RFK Jr. Wants to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ — Here’s What That Means

On Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump announced he selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as his secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

“The safety and health of all Americans is the most important role of any administration, and HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming health crisis in this country,” Trump shared in a post to X (formerly Twitter). “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!”

But what, exactly, does any of this mean? Here’s what you need to know. 

First, here’s what the Department of Health and Human Services does in the first place

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is a sprawling federal agency whose mission 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.” 

The HHS oversees 11 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), whose job is to regulate “clinical investigations of products under its jurisdiction, such as drugs, biological products, and medical devices.” The HSS also oversees any public health threats through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and supports medical research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

The HHS also enforces health-related laws, coordinates responses to emergencies like pandemics, and oversees the operation of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Medicaid. 

What has RFK said about the department in the past?

Kennedy has been a sharp critic of federal health agencies. In October, he tweeted that the “FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.” 

Kennedy has argued that the CDC and FDA are too closely aligned with the pharmaceutical and food industries, leading to what he describes as compromised policies. 

Kennedy has also long been a vocal and prolific critic of vaccines, stating that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” which flies in the face of decades of science on the efficacy of vaccines, adding that he believes the FDA to have too close of a relationship with drug manufacturers over vaccines. Del Bigtree, the former director of communications for Kennedy’s election campaign, told Reuters he expects that Kennedy will be looking into every FDA employee’s ties to the pharmaceutical industry. “You’re going to see a vetting process of, how do the people have the jobs here? What were their conflicts of interest,” Bigtree said. “You’re going to watch a transparency that should have happened … and it’s all going to be made public.” 

And, as CNN reported, while Kennedy remarked he would “immediately” begin studying vaccine safety and efficacy, he stated that he would not “take vaccines away from anybody.” 

Kennedy noted in an additional statement Thursday, “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.” 

What has RFK said are his major goals?

As Kennedy outlined in the tweet above and in his key policy positions on the homepage of the Make America Healthy Again website, he has a laundry list of things he’d want to address. Here’s a quick breakdown of the ones specifically targeting food and beverages in the U.S. 

Public water

Kennedy also committed to formally recommending states and municipalities remove fluoride from public water. “We don’t need fluoride in our water,” Kennedy shared on NPR’s Morning Edition. “It’s a very bad way to deliver it into our systems.” And while adding fluoride to water was long heralded for improving dental health in Americans, it appears the National Toxicology Department, which sits under the HHS, agrees with Kennedy — at least in part — already. “Since 1945, the use of fluoride has been a successful public health initiative for reducing dental cavities and improving general oral health of adults and children,” it explained on its website.

There is a concern, however, that some pregnant women and children may be getting more fluoride than they need because they now get fluoride from many sources, including treated public water, water-added foods and beverages, teas, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, and the combined total intake of fluoride may exceed safe amounts.” So, in 2015, the U.S. Public Health Service recommended fluoridation in water be lowered to 0.7 milligrams per liter nationwide.

However, it’s critical to note that the federal government isn’t in charge of this — local municipalities are. But, as Kennedy additionally told NBC following the presidential election, “I think fluoride is on its way out … I’m not going to compel anybody to take it out, but I’m going to advise the water districts. I’m going to give them good information about the science, and I think fluoride will disappear.”

Nutrition departments

Kennedy shared in an interview with NBC that he would cut workers in “the nutrition departments” at the FDA, adding they have “to go. They’re not doing their job. They’re not protecting our kids.”

Food additives

“We are betraying our children by letting these industries poison them,” Kennedy said at a campaign rally in November about the processed food industry. As the New York Times reported, Kennedy has specifically called out Froot Loops for having artificial ingredients and highlighting how the company’s Canadian version has fewer than the U.S. version — with Canada’s version made with natural colorings from blueberries and carrots and the U.S. product containing red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1, along with Butylated hydroxytoluene. It’s a position that appears to have bipartisan support. In 2023, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill banning four food additives: Red dye No. 3, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil, and Propylparaben, with the ban beginning in 2027. This stance also has support from food policy experts and medical professionals. 

“The idea of reducing unhealthy and ultra-processed foods is a really good idea,” Dr. Federica Amati, an Association for Nutrition accredited nutritionist, a visiting research fellow at King’s College London, and lead nutritionist at Zoe, shared with Food & Wine. However, as Amati added, “I think blanket statements about getting chemicals out of food is not a helpful narrative in general. I think flipping that over and saying, ‘make the majority of your diet from whole foods,’ which is a very well-established public health recommendation, tackles this problem of chemicals — but without actually pointing fingers at things that we’re not sure about.” 

