Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed by the Senate Thursday to be President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, capping off a weekslong political battle that threatened to divide Republicans.
Kennedy cleared the GOP-controlled chamber mostly along party lines, 52-48, to become Trump’s 15th Senate-confirmed nominee in the first weeks of his second term. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), a victim of childhood polio who criticized Kennedy’s stance on vaccines, voted no.
As HHS secretary, Kennedy will oversee some of the federal government’s largest public health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Kennedy is one of Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks in his second term, taking over the very agencies he has spent decades criticizing as an environmental-lawyer-turned-vaccine-skeptic.
He dropped his ill-fated 2024 presidential run to endorse Trump at a critical moment last year and has since been embraced by the MAGA base with a promise to “Make America Healthy Again.”
Once on shaky ground with several Republicans over his history of vaccine skepticism and promoting abortion rights, Kennedy has steadily won over holdouts in recent weeks by pledging increased congressional oversight.
“Many Americans’ trust in health authorities has eroded in recent years, with the pandemic being a big factor,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said in recent floor remarks. “A lot of Americans grew frustrated with confusing and sometimes contradictory guidance from government agencies.”
Kennedy overcame initial hesitation from a group that included Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and John Curtis (R-UT). In public and private conversations, Kennedy’s commitments to senators included more input on HHS hiring, greater oversight, and regular meetings; preserving a CDC panel’s recommendations on vaccines and its online language that vaccines do not cause autism; and following Trump’s lead on abortion policy.
“He has made numerous commitments to me and my colleagues, promising to work with Congress to ensure public access to information and to base vaccine recommendations on data-driven, evidence-based, and medically sound research,” Murkowski said.
Kennedy stressed during his confirmation hearings that he wanted to restore HHS as the home for “honest, unbiased, gold-standard science.”
Democrats voted in unison against Kennedy, a legacy Democrat and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy. They assailed him as a conspiracy theorist and a danger to Americans’ health. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) accused Republicans of secretly opposing Kennedy but bending to the will of Trump.
“I think likely most Republicans would vote against him if there were a secret ballot,” Schumer said. “But sadly and unfortunately for America, Republicans are being strong armed by Donald Trump and will end up holding their nose and voting to confirm Mr. Kennedy.”
The part of Kennedy’s agenda that has attracted the most bipartisan support has been his promise to reform the food system and address chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, obesity, and diabetes through improving the American diet.
Of particular concern for Kennedy is removing financial conflicts of interest from the NIH and FDA and scrutinizing chemical additives in the food supply. Kennedy faced scrutiny in his confirmation hearings for his own financial conflicts of interest and later reversed course to divest from a vaccine lawsuit he stood to benefit from.
HHS does not have direct control over nutrition safety and food production, a key pillar of the MAHA movement, because these policy areas primarily belong to the Department of Agriculture. Kennedy testified to senators that he has already established a strong rapport with Trump’s USDA nominee, Brooke Rollins, and will be working closely with her on nutrition policy issues.
But Kennedy comes into HHS at a critical time as he will have direct control over the final version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a sweeping policy document that is published every five years that shapes federal nutrition policy, including the federal school lunch program and food stamps.
In addition to implementing his MAHA agenda as it relates to chronic conditions, Kennedy must contend with the threat of infectious disease outbreaks, which both Democrats and Republicans consider one of his weak links.
Also in partnership with USDA, Kennedy inherits a protracted effort to prevent H5N1 bird flu from becoming a threat to humans. So far, public health agencies have maintained that the virus does not show any mutations that suggest it will become transmissible person-to-person, but critics say that both Republicans and Democrats are not taking the problem seriously enough.
Any rise in other infectious diseases, particularly among children, including whooping cough and measles, could pose a serious challenge to Kennedy’s efforts to probe the existing vaccine schedule and reshape vaccine recommendation protocols.
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Kennedy will have to execute several other Republican healthcare priorities, including, potentially restructuring and reducing spending through the Medicaid program, implementing federal regulations on abortion, and curtailing transgender procedures for minors.
Following Kennedy’s confirmation, the Senate will work to confirm 19 additional nominees for HHS sub-level agencies in the coming weeks. Among them are former celebrity TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz to oversee Medicare and Medicaid, former Rep. Dave Weldon to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Stanford healthcare economist Jay Bhattacharya for NIH.