COLIN: Hi. This is Colin (ph) from Orlando, Florida, and I’m removing the plant coverings that I draped over our tomatoes in the garden from last night’s freeze warning. This podcast was recorded at…
DEEPA SHIVARAM, HOST:
…12:44 p.m. on Wednesday, January 29, 2025.
COLIN: Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but hopefully, our family will be able to enjoy ripe tomatoes in February. OK, here’s the show.
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SHIVARAM: I heard some parts of Florida got, like, 10 inches of snow.
SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: Really?
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Not good for the tomatoes. I can tell you that.
SHIVARAM: Which is – yeah – nuts. And, like, praying for those tomatoes, ’cause that’s some good stuff.
Hey there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House.
DAVIS: I’m Susan Davis. I cover politics.
SHIVARAM: And friend of the podcast, Selena Simmons-Duffin, who covers health policy for NPR, joins us today. Hey, Selena.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Hi.
SHIVARAM: OK, so the highly anticipated confirmation hearing for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got started today on Capitol Hill. Kennedy has been tapped to be President Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary.
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ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: President Trump has promised to restore America’s global strength and to restore the American dream. But he understands we can’t be a strong nation when our people are so sick.
SHIVARAM: We should note that Kennedy has a condition that affects his voice. And with that, let’s get into it. There’s so much to talk about. Selena, I’m going to start with you. Just very basic stuff here. What is RFK’s background?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Well, his background is really in environmental advocacy and law. So he is an attorney by training, and for many decades, he focused on toxins and the environment. And then, a couple of decades ago, he kind of got into the anti-vax space. Although he was very clear today in the hearing that he is not anti-vaccine, really, he has made his reputation and his fortune sowing doubts about vaccines, pushing the thoroughly disproven link between vaccines and autism. So, you know, he had to kind of thread the needle today in describing how that as his background prepared him to run HHS, which is an enormous agency that oversees vaccine policy, among many other things.
SHIVARAM: Right.
DAVIS: You know, Kennedy is so interesting. I like that phrase you use, thread the needle, ’cause, to me, he’s also this unique figure in politics right now who sort of has threaded the needle between having alliances in very liberal places like Hollywood and also now very conservative MAGA-type spaces, where he’s a bit of a sort of celebrated figure at both the left and the right at various points of his life. And I think that’s part of the reason why Donald Trump picked him. And don’t forget, he was a lifelong Democrat. He became an independent. And then he endorsed Trump in a pretty public display of saying, I will endorse you if you give me a job in your administration, which he was then delivered.
And in his opening remarks today, he did invoke the Kennedy family, obviously one of the most famous political families in American history, invoking both his father, obviously Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy. But I do also think it’s worth noting that several high-profile members of his own family are trying to undermine this nomination. Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of former President Kennedy, released a letter that she sent to senators outlining her opposition to him, calling him a, quote, “predator” and accusing him of any number of sordid and inhumane things and saying that the Senate should not confirm him. So I think everyone was prepared for it to be pretty contentious.
SHIVARAM: Yeah, and we should point out that he also ran for president and, like, there was that stint of his political career as well, where there was a lot of family pushback at that time, too. But given, you know, the context of what he’s done with his career, Selena, what was his pitch to why he should have this job?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Yeah. He really tried to portray himself as an outside-the-box thinker, somebody with fresh ideas who wasn’t afraid to stand up to, like, Big Pharma and Big Food and all of these big industries – basically, that he would speak truth to power. He’s emphasized transparency a lot.
SHIVARAM: Yeah.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: And he also portrayed himself as somebody who would execute on what President Trump wants. He really hewed close to President Trump, mentioned his name a lot, and really tried to portray himself as somebody who was going to come in and, you know, execute on this vision to reshape health.
SHIVARAM: No, and that, you know, goes to the point of how vast HHS is. Like, we are talking about so many things – vaccines, like you pointed out. We’re talking about things like abortion. We’re talking about Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act. There’s so much to get into. And with that, I mean, Sue, this was one of the hearings that, you know, had the potential to be pretty controversial, pretty contentious.
As we’ve been talking about, you know, he is one of the more high-profile picks for Trump’s cabinet. And, you know, there were supporters of Kennedy and protesters in the room today. How did you see it unfolding? I mean, what was the reactions from folks in the room, but also from the senators who were questioning Kennedy?
DAVIS: There’s been a bit of a curiosity in several of these confirmation hearings for Trump nominees in which they seem to come with cheering sections, that there’s been some public celebrating and applause. He was also interrupted a couple of times by protesters, but I don’t think that the protesters were overwhelming or derailing it in any way.
But you’re right. I think it was very clear that Democrats were going to go in and be very contentious towards him on the vaccine issue, which I think has been very widely documented – his, at best, contradictory history of supporting or opposing vaccines and questioning the science around them. One exchange that I think stood out was Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who really went several rounds with him over how he might personally benefit from his past advocacy.
