The American voters bought a ticket to a second Trump administration, but the ride that will be the Department of Health and Human Services might just be a bit crazy, if not downright dangerous.
While President-elect Donald Trump did not seem to follow Project 2025’s recommendations for HHS, the American people should be no less afraid of how the second Trump administration might affect their health outcomes.
Back in August, I concluded that if the Trump administration followed the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations, the United States would likely have less healthy outcomes. I wrote: “Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services does little to address the health challenges to Americans nor does it advance our collective well-being.”
There is a wide chasm between Project 2025’s vision for HHS and Trump’s nominee for secretary of that department. My prediction after reading Project 2025 last year does not even come close to the future that Americans may experience if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed by the Senate.
The Heritage Foundation, which assembled Project 2025, is a conservative think tank and its proposals were predictably right of center. It had five goals for the next “conservative” president when it comes to health care leadership: Protecting Life, Conscience, and Bodily Integrity; Empowering Patient Choices and Provider Autonomy; Promoting Stable and Flourishing Married Families; Preparing for the Next Health Emergency; and Instituting Greater Transparency, Accountability, and Oversight.
Almost a quarter of Project 2025's 54-page chapter on HHS prioritized an anti-abortion agenda as well as recommending traditional family values. Kennedy, Trump’s pick to head the department, has been married three times and favors abortion rights.
The mission of HHS is “to enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.”
Going by this mission statement alone, Kennedy is wholly unqualified to run the department due to his long history of believing and spewing conspiracy theories when it comes to matters of health.
Here is a list of just a few of the health-related conspiracies that Kennedy has publicly endorsed:
- Kennedy has falsely linked vaccines to autism, saying of vaccines: "This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”
- He claimed HIV does not cause AIDS.
- He suggested that the Covid-19 pandemic may have been a “plandemic” and that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
- Kennedy accused the government of using 5G networks to “control our behavior” and he claims that WiFi is making us unhealthy.
- He has expressed the belief in the existence of “chemtrails,” insisting that the water vapor trails that some planes leave in the sky are geoengineering projects, run by the Department of Defense or our intelligence agencies.
- He said the Food and Drug Administration is waging a “war on public health.”
While Kennedy is committed to combating the causes of chronic disease, childhood illnesses and obesity, which should be lauded, his “Make America Healthy Again” methods are questionable at best in their scientific foundations — and potentially dangerous to the health and safety of the American public.
One example is Kennedy's call to remove fluoride from tap water and increase access to raw milk. There are reasons that we added fluoride to our water in 1950 and why milk is pasteurized — reasons Kennedy doesn’t take into account.
Neil Maniar, director of Northeastern University’s Master of Public Health Program and professor of practice in public health, says fluoridation of water was “one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century.” Maniar says the introduction of fluoride into drinking water has reduced cavities by 25 percent.
The American Dental Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to support water fluoridation. The AAP’s Campaign for Dental Health refutes Kennedy’s accusation that fluoride causes cancer and kidney disease, stating “there is no scientifically valid evidence” to support Kennedy’s claims that fluoride causes cancer and kidney disease.
Raw milk is unsafe to consume as it may contain harmful and dangerous bacteria, such as Campylobacter, salmonella, E. coli and listeria. The FDA and CDC have strongly advised against consuming it.
Of course, the president-elect has the full authority to nominate anyone he wishes to Cabinet posts but ultimately it will be up to the Senate to determine if Kennedy is confirmed as the HHS secretary.
The irony is that Trump has rejected most of Project 2025’s HHS proposals with his pick of Kennedy, but the choice of Kennedy as the top protector of Americans' health might be even worse.
Read the complete collection of Fulcrum articles on Project 2025.
Schmidt, a columnist and editorial board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, holds a degree in nursing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.