Physician lawmakers take part in examining Kennedy and HHS 2026 budget

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions on May 14, 2025.
_{© Senate HELP Committee}

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent the day in hearings with the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP).

Physicians in Congress had a chance to inquire of Kennedy on May 14 in the Senate HELP Committee and, earlier in the day, the House Appropriations Committee. The White House has published a budget request with approximately $93.8 billion for HHS, down 26.2% from the fiscal year 2025 budget. The hearings, combined lasting almost five hours, at times were congenial and confrontational, depending on the focus of the questioner, and covered a wide range of medicine, health care and research.

Doing more with less

Kennedy outlined the administration’s priorities for American health.

“Debilitating disease, contaminated food, toxic environments, addiction and Mental Illness affect Americans across every race, class and political belief,” Kennedy said to the Senate committee. “When my team and I took the helm at HHS, we set out with clear goals. First, we aim to make America healthy again, with a special focus on the chronic disease epidemic. Second, we committed to delivering more efficient, responsive and effective service to over 100 million Americans who rely on Medicare, Medicaid and other programs. Third, we focus on achieving these goals by cutting costs for taxpayers, and intend to do more, a lot more, with less.”

In both hearings, protestors began shouting down Kennedy and were escorted out by police. In the Senate hearing, a shout of “RFK kills people with AIDS,” was audible over the webcast.

“The budget I'm presenting today supports those calls and reflects two enduring American values, compassion and responsibility,” Kennedy said. He asked for a discretionary budget of $94 billion to support the new Administration for a Healthy America with programs ranging from fighting the opioid epidemic to removing harmful chemicals from foods to ending research on gain of function in microbes and radical gender ideologies.

Fear of change

Senate HELP Committee Chair Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD (R-Louisiana) noted change is coming and that has sparked some fears about the direction of HHS.

“Now, people instinctively fear change, even when it’s from worse to better,” Cassidy said. “But without a clearly defined plan or objective, people will assume the worst.

“Much of the conversation around HHS’ agenda has been set by anonymous sources in the media and individuals with a bias against the president,” he said. Americans need direct reassurance from the administration and from Kennedy that reforms will make their lives easier, not harder, and no one was better situated to explain that than Kennedy, Cassidy said.

“There are questions about how HHS will be able to preserve its primary functions and duties under this proposed budget,” he said. “Many offices and programs potentially seeing changes are essential for implementing bipartisan laws, including laws championed by President Trump.”

HHS needs reform to eliminate bureaucratic bloat and regulatory hurdles that make it harder to deliver critical services.

“We need to make HHS work better for the American people,” Cassidy said. “That means finding ways to speed up approvals for lifesaving drugs, improving delivery of health care services so Americans who need these benefits can receive them, addressing high levels of chronic disease, and holding bad actors accountable to lower health care costs for American workers.”

Better studies and science

Sen. Rand Paul, MD (R-Kentucky), commended the budget proposal that proposes less spending. He cited the National Institutes of Health and other grant-making organizations for getting the same amounts of money and then making the same frivolous grants. Some of his examples:

• $660,000 to study the impact of microaggressions in eating disorders in Latinx Americans
• $419,000 to study whether lonely rats seek cocaine more than happy rats. “Maybe we can eliminate that and that can go to a real disease,” he said.
• $620,000 for a LGBTQ+ pregnancy prevention program for transgender boys.

“And what they discovered was, the girls who think they are boys are at least as likely to get pregnant as girls who think they are girls,” Paul said. “Amazing, the science. But we should all agree that’s just left-wing ideology. That’s not science. We should study obesity and cancer and diabetes. I commend you for shifting the balance.”

Paul asked about a safety breach at Fort Detrick, an integrated research facility and hub of virus research, and gain of function research and experiments involving germs such as Ebola, avian flu and Marburg virus. Kennedy said it is under investigation and the administration would be “absolutely transparent” and would differentiate between legitimate scientific investigation and potentially dangers gain of function research. Law enforcement and defense agencies within the federal government “have all agreed that NIH research almost certainly led to the pandemic, the COVID pandemic, so that’s not the kind of the result that we should be allowing or enabling and we’re going to end that now,” Kennedy said.

Measles vaccine safety

Sen Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) grilled Kennedy over his confirmation hearing statements about vaccine effectiveness and safety. Kennedy cancelled $12 billion in public health grants that states used to administer and dispense information about vaccines, the senator said.

“You also said, specific to the measles vaccine, that you support the measles vaccine, but you have consistently been undermining the measles vaccine,” Murphy said. “You told the public that the vaccine wanes very quickly. You went on the Dr. Phil show and said that the measles vaccine was never fully tested for safety. You said there’s fetal debris in the measles vaccine.”

“All true, all true,” Kennedy said. They argued over the point and Kennedy said Murphy did not know what he was talking about, while Murphy claimed Kennedy should acknowledge that when he constantly questions the vaccine, the result is that fewer people get vaccinated.

A physician’s perspective

Sen. Roger “Doc” Marshall, MD (R-Kansas), followed. “Let me catch my breath after that,” he said.

As an obstetrician, Marshall said he would advise a 25-year-old pregnant woman to not take the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, but would give different advice to a 25-year-old woman who was trying to get pregnant.

“I’ve always valued the sanctity of the physician-patient relationship,” Marshall said. After medical school, residency, and delivering thousands of babies, it is his job to give that recommendation, he said.

“What’s the role of the secretary of HHS as far as recommendations of vaccines?” Marshall said.

Kennedy discussed the roles of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee under the Food and Drug Administration. They adopted evidence-based medicine about 12 years ago he said.

“And what we’ve said during our administration is, we want to have safety studies prior to the licensure and recommendation of vaccines,” Kennedy said. “Vaccines are the only medical product that is exempt from pre-license safety testing.”

The only vaccine tested in a placebo trial was the COVID-19 vaccine. Other shots that children receive have not been safety tested that way, which means authorities do not understand the risk profiles for those products, Kennedy said, adding he intends to remedy that.

HHS restructuring

Marshall asked about the restructuring of HHS, noting when Kennedy was nominated, the department had 28 divisions, a hundred communication offices, 40 IT departments, nine human resources units. Along with those, Kennedy said there were nine separate offices on women’s health, eight offices for minority health, 27 separate offices related to HIV, and more.

“What we’re trying to do is consolidate, streamline, eliminate redundancies, eliminate all those administrative costs for each one of those … departments consolidate them and make them make sense and make them accountable to the American people,” Kennedy said. He specifically mentioned modern artificial intelligence and telemedicine as new opportunities to deliver health care to patients, but HHS is not taking advantage of those “because there’s so much chaos and disorganization in this department.”

“My department grew by 38 percent over the last four years,” Kennedy said. “I would say that’s great if Americans got healthier, but they didn’t, they got worse.”

Questions and answers

The question-and-answer periods generally went more smoothly with Republicans and more critically with Democrats. In the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) made lengthy statements about everything she thought is wrong during Kennedy’s tenure so far. She accused Kennedy and President Donald J. Trump of aiding and abetting China’s efforts to overtake the United States as the global leader of health research and innovation. In the Senate HELP Committee, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Maryland) said Kennedy was the wrong person for the job.

HELP Committee Ranking Member Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) agreed with Kennedy that the American health care system is broken, expensive and dysfunctional. But in the administration, Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk, the richest person on earth, has led efforts to cut health and nutrition programs for the poorest people on earth, Sanders said.

With its wealth and purchasing power, the United States should have the best health care and the lowest prices for prescription drugs on earth, Sanders said. He and Kennedy agreed about the need to lower prices of prescription medicines for patients.