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ELIZABETH WARREN: And I’m asking you to commit right now that you will not take a financial stake in every one of those lawsuits so that what you do as secretary will also benefit you financially down the line.
KENNEDY: I’ll comply with all the ethical guidelines.
WARREN: That’s not the question. You and I – you have said repeatedly…
KENNEDY: You’re asking me – Senator, you’re asking me not to sue vaccine – pharmaceutical companies.
WARREN: No, I am not. My question is…
KENNEDY: Yeah, you are.
WARREN: …Stop enriching…
KENNEDY: That’s exactly what you’re doing.
WARREN: No. Look; no one should be fooled here.
KENNEDY: I have fought from…
WARREN: As secretary of HHS, Robert Kennedy will have the power to undercut vaccines and vaccine manufacturing across our country. And for all of his talk about follow the science and his promise that he won’t interfere with those of us who want to vaccinate his kids, the bottom line is the same. Kennedy can kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it. Kids might die, but Robert Kennedy can keep cashing in.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: So going into this hearing, one big question mark was, would there be questions that came out in the financial and ethical disclosures that were made public last week? Those disclosures did show that he has made many millions of dollars in lawsuits against drugmakers, and this job oversees drugmakers. So that’s a big question mark. But in particular, in the ethics disclosure, he said he would not divest himself from ongoing lawsuits against Merck for its HPV vaccine that prevents cervical cancer. And so Senator Warren was really trying to dig into, like, would he commit there in the hearing to not profit off of a lawsuit against a drugmaker that he’s regulating.
SHIVARAM: Yeah.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: And he would not affirmatively answer that he would divest.
SHIVARAM: One other thing I want to get into about something that Kennedy said in that exchange – and I want both of you to hop in here – because he said, I support vaccines. I will support the childhood schedule. The only thing I want is good science.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Yeah. So implicitly, he’s saying the science that has been done is not good. He’s disparaging the federal regulators and the scientists who have worked to create these products and to recommend them on these schedules to try to make the population healthier.
DAVIS: I also think some Republicans on the committee hearing tried to help him do defense in that regard. There was kind of a telling exchange between Kennedy and Thom Tillis, who’s a Republican senator from North Carolina, where he just says to him, are you a conspiracy theorist? Because that is something that Kennedy has been accused of in the course of his career. And Kennedy said something to the effect of, like, people just don’t want me asking the tough questions.
And look; this, as Selena knows, as we all know, like, this sense that you could no longer trust science, I think, is something that was very much borne out of the cultural divisions of the COVID pandemic. But I would say on the right, in particular, I think it has fueled an extreme skepticism in the scientific agencies of the United States government, and that is the sort of broader political climate that I think is really important to understanding why someone who questions those entities would be very appealing to the Trump administration.
SHIVARAM: All right. We’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be back in a moment.
And we’re back. RFK Jr. has gotten some pushback from Republicans on his prior stances in support of abortion rights, but that also came up from Democrats today. Here’s New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan.
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MAGGIE HASSAN: So, Mr. Kennedy, I’m confused. You have clearly stated in the past that bodily autonomy is one of your core values. The question is, do you stand for that value or not? When was it that you decided to sell out the values you’ve had your whole life in order to be given power by President Trump?
SHIVARAM: Let’s get into that. So there are a couple of things as we were talking about earlier, you know, where Kennedy has shifted, changed, flip-flopped on some of his stances. So, Sue, where exactly does Kennedy stand on abortion?
DAVIS: I thought this was some of the most interesting exchanges today because Kennedy, for most of his life and career, has supported abortion rights. And it’s not even entirely clear to me that he no longer supports abortion rights. He just emphatically and repeatedly kept making the point that he supports Donald Trump’s position on abortion rights. And this is how he responded in that exchange with Hassan.
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KENNEDY: Senator, I agree with President Trump that every abortion is a tragedy.
DAVIS: And that’s really the most important thing – is what I think he was signaling, mainly to the Republican senators here because they’re the votes that really matter, is that he’s not going to do anything to contradict whatever the Trump White House position is going to be on abortion policies. And frankly, we don’t entirely know where Donald Trump is going to maneuver in that space over the next four years.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Yeah, I would agree with that. In terms of domestically, what moves the Trump administration is going to make to restrict access to abortion is a really big question. And who is in charge at HHS plays pretty directly into what those policies look like and what restrictions might look like around the country. There’s a lot of different levers that could be pulled from HHS that could affect abortion access nationally.
DAVIS: And one thing I think that we’re all watching for is that he was asked some questions about mifepristone, which is the abortion-inducing drug that can currently be delivered in the mail. And there has been – certainly been pushes among conservatives to try to restrict mail access to the drug, particularly in states that have essentially outlawed abortion access. And there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the Trump administration to do that, to do it through rule-making authority. And to Selena’s point, if they were to attempt that, Kennedy would be a really central figure in a decision like that. Today, the way I heard him, he did not seem to indicate that that was an issue in which he would seek to oppose the president’s wishes.
