RFK Jr. Confirmation Hearing

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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Deepa Shivaram.
I cover the White House.

Speaker 11 I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.

Speaker 10 And friend of the podcast, Selena Simmons-Duffin, who covers health policy for NPR, joins us today. Hey, Selena.

Speaker 13 Hi.

Speaker 10 Okay, so the highly anticipated confirmation hearing for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
got started today on Capitol Hill. Kennedy has been tapped to be President Trump's health and human services secretary.

Speaker 14 President Trump has promised to restore America's global strength and to restore the American dream, but he understands.

Speaker 14 We can't be a strong nation when our people are so sick.

Speaker 10 We should note that Kennedy has a condition that affects his voice. And with that, let's get into it.
There's so much to talk about. Selena, I'm going to start with you.
Just very basic stuff here.

Speaker 10 What is RFK's background?

Speaker 13 Well, his background is really in environmental advocacy and law. So he is an attorney by training.
And for many decades, he focused on toxins and the environment.

Speaker 13 And then a couple decades ago, he kind of got into the anti-vax space. Although he was very clear today in the hearing that he is not anti-vaccine.

Speaker 13 Really, he has made his reputation and his fortune sowing doubts about vaccines, pushing the thoroughly disproven link between vaccines and autism.

Speaker 13 So, you know, he had to kind of thread the needle today in describing how that as his background prepared him to run HHS, which is an enormous agency that oversees vaccine policy, among many other things.

Speaker 11 You know, Kennedy is so interesting.

Speaker 11 I like that phrase you use, thread the needle, because to me, he's also this unique figure in politics right now who sort of has threaded the needle between having alliances in very liberal places like Hollywood and also now very conservative MAGA type spaces where he's a bit a sort of celebrated figure at both the left and the right at various points of his life.

Speaker 11 And I think that's part of the reason why Donald Trump picked him. And don't forget, he was a lifelong Democrat.
He became an independent.

Speaker 11 And then he endorsed Trump in a pretty public display of saying, I will endorse you if you give me a job in your administration, which he was then delivered.

Speaker 11 And in his opening remarks today, he did invoke the Kennedy family, obviously one of the most famous political families in American history, invoking both his father, obviously Robert F.

Speaker 11 Kennedy, and his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.
But I do also think it's worth noting that several high-profile members of his own family are trying to undermine this nomination.

Speaker 11 Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of former President Kennedy, released a letter that she sent to senators outlining her opposition to him, calling him a quote predator and accusing him of any number of sordid and inhumane things, and saying that the Senate should not confirm him.

Speaker 11 So I think everyone was prepared for it to be pretty contentious.

Speaker 10 Yeah, and we should point out that he also ran for president. And like there was that stint of his political career as well, where there was a lot of family pushback at that time, too.

Speaker 10 But given, you know, the context of what he's done with his career, Selena, what was his pitch to why he should have this job?

Speaker 13 Yeah, he really tried to portray himself as an outside-the-box thinker, somebody with fresh ideas who wasn't afraid to stand up to like big pharma and big food and all of these big industries.

Speaker 13 Basically, that he would speak truth to power. He emphasized transparency a lot.

Speaker 13 And he also portrayed himself as somebody who would execute on what President Trump wants.

Speaker 13 He really hewed close to President Trump, mentioned his name a lot, and really tried to portray himself as somebody who was going to come in and, you know, execute on this vision to reshape health.

Speaker 10 No, and that goes to the point of how vast HHS is. Like, we are talking about so many things, vaccines, like you pointed out.
We're talking about things like abortion.

Speaker 10 We're talking about Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act. There's so much to get into.

Speaker 10 And with that, I mean, Sue, this was one of the hearings that had the potential to be pretty controversial, pretty contentious.

Speaker 10 As we've been talking about, he is one of the more high-profile picks for Trump's cabinet. And there were supporters of Kennedy and protesters in the room today.
How did you see it unfolding?

Speaker 10 I mean, what were the reactions from folks in the room, but also from the senators who were questioning Kennedy?

Speaker 11 There's been a bit of a curiosity in several of these confirmation hearings for Trump nominees, in which they seem to come with cheering sections, that there's been some public celebrating and applause.

Speaker 11 He was also interrupted a couple times by protesters, but I don't think that the protesters were overwhelming or derailed it in any way. But you're right.

Speaker 11 I think it was very clear that Democrats were going to go in and be very contentious towards him on the vaccine issue, which I think has been very widely documented, his at best contradictory history of supporting or opposing vaccines and questioning the science around them.

Speaker 11 One exchange that I think stood out was Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who really went several rounds with him over how he might personally benefit from his past advocacy.

Speaker 15 And I'm asking you to commit right now that you will not take a financial stake in every one of those lawsuits so that what you do as secretary will also benefit you financially down the line.

Speaker 16 I'll comply with all the ethical guidelines.

Speaker 15 That's not the question. You and I, you have said that.

Speaker 16 You're asking me, Senator, you're asking me not to vaccine colours. No,

Speaker 16 I am not. Mike.
Yeah, you are.

