Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before a House subcommittee about the HHS’s proposed 2026 budget on Tuesday, making the case that the department needs to “recalibrate its trajectory so that it transforms our health care system from a sick care system into a health care system.” Kennedy outlined the HHS’s revamped priorities to create wide-reaching reforms to the nation’s food and healthcare system as he characterized the country’s current system as unsustainable.

As the MAHA initiative brings new priorities to the table that could provide real results, one would rightly question why those in power hadn’t addressed these priorities before.
MAHA’s primary target, according to Kennedy, is “a special focus on the chronic disease epidemic.” He said that the HHS must tackle the problems of debilitating disease, contaminated food, toxic environments, addiction, and mental health. In addition, the HHS aims to maintain “responsible and effective service to the 100 million Americans” on government health programs while cutting costs to the American taxpayer. “We intend to do a lot more with less,” Kennedy promised.
The HHS is a massive sprawling bureaucracy with a $130.7 billion budget for fiscal year 2025 (which doesn’t even include $1.7 trillion in mandatory spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs). The proposed 2026 fiscal budget cuts 25 percent of discretionary spending to a new total of $94.7 billion.
The largest cuts come from the National Institutes for Health, an agency that had a $47 billion budget. The new budget cuts the agency by almost 40 percent, retaining $27 billion for NIH research. In the new proposed budget, the White House argued that the “NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.” The administration criticized the NIH for engaging in gain-of-function research and “promot[ing] radical gend...