Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

RFK Jr. as secretary of HHS is a departure from Project 2025

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaking while Donald Trump looks on

President-election Donald Trump tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

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.

Read More

Yes, They Are Trying To Kill Us
Provided

Yes, They Are Trying To Kill Us

In the rush to “dismantle the administrative state,” some insist that freeing people from “burdensome bureaucracy” will unleash thriving. Will it? Let’s look together.

A century ago, bureaucracy was minimal. The 1920s followed a worldwide pandemic that killed an estimated 17.4–50 million people. While the virus spread, the Great War raged; we can still picture the dehumanizing use of mustard gas and trench warfare. When the war ended, the Roaring Twenties erupted as an antidote to grief. Despite Prohibition, life was a party—until the crash of 1929. The 1930s opened with a global depression, record joblessness, homelessness, and hunger. Despair spread faster than the pandemic had.

Keep ReadingShow less
Millions Could Lose Housing Aid Under Trump Plan

Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: Chicago History Museum and eobrazy

Getty Images

Millions Could Lose Housing Aid Under Trump Plan

Some 4 million people could lose federal housing assistance under new plans from the Trump administration, according to experts who reviewed drafts of two unpublished rules obtained by ProPublica. The rules would pave the way for a host of restrictions long sought by conservatives, including time limits on living in public housing, work requirements for many people receiving federal housing assistance and the stripping of aid from entire families if one member of the household is in the country illegally.

The first Trump administration tried and failed to implement similar policies, and renewed efforts have been in the works since early in the president’s second term. Now, the documents obtained by ProPublica lay out how the administration intends to overhaul major housing programs that serve some of the nation’s poorest residents, with sweeping reforms that experts and advocates warn will weaken the social safety net amid historically high rents, home prices and homelessness.

Keep ReadingShow less
Trump’s Ultimatums and the Erosion of Presidential Credibility

Donald Trump

YouTube

Trump’s Ultimatums and the Erosion of Presidential Credibility

On Friday, October 3rd, President Donald Trump issued a dramatic ultimatum on Truth Social, stating this is the “LAST CHANCE” for Hamas to accept a 20-point peace proposal backed by Israel and several Arab nations. The deadline, set for Sunday at 6:00 p.m. EDT, was framed as a final opportunity to avoid catastrophic consequences. Trump warned that if Hamas rejected the deal, “all HELL, like no one has ever seen before, will break out against Hamas,” and that its fighters would be “hunted down and killed.”

Ordinarily, when a president sets a deadline, the world takes him seriously. In history, Presidential deadlines signal resolve, seriousness, and the weight of executive authority. But with Trump, the pattern is different. His history of issuing ultimatums and then quietly backing off has dulled the edge of his threats and raised questions about their strategic value.

Keep ReadingShow less
From Fragility to Resilience: Fixing America’s Economic and Political Fault Lines

fractured foundation and US flag

AI generated

From Fragility to Resilience: Fixing America’s Economic and Political Fault Lines

This series began with a simple but urgent question: What’s gone wrong with America’s economic policies, and how can we begin to fix them? The story so far has revealed not only financial instability but also deeper structural weaknesses that leave families, small businesses, and entire communities far more vulnerable than they should be.

In the first two articles, “Running on Empty” and “Crash Course,” we examined how middle-class families, small businesses, and retirees are increasingly caught in a web of debt and financial uncertainty. We also examined how Wall Street’s speculative excesses, deregulation, and shadow banking have pushed the financial system to the brink. Finally, we warned that Donald Trump’s economic agenda doesn’t address these problems—it magnifies them. Together, these earlier articles painted a picture of a system skating on thin ice, where even small shocks could trigger widespread crisis.

Keep ReadingShow less