Speaker 16 That's exactly what you're doing.

Speaker 15 Look, no one should be fooled here.

Speaker 15 As Secretary of HHS, Robert Kennedy will have the power to undercut vaccines and vaccine manufacturing across our country.

Speaker 15 And for all of his talk about follow the science science and his promise that he won't interfere with those of us who want to vaccinate his kids, the bottom line is the same.

Speaker 15 Kennedy can kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it. Kids might die, but Robert Kennedy can keep cashing in.

Speaker 13 So going into this hearing, one big question mark was, would there be questions that came out in the financial and ethical disclosures that were made public last week?

Speaker 13 Those disclosures did show that he has made many millions of dollars in lawsuits against drug makers. And this job oversees drug makers.
So that's a big, big question mark.

Speaker 13 But in particular, in the ethics disclosure, he said he would not divest himself from ongoing lawsuits against Merck for its HPV vaccine that prevents cervical cancer.

Speaker 13 And so Senator Warren was really trying to dig into: would he commit there in the hearing to not profit off of a lawsuit against a drug maker that that he's regulating.

Speaker 13 And he would not affirmatively answer that he would divest.

Speaker 10 One other thing I want to get into about something that Kennedy said in that exchange, and I want both of you to hop in here because he said, I support vaccines. I will support the childhood schedule.

Speaker 10 The only thing I want is good science.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so implicitly he's saying the science that has been done is not good.

Speaker 13 He's disparaging the federal regulators and the scientists who have worked to create these products and to recommend them them on these schedules to try to make the population healthier.

Speaker 11 I also think some Republicans on the committee hearing tried to help him do defense in that regard.

Speaker 11 There was kind of a telling exchange between Kennedy and Tom Tillis, who's a Republican senator from North Carolina, where he just says to him, Are you a conspiracy theorist?

Speaker 11 Because that is something that Kennedy has been accused of in the course of his career. And Kennedy said something to the effect of like, people just don't want me asking the tough questions.

Speaker 11 And look, this, as Selena knows, as we all know, like this sense that you could no longer trust science, I think is something that was very much born out of the cultural divisions of the COVID pandemic.

Speaker 11 But I would say on the right in particular, I think it has fueled an extreme skepticism in the scientific agencies of the United States government.

Speaker 11 And that is the sort of broader political climate that I think is really important to understanding why someone who questions those entities would be very appealing to the Trump administration.

Speaker 10 All right, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment.

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Speaker 10 And we're back. RFK Jr.
has gotten some pushback from Republicans on his prior stances in support of abortion rights, but that also came up from Democrats today.

Speaker 10 Here's New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan.

Speaker 21 So, Mr. Kennedy, I'm confused.
You have clearly stated in the past that bodily autonomy is one of your core values. The question is: do you stand for that value or not?

Speaker 21 When was it that you decided to sell out the values you've had your whole life in order to be given power by President Trump?

Speaker 10 Let's get into that. So there are a couple of things as we were talking about earlier, you know, where Kennedy has shifted, changed, flip-flopped on some of his stances.

Speaker 10 So, Sue, where exactly does Kennedy stand on abortion?

Speaker 11 I thought this was some of the most interesting exchanges today because Kennedy, for most of his life and career, has supported abortion rights.

Speaker 11 And it's not even entirely clear to me that he no longer supports abortion rights.

Speaker 11 He just emphatically and repeatedly kept making the point that he supports Donald Trump's position on abortion rights. And this is how he responded in that exchange with Hassan.

Speaker 14 Senator, I agree with President Trump that every abortion is a tragedy.

Speaker 11 And that's really the most important thing is what I think he was signaling mainly to the Republican senators here because they're the votes that really matter is that he's not going to do anything to contradict whatever the Trump White House position is going to be on abortion policies.

Speaker 11 And frankly, we don't entirely know where Donald Trump is going to maneuver in that space over the next four years.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I would agree with that. In terms of domestically, what moves the Trump administration is going to make to restrict access to abortion is a really big question.

Speaker 13 And who is in charge at HHS plays pretty directly into what those policies look like and what restrictions might look like around the country.

Speaker 13 There's a lot of different levers that could be pulled from HHS that could affect abortion access nationally.

Speaker 11 And one thing I think that we're all watching for is that he was asked some questions about mifopristone, which is the the abortion-inducing drug that can currently be delivered in the mail.

Speaker 11 And there has been certainly been pushes among conservatives to try to restrict mail access to the drug, particularly in states that have essentially outlawed abortion access.

Speaker 11 And there's going to be a lot of pressure on the Trump administration to do that, to do it through rulemaking authority.

Speaker 11 And to Selena's point, if they were to attempt that, Kennedy would be a really central figure in a decision like that.

Speaker 11 Today, the way I heard him, he did not seem to indicate that that was an issue in which he would seek to oppose the president's wishes.

Speaker 10 Selena, I want to shift for just a second because the Affordable Care Act was also brought up today. Kennedy said that, you know, this is something that isn't working for Americans.

Speaker 10 He specifically said a majority of Americans don't want the Affordable Care Act and prefer private insurance. That's not true, though.