SHIVARAM: Selena, I want to shift for just a second because the Affordable Care Act was also brought up today. Kennedy said that, you know, this is something that isn’t working for Americans. He specifically said a majority of Americans don’t want the Affordable Care Act and prefer private insurance. That’s not true, though.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: There were a couple of really confusing exchanges when it comes to health policy. The Affordable Care Act marketplaces are private insurance. Like, that’s what you’re buying when you go to the Obamacare HealthCare.gov. Like, those marketplaces, that’s what that is. And favorability has never been higher for the Affordable Care Act. This is a very well-established law. The marketplaces now have 24 million people enrolled in them. It doubled in the four years of the Biden administration. There are lots of options. Plans are affordable. People are happy with the Affordable Care Act right now.
DAVIS: He also suggested at times that Medicaid is also not a popular program. And that is also exponentially not true. Medicaid is very popular amongst Democrats, Republicans and independents. It is the program that serves the poor. It is the program that delivers a whole heck of a lot of babies in this country. And as every family with a special needs kid knows, Medicaid covers much of the care and costs associated with kids that need extra medical help.
So I think Medicaid is one of those third rails of American politics where you start suggesting it needs to be overhauled or that it’s not very popular, a lot of Americans’ ears perk up. And I think that that is one of the most interesting and politically perilous paths ahead for the Republican Party, in which they openly discuss cutting programs like Medicaid in order to pay for things like tax cuts.
And I think this is particularly interesting now as the Republican Party, increasingly, the growth within the party is coming from people who are much more reliant on government programs, who have a much more direct connection to a lot of these social safety net programs, and they’re still operating with a sort of old school conservative ethos that they all need to be sort of reduced down and pared back, and that it runs kind of counter to who their party is and who they represent now.
SHIVARAM: Yeah. I want to try to, like, patch together, like, some of the takeaways we’ve all had from watching this hearing today. I know that’s really kind of a hard task, but I’m going to try. And I feel like one of the things is that, you know, as we’ve pointed out over and over again, like, this is such a vast and huge department that oversees so much of what touches our health care, some things that don’t even really directly touch our health care. But, you know, something that Kennedy kept talking about was, you know, people are not healthy. Kids are not healthy in this country. He kept talking about a lot of things like SNAP, things to do with school lunches, so nutrition. But, Selena, not all of that would even live under his purview if he were confirmed.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: No. Those two programs – SNAP, which used to be known as food stamps, and School Lunch Program – are under USDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, not under HHS. But to your point, HHS – there’s plenty there.
SHIVARAM: (Laughter).
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Like, so much.
SHIVARAM: Yeah.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: My favorite fun fact about HHS is that its annual budget is $1.7 trillion, which is the GDP of Australia.
SHIVARAM: Oh, so tiny.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Yeah.
SHIVARAM: (Laughter).
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: It’s so big and vast. He mentioned a couple of times 90,000 people work for HHS. And just to give people a sense for the work that’s happening in the health agencies, people have heard of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s under HHS. Food and Drug Administration – that’s under HHS. NIH – basic science research. The NIH is the biggest funder of biomedical research in the world. That’s under HHS. And it was interesting to me that some of the core issues he seemed to be passionate about were for programs that he would not have jurisdiction over. And when he was talking about Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, those things that are very much under HHS.
SHIVARAM: And so, Sue, the big question going forward is, does he have enough votes to get confirmed?
DAVIS: I mean, it certainly seems more likely than not. The questioning from Republicans today was pretty friendly. I think the handful of Republican senators people are watching to see how they vote are people like Bill Cassidy. He’s a Republican from Louisiana. He was one of the Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump. He’s been a bit of an independent-minded senator. He’s also a doctor and deeply aware of all of those jurisdictions of HHS that matter.
Maybe, you know, the senators that voted against Pete Hegseth’s defense nomination, people like Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. But the politics right now just don’t really lend itself to handing Trump a big defeat within the party. Like, he’s popular. There’s a lot of energy around it. I think the bigger question, too, was also, would any Democrats support RFK Jr.?
Because, look; like, a lot of the advocacy of his lifetime did align with a lot of values of the Democratic Party, particularly on environmental issues. I didn’t hear that today. I think one of the senators, Bernie Sanders, independent from Vermont who was aligned with RFK Jr. in the past on certain issues, he seemed very skeptical. He did not sound like a yes vote to me today. So I think it’s likely he is confirmed. It seems almost certainly to be on a likely party-line vote.
His performance, just speaking strictly through the political lens, not the policy one – he did a very good job today. He was pugnacious and direct with Democrats. He responded very well with Republicans. And the bottom line – this game is not about winning over the opposition party. It’s about keeping Republicans unified behind you. And I think he probably succeeded in that today.
SHIVARAM: All right, we’re going to leave it there for today. Selena, thanks so much for joining us.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Thanks for having me.
SHIVARAM: I’m Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House.
DAVIS: I’m Susan Davis. I cover politics.
SHIVARAM: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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