Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday announced a plan to shake up the nation’s compensation system for people harmed by vaccines.

The federal system, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, “is broken, and I intend to fix it,” Mr. Kennedy wrote on X. “I will not allow the V.I.C.P. to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals.”

The compensation program, created by Congress in 1986, allows people who believe they were injured by vaccines to apply for financial compensation. The system is operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, with federally appointed special masters serving as judges, and funded by a 75-cent surcharge on vaccines.

Mr. Kennedy said he was working with Attorney General Pam Bondi on the effort to remake the system but did not provide details.

Mr. Kennedy noted that the compensation program protects vaccine makers from liability in courts. He said that the compensation fund has paid out $5.4 billion to 12,000 petitioners, but argued that it “no longer functions to achieve its Congressional intent.”

The program is inefficient and corrupt, Mr. Kennedy said in his lengthy online post, and he charged that judges were prioritizing “the solvency of the H.H.S. Trust Fund, over their duty to compensate victims.”