How RFK Jr. is quickly changing U.S. health agencies

WASHINGTON — In just a few short months, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

WASHINGTON — In just a few short months, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has begun to transform U.S. health policy: shrinking staff at health agencies, restructuring the focus of some regulators and researchers, changing Covid vaccine regulations and reshaping the mission of his department to focus more on alternative medicine.

The directives are all part of the same issue set that drove a slice of health-conscious, left-leaning Americans to eventually vote for a Republican president whose favorite meal is from McDonald’s, Trump and Kennedy catered to a type of voter who has grown distrustful of America’s health care establishment — but possibly fomented a new type of distrust in federal health policy along the way.

Bernadine Francis, a lifelong Democrat who backed Joe Biden for president in 2020 before supporting Donald Trump in 2024, told NBC News in an interview that she approves of Kennedy’s efforts so far, despite his “hands being tied” by entrenched forces in the administration and in Congress.

“From what I have seen so far with what RFK has been trying to do,” she said, “I am really, really proud of what he’s doing.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Capitol Hill on May 14.Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images fileFrancis is among the voters who left the Democratic Party and voted for Trump because “nothing else mattered” apart from public health, which they — like Kennedy — felt was going in the wrong direction.