In the spirit of the season, the Washington Examiner has identified 12 issues we believe will shape and influence 2025 and beyond. The incoming Trump administration has made the fight against illegal immigration and the use of tariffs its flagship policy items. The U.S. will also possibly undergo a health revolution, while very real questions need to be answered on everything from Social Security reform to the military to the changing landscape of the energy sector. Part 2 is on Make America Healthy Again.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for health and human services secretary, is expected to hit the ground running in 2025 to transform priorities in healthcare policy fundamentally.
Kennedy was once considered by former President Barack Obama to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, and his shift from his family’s Democratic roots to the front face of Republican healthcare priorities has been one of the clearest examples of a reorientation of the political parties in the United States.
Branching off from his career as an environmental lawyer, Kennedy rose to greater prominence in the health policy arena in the wake of COVID-19 due largely to his skepticism of vaccines, including his past support for the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism.
GOP SENATORS VOICE RESERVATIONS ABOUT RFK JR.’S VIEWS ON ABORTION AND AGRICULTURE
Support for Kennedy’s nomination among average voters is split along partisan lines, with about 60% of Republicans supporting his role in the Trump administration and 60% of Democrats saying they “strongly disapprove,” according to an Associated Press poll earlier this month.
But it’s unclear whether Kennedy’s more fringe views will cost him the confirmation as he has drawn support from politicians on the Left such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for their shared goal of rooting out corrupt influence in the food and beverage industry.
In the lead-up to the confirmation hearing process, senators have questioned Kennedy about more than his support of anti-vaccine goals. Kennedy’s meetings with Republican senators before the Christmas holiday covered a range of topics, including his stance on abortion and other social issues under the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The HHS secretary must undergo two confirmation hearings in the Senate before a final vote: one with the Senate Finance Committee and one with the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Those will likely be scheduled shortly after the presidential inauguration.
Should Kennedy be confirmed early in the new year, here are the three top areas most important to watch in 2025.
Abortion
Although Trump has set the GOP agenda on abortion to make gestational age limits on abortion a state policy issue, the HHS secretary has significant sway over the portions of abortion policy that are still executed by the federal government.
Title X family planning services for low-income families, for example, did not include any abortion-related services under the first Trump administration, but President Joe Biden’s HHS reversed these rules, creating tension between his administration and states that passed anti-abortion legislation after the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Kennedy’s leadership, along with Trump’s nominee for Food and Drug Administration commissioner Martin Makary, would have the authority to restrict access to the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol.
Abortion pills were the center of the 2024 presidential election cycle in part because of the efforts of anti-abortion advocates to get the courts to overturn the FDA’s decision to allow mifepristone to be shipped to patients in the mail without physical examination.
In March, the Supreme Court dismissed a case against mifepristone on technical grounds, meaning that legal challenges to the drug are still very much a live issue for next year and beyond.
Should Kennedy and Makary make a move to remove the Biden-era rules allowing for mifepristone to be prescribed without an in-person screening, abortion-rights groups are likely to pursue a remedy in court.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who is anti-abortion, said on X last week that Kennedy seemed receptive to tightening the regulatory protocols on mifepristone on patient safety grounds, which would inherently limit access to the drug.
According to Hawley, Kennedy also supports ending taxpayer funding of domestic abortions and reinstating the “Mexico City policy,” which prevented U.S. funding to nongovernmental organizations that “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) echoed similar talking points about his discussions of abortion with Kennedy, saying that Kennedy fully supports Trump’s direction on the controversial issue.
“He’s telling everybody to listen: ‘Whatever President Trump says, I’m going to back him 100%,’” Tuberville said of Kennedy.
Disentangling public health from big industry
At the heart of a Kennedy HHS would be his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, the theme of which is to decouple the interests of the FDA and the corporations the agency was created to regulate.
Kennedy has become a champion of the crusade against ultra-processed foods, leading the call to ban seed oils and artificial food additives that he says are the causes of the obesity, diabetes, and cancer epidemics in the U.S.
The HHS nominee has also supported the proposition of deregulating the sale of unpasteurized milk across state lines and removing fluoride from the water supply, both of which have grown in popularity since COVID-19.
