RFK Jr. & Michael Knowles: "Fight For Healthy America" | White House Interview

The political order is shifting. The crunchy hippies are now on the right.
Democrat presidential candidates are working for President Donald Trump in the administration. And one of the key features of the administration is making America healthy again,

which is why I'm so pleased to be joined by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Mr. Secretary, thanks so much for taking the time.

Thank you for having me.

So I come into the White House this morning.

I see breaking news.

You've fired 20,000 bureaucrats.

What is this move?

It seems like Doge meets HHS. What does it mean? Why did you do it? How does it serve the Maha movement? I mean, the agency, this is a $1.9 trillion agency.
It's the biggest agency in the government. And during the Biden administration, President Biden increase its budget by 38 percent and increased the workforce by 17 percent.
And by every metric by which we measure public health, health accelerated its decline. Putting the money and the personnel in there is not alone going to solve the problem.
And what I found when I came to HHS was really a sprawling bureaucracy. We have over 100 communications departments.
We should have one. We have 40 IT departments, 40 procurement departments, dozens of HR departments.
And there's a lot of administrative ways. What we wanted to do is make sure, and that is where we're doing the cuts.
We're going down from 82,000 personnel to 62,000. We're keeping the scientists.
We're keeping the frontline providers. We're trying to do our best, not only serve ourselves as stewards of the taxpayer money, but also to make the agency more efficient.
We're cutting it down. Many of these sub-agencies live in these kind of sides.
They're not talking to each other. They're in these siloed fiefdoms.
And they operate often at cross purposes with each other with no sense of a unified sense of mission that we're here to protect public health. They're checking boxes in many cases.
For example, I found that some of these groups collect health data from America and have these big databases that are very, very valuable in figuring out what's wrong with our health. But they won't give that data to other parts of the department that could actually, you know, make health better.
They sell it to them for, in some cases, very, very extravagant prices in order to support their own little fiefdom rather than public health as a whole. And so we're cutting 20 and there's a lot of redundancy.
We're going to eliminate the redundancy. We're going to streamline the agency so that we can inspire all the workers who work there.
And it's really an extraordinary group. Most of the people who work there are very conscientious, great public servants that want to do their job, but they're not able to because of perverse incentives and because of these, you know, because there's no overall mission for that agency that everybody wakes up every day and says, my job today is to improve the health of the American public.
We're going to recalibrate the trajectory of the agency so that everybody knows we are going to end the chronic disease epidemic in this country. We're going to study all the ingredients in our food.
We're going to eliminate the ingredients that are not keeping us safe. We're not eating food today.
We're eating food-like substances. And 10% of our SNAP program is going to soda drinks, sugar water.
Well, this just came up this past week. There was a suggestion that maybe the federal government would stop subsidizing soda through various welfare programs.
And then all of a sudden, I saw a social media campaign from big social media accounts, ostensibly even on the right, saying, this is government overreach. Actually, no, we need to continue to subsidize soda.
And they made all sorts of bogus arguments for it. Well, the soda industry is very frightened, and they went out and paid all these influencers.
That's not been demonstrated, actually. There was an active campaign.
But you can see the same talking points from each of these accounts. And, of course, you know, why are we paying, you know, listen, if you want a Coca-Cola, you ought to be able to get one.
And we have no objection to that. Why is the taxpayer, you know, paying money that is supposed to be for food for poor children? And we're giving them Coca-Cola, which is giving them diabetes, or other sodas, which is giving them diabetes, which then we have to pay for on the Medicaid program.
It doesn't make any sense. We're creating a generation of sick kids.
Our obesity rate is now up to 50% of our children. Our diabetes and prediabetes rate is 38% in teenagers.
When I was a kid, it was zero. A pediatrician in my age, my youth, would typically see one case of diabetes in his lifetime over a 40 or 50 year career.
Today, more than one out of every three kids who walk through his office door is diabetic or prediabetic. It's because we're giving them soda when they're kids.
Well, this is my question then, even beyond soda. You've obviously now, we've all encountered this massive special interest campaign to stop you from achieving your goal of making America healthy again.
What other sorts of special interests have you run up against since you took office? Well, you know, I've been meeting with all the food companies. I met with all the baby formula companies.
We launched Operation Stork Speed to make sure American mothers can get really healthy formula for their babies. And, you know, we have a crisis in our formula providers.
One, because it's a very narrow market and there's not enough of it.

But also, it's not high quality.

And it's not well tested for heavy metals and other contaminants, which we're fine to get it. And then there's ingredients in there like corn solids, which are not good particularly

for premiums. And then there's ingredients in there like corn solids, which are not good, particularly for preemies, and can make them very, very sick and even kill them.

So, we need to do it better.

We're going to do a good job at FDA, at streamlining the regulations, at fast-tracking them, at doing everything we can to make sure that the formula companies can improve and maximize the improvement of their formulas as soon as possible. I know you've written at length about agency capture, and so you're no stranger to the influence of lobbies and special interests.
So how do you practically fight against that? Because it's not just you. As you mentioned, there are 10 zillion HR departments at HHS.