Amati noted one other tip for not just Kennedy but for all of us: “Learn how to cook. If you don’t know how it’s a solid investment in your health.” 

Environmental toxins

The front page of the MAHA website reads, “One of MAHA’s top priorities is the elimination of harmful chemicals and toxins from America’s food, water, and air. MAHA advocates for comprehensive testing and monitoring of environmental toxins to ensure that all Americans have access to clean, safe, and healthy living conditions.” Considering the vast number of studies showcasing the dangers of pesticides, that may be a good thing. The only problem is, that’s all the information we’ve got on his plans. He hasn’t shared which chemicals, exactly, he’d go after and how. 

Farms

To go with this environmental toxins discussion, Kennedy has also stated he’s looking to overhaul farming in the U.S., including removing some crop subsidies. “They make corn, soybeans, and wheat artificially cheap, so those crops end up in many processed forms,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Soybean oil in the 1990s became a major source of American calories, and high-fructose corn syrup is everywhere. Our subsidy program is so backward that less than 2% of farm subsidies go to fruits and vegetables.”

“America’s current ag policy is destroying America’s health on every level,” he added in a video message. “It destroys the health of America’s soil and water by tilting the playing field in favor of more chemicals, more herbicides, more insecticides, more concentrated mono-crops and feedlots, and finally, it destroys the health of consumers.” The answer, he added, is to “encourage sustainable, regenerative farming … ban the worst agricultural chemicals,” and to produce more “natural, unprocessed foods.” 

However, this, Dana O’Brien, a biotechnology consultant, shared in an essay on Agri-Pulse, would mean a “wholesale change in politics and farm policy. It represents a significant elevation of anti-technology thinking by a major party candidate for president of the United States and must be reconciled with the support many farm organizations are giving to the Trump campaign.” He added, “The reality of what is happening is extremely dangerous for farmers, for rural communities, and for American innovation.” 

SNAP programming

It appears Kennedy also wants to reshape the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is utilized by more than 40 million people in the U.S. Kennedy wrote in the Wall Street Journal he wants to “Stop allowing beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to use their food stamps to buy soda or processed foods. Nine percent of all SNAP funding goes to sweetened drinks, according to 2011 data. It’s nonsensical for U.S. taxpayers to spend tens of billions of dollars subsidizing junk that harms the health of low-income Americans.”

Will any of RFK’s plans actually happen?

This is all a huge … maybe. For starters, he has to get confirmed. And even if he does, his wish list depends on the future political dynamics, scientific feasibility, funding, and the public appetite for any of these changes. 

As Reuters noted, his promises would require the new “Trump administration to strip federal employees of protections against arbitrary firing put in place by lawmakers.” However, some 18,000 FDA staffers don’t even rely on funding from Congress. The 18,000 FDA staff are further shielded because their salaries are not exclusively funded by Congress, with nearly 50% of the agency’s budget coming from “user fees,” which Reuters explained are payments made by pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers to fund the staff resources needed to review their products. The FDA noted that these feeds do not compromise “the agency’s commitment to scientific integrity, public health, regulatory standards, patient safety, and transparency.”  

Additionally, as Dan Troy, former chief counsel at the FDA under Republican President George W. Bush’s first administration, shared with Reuters, even if Kennedy were able to fire a large number of staffers, “who are you going to put in place? Who has the technical expertise to write these rules that are going to really change the paradigm?”

Even if he does fire all those FDA employees and replace them, he still likely won’t hit Trump’s “mandate.”

“Trump gave him a mandate to reduce chronic diseases in two years. That’s impossible,” Dawn Matusz, a part-time instructor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas’ nutrition program and also a doctoral candidate in UNLV’s Doctor of Public Policy program, said. “That is an impossible undertaking. Maybe his inevitable failure of that will start to make people realize that health doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Nutrition doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Public policy does not exist in a vacuum.” As Matusz added, you can have two people with the exact same disease, like type two diabetes, who are the same age, same height, and same weight. “You could give metformin to one person, and it would completely bring their blood sugar levels back down to normal range. You could give metformin to the other person, and it won’t make a dent.” Health, Matusz says, is very “individualized, and people don’t realize that.” 

Matusz did note, “I think they have good intentions. They’re just going about it the wrong way.”