President-elect Trump’s decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a divisive skeptic of vaccines and purveyor of misinformation, to lead the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services has raised alarm among academics.
If the U.S. Senate confirms Kennedy, he’ll oversee numerous federal agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health—the largest source of federal research funding for universities, which received more than $30 billion from the HHS in 2022.
“Over the edge. Down the rabbit hole. Completely insane,” Jeffrey Flier, a professor and former dean of Harvard Medical School, posted on X in response to Kennedy’s nomination. “Would not have believed this possible until right now. Completely independent of politics, this must be seen as unacceptable in 2024.”
Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, posted on X that because the HHS Secretary “shapes health policy in profound ways,” Kennedy is “an extraordinarily bad choice for the health of the American people.
“Our healthcare system is far from perfect,” wrote Jha, who also served as President Biden’s White House COVID-19 response coordinator. “But it has spurred so much progress that has benefited the American people. This appointment, if confirmed, puts all of that at risk.”
Among the many agencies Kennedy will oversee, he may first turn his attention to NIH, given his public comments on his plans to downsize the agency his first day in office.
At an event in Arizona just days before Trump picked him to lead the department, Kennedy said that, on Jan. 21, 600 people “are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave,” NPR reported. (Nearly 20,000 people work at NIH.)
Aside from the layoffs, Kennedy has said he wants to shift NIH’s focus away from infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, toward chronic diseases like obesity. Last November, according to NBC News, Kennedy told an anti-vaccine group, “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists ‘God bless you all. Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.’”
NBC News also reported that Kennedy, who has spread the discredited claim that vaccines cause autism, said he wanted to force medical journals to publish retracted studies.
“It’s just a jumble of grievances, some of which could have broad ideological support from a more populist agenda,” including things that aren’t “well-grounded in research like his opposition to vaccines,” said David Guston, a professor and founding director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. “It gives an opportunity for potentially strange coalitions to occur around a variety of reforms, some that could be research-based [and] others that could not be.”
Even if the Senate confirms Kennedy, he and other department heads “only have so much latitude in making change,” Guston said, noting that what really matters is how they communicate with the public.
“A more potentially damaging situation is the rhetoric and focal point RFK could provide for a more robust anti-vaccine movement to emerge even among more accepted childhood vaccines,” he said. “That’s going to be problematic vis-a-vis the public because the public is following things not through the peer-reviewed literature, but through the way they’re represented on X or other social media.”
Inside Higher Ed was unable to reach Kennedy for comment on Friday.
After Trump announced him as his pick to lead the HHS, Kennedy said on X: “We have a generational opportunity to bring together the greatest minds in science, medicine, industry and government to put an end to the chronic disease epidemic. I look forward to working with the more than 80,000 employees at HHS to free the agencies from the smothering cloud of corporate capture so they can pursue their mission to make Americans once again the healthiest people on Earth.”
Kennedy also wrote that he would work to “return our health agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science,” promising to provide Americans with “transparency and access to all the data so they can make informed choices for themselves and their families.”
Trump echoed Kennedy’s sentiments on Truth Social, his own social media network, saying, “Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
The president-elect has previously said he would let Kennedy go “wild on health.”
Jim Olds, a neuroscience and public policy professor at George Mason University who headed the Biological Sciences Directorate at the U.S. National Science Foundation from 2014-18 and previously worked in NIH’s intramural research program, told Inside Higher Ed that Kennedy’s public skepticism of water fluoridation and vaccines has him concerned.
“I’m hopeful that if RFK Jr. is confirmed,” Olds said, “his unusual views on vaccines won’t be the primary driver of what the [HHS] primarily does.”
Even though Kennedy’s public criticism of the department has been aimed at NIH, Medicare and Medicaid Services make up the majority of the HHS budget. It’s also unlikely that he will be able to influence NIH funding since final decisions must pass through Congressional appropriations committees which, during Trump’s first term, largely ignored the president’s calls to drastically cut research funding.
And just as the academic community’s deepest fears about the first Trump administration’s calls to reduce science funding didn’t come to pass, Olds said he “feels very confident” in NIH’s leadership. Between that and the powerful patient-interest lobby groups that back NIH, he predicted that the agency likely won’t experience the level of catastrophe some are predicting in Kennedy’s appointment.
He does not, however, rule out the possibility of Republicans making reforms to the agency. Earlier this year Republican lawmakers called for a restructuring of NIH in response to claims that it allegedly allowed dangerous experiments during the pandemic.
With Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, Olds said such proposals may “have legs.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some changes,” he said. “But change has never hurt the NIH. It’s been around a long time and undergone continuous evolution.”