There is a deep state, to use a popular term.

There's an entrenched bureaucracy here and a lot of interest.

So how do you answer your agenda?

I think it's really hard to fight it from the outside, which is what I've been doing for 40 years.

But now I'm on the inside.

So I really have an opportunity to correct this, and this is the purpose of my life. That's what I'm going to do over the next four years.
I'm going to, you know, we're going to end the chronic disease epidemic in this country, and we're going to do it by making sure that the food companies, the formula companies, are no longer poisoning us. They're giving us nutrition.
They're giving us real food instead of food-like substances that are loaded with poison. And we're going to make sure that our medicines are well-tested, but that they're available and that we can fast-track that testing.
We have the capacity now through AI to really shorten the length of clinical trials. and we have really smart people are in the agency we have people coming in through Elon and Doge who are you know people who are walking away from very very important businesses just because they want to improve the government they're not there for position they're not there for prestige they're there because they want to fix America.
And so I'm very hopeful that we actually will be able to make a difference. I think it's a unique generational opportunity that has not happened before.
And, you know, it's hard. It's very difficult being part of a disruptive process because, you know, there's 20,000 people who are losing their jobs and that nobody likes that.
But, you know, at the same time, we have a responsibility to the American public and public health. And, you know, my job is to achieve that those goals of making America healthy again.
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was about a month ago, on innovation, specifically in biotech. Are we at the brink of a sort of deep-seek moment in biotech? So it's great to hear you talk about innovation in health care because it seems like you have two tasks.
One is to stop abuses, to actually slow things down that have been fast-tracked in HHS. The other is to speed things up.
I know the question that you've been asked throughout your confirmation hearings, of course, was about the public's, I think, justifiable concern with the growth of vaccines. And the senators ask you enough questions about that, but I don't think you need to rehash a lot of it.
But for the people who are asking questions about whether or not they'll vaccinate their kids or whether they should vaccinate their kids, will anything change about vaccine policy? Yeah, everything's going to change because we're going to have good information. And, you know, none of the vaccines that are given, you know, people said to me during the hearing, oh, well, this link between autism and vaccines has been disproven.
None of the vaccines that are given during the first six months of life have ever been tested for autism. The only one was the DTP vaccine.
And that one study that was done, according to the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, found that there was a link. They threw out that study because it was based upon CDC's surveillance system, VAERS, and they said that system is no good.
It begs the question is why doesn't CDC have a functional surveillance system? We're going to make sure they do have a functional surveillance system. right now, surveillance system is a system that, because they don't do pre-licensing safety testing for vaccines, they're the only product that's exempt.
So what they say is, if there are injuries, we'll capture them afterward. They have a system that doesn't capture them.
In fact, CDC's own study of its own system said it captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries. It's worthless.
And everybody agrees it's worthless. But why have we gone for 39 years and nobody's fixed it? Without a functional system, right.
We're going to fix it. And we have, you know, we have Doge, you know, knows how to manage data.
And so we're going to be able to get into these databases and give answers to the American public. And we're going to fix the problems.
If there are problems, we're going to fix them very quickly. But we're going to follow the science.
That's what we're going to do. We're going to have gold standard science, and we're going to follow the science.
We're going to publish all of our data sets, which CDC has never done. We're going to do replication of all of our studies, which CDC has never done.
We're going to publish our peer review, which CDC has never done. So people are going to have real answers for the first time.
That is marvelous. Also not flattery, just an observation, having watched the campaign into the transition.
Not only were you picked by President Trump, you ran for president, you got a lot of support, you campaigned on these exact issues, President Trump campaigned with you on these exact issues. I don't think it's overstating it to say that your presence was a significant part of the reason that President Trump was elected.
So it seems to me the wind is at your back, and I wish you the best of luck, Mr. Secretary.
I mean, I'm really grateful to President Trump because I don't think, you know, a lot of people have criticism or problems with President Trump. But I don't, you know, I've watched him in action.
I think the characters of him are absolutely incorrect. And that, you know, I've seen somebody who genuinely cares about people and who wants to fix the situation.
You look at, for the past four years, I've never heard a Democrat talk about all the deaths in Ukraine. And every time that President Trump talks about Ukraine, he talks about the deaths.
You know, million people have died a million soldiers on both sides and saying him saying that's not good for any of us nobody talks about that stuff and i think he genuinely cares and he has he's not scared of these big institutions he's not scared to challenge them and uh... you know i'm very very grateful him giving me, putting me in a position where I can actually make a difference.
Well, it's audacious. I mean, even just to have a Kennedy in a Republican administration, it's audacious, it's ambitious, but then isn't that the charge? Isn't the charge to make America great again and healthy again? I mean, we can't be a great country if we're a sick country.
If we want to be strong as a nation, we have to be strong as individuals. And, you know, like I said, I've said before, President Trump promised to return the American dream to Americans.
A healthy person has a thousand dreams. A sick person only has one.

And now we have 60% of our population that only think about one thing.

How do I make it through the day?

You know, how do I get myself better?

And we need to change that.

Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for your time.