the safety of immunizations and threaten to erode hard-fought improvements in U.S. vaccination rates against preventable diseases.
Kennedy himself has been noncommittal when asked publicly about the possibility he could be picked to head the sprawling HHS umbrella of agencies, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Food and Drug Administration.
Ahead of the election, Kennedy told Fox News he was “confident that if I wanted to do HHS secretary, the president would fight like hell to make that happen,” but also said that he was unsure if that would be “the most effective” role for him.
In a CNN interview last month, Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick, was asked whether Kennedy would be in charge of HHS.
“Of course not,” he replied.
But two people close to the campaign say the election results have played a big role in changing the thinking on whether Kennedy could clear a steep and often painful Senate confirmation process that can bog down nominees.
Kennedy’s supporters argue that the election offers a mandate not just for Trump’s platform overall but for Kennedy and his “Make America Healthy Again” proposals to combat chronic disease, citing the votes Kennedy may have delivered in Trump’s favor.
As one example, podcast host Joe Rogan initially voiced support for Kennedy and his ideas before later endorsing Trump.
“We have not yet decided exactly what that strategy is going to be, but that is a possibility,” Kennedy told NPR in an interview after the election, asked if he would be named to a Senate-confirmed position.
As to the question of whether Kennedy is now in serious contention for the HHS secretary role, Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that Americans reelected Trump “by resounding margins because they trust his judgement and support his policies, including his promise to Make America Healthy Again alongside well-respected leaders like RFK Jr.”
Other potential HHS secretary picks
However, Kennedy is not the only name that has been floated by Republicans for the top job at HHS.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suggested Wednesday his top health official, state surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo, could be a candidate. Under Ladapo, the state’s health department has warned some against getting COVID-19 booster shots, citing claims that federal health authorities and outside experts criticized as unproven or misleading.
Other names floated by Trump allies in Washington include former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former deputy HHS secretary Eric Hargan, who supporters think could be effective because he knows how to navigate the department’s bureaucracy.
But people close to the campaign say few Trump surrogates and supporters have spent as much time with the president-elect as Kennedy or plotted as ambitious an agenda.
The two spent hours flying together in the final stretch of the campaign. Kennedy was also in Florida after the election, huddling with the president-elect’s top ranks to weigh potential candidates to fill the administration.
“He’s going to help make America healthy again. And he’s a great guy and he really means it. He wants to do some things, and we’re going to let him go to it,” Trump said on Wednesday morning after the election.
Trump has previously said he’s been friends with Kennedy “for a long time” and would let him “go wild” on many of his policy priorities, except for curbing fossil fuels.
“I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines. The only thing I don’t think I’m going to let him even get near is the liquid gold that we have under our feet,” Trump said in New York on Oct. 27.
Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” platform
Kennedy’s nomination would come at a key time for many of the issues he campaigned on, which he says underpin “the chronic-disease crisis.”
Kennedy has accused the FDA of “aggressive suppression” of a range of products, including psychedelics — after MDMA failed to earn the agency’s approval earlier this year — and raw milk, which officials have discouraged amid the ongoing bird flu outbreak on dairy farms.
Other proposals include restricting pharmaceutical advertising and rewriting the laws that currently rely on drugmakers paying fees to fund most FDA approvals. Ahead of the election, he warned FDA officials who “are part of this corrupt system” to “pack your bags.”
In the days ahead of the election, Kennedy said Trump had asked him to “root out the corruption and the conflicts of interests” in agencies that oversee drugs and vaccines, pledging to “restore transparency” and stop “hiding science.”
“He doesn’t want me to take vaccines away from people. If you want to take a vaccine, you ought to be able to take it. We believe in free choice in this country,” Kennedy said in remarks posted on Nov. 2.
His call for stopping water fluoridation comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is now facing a court order to take action against the practice.
That ruling was driven in part by a review released by the NIH earlier this year, examining the risk it might lower children’s IQ, and comes as critics have called on the CDC to revise its statement backing fluoridation. The NIH review found that concentrations of fluoride in drinking water higher than recommended levels were associated with lower IQ in children, but more studies were needed on the effect of lower concentrations of fluoride.
But were he to end up HHS secretary, some of Kennedy’s aims would fall outside of his jurisdiction, like the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Other responsibilities under the broad HHS umbrella could consume much of Kennedy’s time, some allies worry, distracting from his priorities.
“Bobby is very action-oriented, brilliant, an excellent communicator, has a great grasp of details, and is a transformational leader. He is not, his skillset is not, as a bureaucrat administrator,” said Dr. Robert Malone, a longtime Kennedy ally who was with him and Trump on election night.
Malone said he had spoken with many of the aides from some of the “at least four different HHS transition teams” under Trump, but not personally with Kennedy, in recent weeks about the future of the department.
He said he thought Kennedy would likely do better in a role at the White House, serving as a czar who could target specific issues across different departments.
“Make no mistake, what is being discussed is a major reimagining of the entire federal health research and promotion and protection infrastructure. That includes very significant reforms and changes in business practice,” said Malone.
Alexander Tin is a digital reporter for CBS News based in the Washington, D.C. bureau. He covers the Biden administration’s public health agencies, including the federal response to infectious disease outbreaks like COVID-19.