In September, Kennedy slammed the obesity and diabetes medication Ozempic as a cure to a disease created by the food industry, promising that his role in the Trump administration would be to “address our sick food system — and the corrupt government agencies — to help make our country healthy again.”
“Instead of fixing our food system and addressing the obesity crisis at its root, the author focuses on a drug that may palliate the symptom — and gladden the wallets of distant Big Pharma execs,” Kennedy said, referencing an opinion piece praising the benefits of new obesity drugs.
Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told the Washington Examiner that he thinks Kennedy’s hope for changing the regulatory relationship between the FDA and industry is “incredibly naive,” saying the institution has an incentive structure “that will always produce this sort of result.”
“The only way to prevent regulatory or program capture is to get the decisions that the government is making on behalf of patients, on behalf of consumers, out of the government’s hands and return them to patients,” Cannon said.
Kennedy expressed similar disdain for the pharmaceutical industry in May at the possibility the epidemic of bird flu, or H5N1, that swept through dairy cattle herds across the country this year could have been engineered in a lab so that companies could profit off a vaccine to prevent the disease.
The HHS nominee has tried to distance himself from his anti-vaccine past since the news broke this month that a lawyer who is helping him choose officials for the department has petitioned the FDA to suspend or withdraw approval of polio and hepatitis B vaccines.
But Kennedy’s food industry agenda is significantly more attractive to voters than his stance against vaccines, even as public health officials are concerned about a worldwide increase in vaccine hesitancy since COVID-19.
Overall, only 2 in 10 people want the government to be less involved in ensuring children are vaccinated against infectious diseases. About 40% of Trump voters who are parents of children under 18 said they wanted the government to be less involved in mandating vaccines for children.
Standards of scientific evidence
Kennedy’s critique of the safety protocols for vaccines, drugs, and food dyes will likely have a more systemic effect than solely on those policy areas.
Rather, Kennedy’s overall skepticism of the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry, major food corporations, and the federal government is likely to have substantial implications for the credibility of science and what constitutes sufficient scientific evidence.
“What RFK has talked about and what has come up, is different views about safety and efficacy and what counts to evaluate those. And if changes are made there, or different levels of evidence, or views about the evidence are imposed, that could really change things,” Jennifer Kates, global health policy specialist at the think tank KFF, told reporters when Kennedy was first nominated.
Kates said that a change or a de-emphasis in what constitutes solid scientific evidence to support a particular recommendation could influence not only what agencies such as the National Institutes of Health prioritize but also what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can recommend as best practices. That, in turn, will have ripple effects on what states have jurisdiction over and what health policies are enforced.
“If those recommendations are not being made or being watered down or changed, that sends a message. It sends a message to states, to schools, to parents, where we already see the effect of that,” Kates said.
Cannon said he is wary of Kennedy’s discernment when it comes to evaluating medical evidence.
“It’s not clear that either RFK has all that great a track record on distinguishing signal from noise and making careful statements about what the evidence says,” Cannon said. “Because if you can’t distinguish what is solid evidence from what is not, then even if you were trying to send responsible messages about the evidence, you’re misreading the evidence.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a strong supporter of Kennedy’s ascension to HHS, told the Washington Examiner that part of what he is looking forward to about the change in the department is a reevaluation of scientific evidence and a focus on finding the truth.
Public confidence in science, scientists, and public health professionals has been at record lows since COVID-19, during which policies such as social distancing and the use of face masks had scant supporting evidence but were rigidly enforced.
RFK JR. ON ULTRA-PROCESSED FOOD: THE SCIENCE ON FOOD DYES, GLYPHOSATE, AND SEED OILS
Paul said he is hopeful that the incoming Trump administration, with Kennedy at the helm of public health, will turn the trend around because trust in government health recommendations “can’t get any worse.”
“I think it’s at the lowest ebb that it’s been in my lifetime. And this distrust of government is based on the government lying,” Paul said. “I think they’re going to quit lying. I think they’re going to demand honesty and integrity, and I think you’ll be surprised how quickly things turn around.”