Speaker 13 There were a couple really confusing exchanges when it comes to health policy. The Affordable Care Act marketplaces are private insurance.

Speaker 13 Like, that's what you're buying when you go to the Obamacarehealthcare.gov, like those marketplaces, that's what that is. And favorability has never been higher for the Affordable Care Act.

Speaker 13 This is a very well-established law. The marketplaces now have 24 million people enrolled in them.
It doubled in the four years of the Biden administration. There are lots of options.

Speaker 13 Plans are affordable. People are happy with the Affordable Care Act right now.

Speaker 11 He also suggested at times that Medicaid is also not a popular program. And that is also exponentially not true.
Medicaid is very popular amongst Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.

Speaker 11 It is the program that serves the poor. It is the program that delivers a whole heck of a lot of babies in this country.

Speaker 11 And as every family with a special needs kid knows, Medicaid covers much of the care and costs associated with kids that need extra medical help.

Speaker 11 So I think Medicaid is one of those third rails of American politics where you start suggesting it needs to be overhauled or that it's not very popular. A lot of Americans' ears perk up.

Speaker 11 And I think that that is one of the most interesting and politically perilous paths ahead for the Republican Party as in which they openly discuss cutting programs like Medicaid in order to pay for things like tax cuts.

Speaker 11 And I think this is particularly interesting now as the Republican Party increasingly, the growth within the party is coming from people who are much more reliant on government programs, who have a much more direct connection to a lot of these social safety net programs.

Speaker 11 And they're still operating with a sort of old school conservative ethos that they all need to be sort of reduced down and paired back and that it runs kind of counter to who their party is and who they represent now.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 10 I want to try to like patch together like some of the takeaways we've all had from watching this hearing today. And that's really kind of a hard task, but I'm going to try.

Speaker 10 And I feel like one of the things is that, you know, as we've pointed out over and over again, like this is such a vast and huge department that oversees so much of what touches our health care, some things that don't even really directly touch our health care.

Speaker 10 But, you know, something that Kennedy kept talking about was, you know, people are not healthy. Kids are not healthy in this country.

Speaker 10 He kept talking about a lot of things like SNAP, things to do with school lunches, so nutrition. But Selena, not all of that would even live under his purview if he were confirmed.

Speaker 13 No, those two programs, SNAP, which used to be known as food stamps, and the school lunch program, are under USDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, not under HHS.

Speaker 13 But to your point, HHS, there's plenty there. Like so much.

Speaker 13 My favorite fun fact about HHS is that its annual budget is $1.7 trillion,

Speaker 13 which is the GDP of Australia.

Speaker 10 So tiny.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it's so big and vast. He mentioned a couple of times 90,000 people work for HHS.

Speaker 13 And just to give people a sense for the work that's happening in the health agencies, people have heard of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevent. That's under HHS.
Food and Drug Administration.

Speaker 13 That's under HHS. NIH, Basic Science Research.
The NIH is the biggest funder of biomedical research in the world. That's under HHS.

Speaker 13 And it was interesting to me that some of the core issues he seemed to be passionate about were for programs that he would not have jurisdiction over.

Speaker 13 And when he was talking about Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, those things that are very much under HHS.

Speaker 10 And so, Sue, the big question going forward is, does he have enough votes to get confirmed?

Speaker 11 I mean, it certainly seems more likely than not.

Speaker 11 The questioning from Republicans today was pretty friendly. I think the handful of Republican senators people are watching to see how they vote are people like Bill Cassidy.

Speaker 11 He's a Republican from Louisiana. He was one of the Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump.
He's been a bit of an independent-minded senator.

Speaker 11 He's also a doctor and deeply aware of all of those jurisdictions of HHS that matter.

Speaker 11 Maybe, you know, the senators that voted against Pete Hegseth's defense nomination, people like Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Speaker 11 But the politics right now just don't really lend itself to handing Trump Trump a big defeat within the party. Like he's popular, there's a lot of energy around it.

Speaker 11 I think the bigger question too was also, would any Democrats support RFK Jr.?

Speaker 11 Because look, like a lot of the advocacy of his lifetime did align with a lot of values of the Democratic Party, particularly on environmental issues. I didn't hear that today.

Speaker 11 I think one of the senators, Bernie Sanders, independent from Vermont, who has aligned with RFK Jr. in the past on certain issues, he seemed very skeptical.

Speaker 11 He did not sound like a yes vote to me today. So I think it's likely he is confirmed.
It seems almost certainly to be on a likely party line vote.

Speaker 11 His performance, just speaking strictly through the political lens, not the policy one, he did a very good job today. He was pugnacious and direct with Democrats.

Speaker 11 He responded very well with Republicans. And the bottom line, this game is not about winning over the opposition party.
It's about keeping Republicans unified behind you.

Speaker 11 And I think he probably succeeded in that today.

Speaker 10 All right, we're going to leave it there for today. Selena, thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me. I'm Diva Shivaram.
I cover the White House.

Speaker 11 I'm Susan Davis.

Speaker 10 I cover politics. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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