Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Part I

 Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (born January 17, 1954), also known by his initials RFK Jr., is an American politician, environmental lawyer, author, conspiracy theorist, and [discuss] anti-vaccine activist serving since February 2025 as the 26th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. A member of the Kennedy family, he is a son of senator and former U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy and a nephew of President John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy began his career as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. In the mid-1980s, he joined two nonprofits focused on environmental protection: Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). In 1986, he became an adjunct professor of environmental law at Pace University School of Law, and in 1987 he founded Pace's Environmental Litigation Clinic. In 1999, Kennedy founded the nonprofit environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance. He first ran as a Democrat and later started an independent campaign in the 2024 United States presidential election, before withdrawing from the race and endorsing Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Since 2005, Kennedy has promoted vaccine misinformation and public-health conspiracy theories, including the chemtrail conspiracy theory, HIV/AIDS denialism, and the scientifically disproved claim of a causal link between vaccines and autism. He has drawn criticism for fueling vaccine hesitancy amid a social climate that gave rise to the deadly measles outbreaks in Samoa and Tonga.

Kennedy is the founder and former chairman of Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine advocacy group and proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. He has written books including The Riverkeepers (1997), Crimes Against Nature (2004), The Real Anthony Fauci (2021), and A Letter to Liberals (2022).

Early life and education

Kennedy was born at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., on January 17, 1954. He is the third of eleven children of senator and U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel. He is a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy was raised at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and at Hickory Hill, the family estate in McLean, Virginia. In June 1972, Kennedy graduated from the Palfrey Street School, a day school in a Boston suburb. While attending Palfrey, he lived with a surrogate family at a farmhouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kennedy continued his education at Harvard University, graduating in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in American history and literature. He earned a Juris Doctor degree from the University Of Virginia School Of Law in 1982 and a Master of Laws from Pace University in 1987.

He was nine years old when his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963, and 14 when his father was assassinated while running for president in 1968. Kennedy learned of his father's shooting while at Georgetown Preparatory School. A few hours later, he flew to Los Angeles on Vice President Hubert Humphrey's plane, along with his older siblings, Kathleen and Joseph. He was with his father when he died. Kennedy was a pallbearer at his father's funeral, where he spoke and read excerpts from his father's speeches at the mass commemorating his death at Arlington National Cemetery.

After his father's death, Kennedy struggled with drug abuse, which led to his arrest in Barnstable, Massachusetts, for cannabis possession at age 16, and his expulsion from two boarding schools: Millbrook and Pomfret. During this time, some in the Kennedy family regarded him as the "ringleader" of a pack of spoiled, rich kids who called themselves the "Hyannis Port Terrors", engaging in vandalism, theft, and drug use. His first cousin Caroline Kennedy later blamed Kennedy for leading other members of their family "down the path of drug addiction", calling him a "predator". At Harvard, Kennedy continued his experimentation with heroin and cocaine, often with his brother David, earning a reputation that has been described as a "pied piper" and "drug dealer".

Legal career

Manhattan DA's office

In 1982, Kennedy was sworn in as an assistant district attorney for Manhattan. After failing the New York bar exam, he resigned in July 1983.

Conviction for heroin possession

On September 16, 1983, Kennedy was charged with heroin possession in Rapid City, South Dakota. In February 1984, he pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of possession of heroin, and was sentenced to two years of probation and community service. After his arrest, he entered a drug treatment center. To satisfy conditions of his probation, Kennedy worked as a volunteer for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and was required to attend regular drug rehabilitation sessions. Kennedy asserted that this ended his 14 years of heroin use, which he said had begun when he was 15. His probation ended a year early.

Riverkeeper

In 1984, Kennedy began volunteering at the Hudson River Fisherman's Association, renamed Riverkeeper in 1986 after a patrol boat it had built with settlement money from legal victories preceding Kennedy's arrival. After he was admitted to the New York bar in 1985, Riverkeeper hired him as senior attorney. Kennedy litigated and supervised environmental enforcement lawsuits on the east coast estuaries on behalf of Hudson Riverkeeper and the Long Island Soundkeeper, where he was also a board member. Long Island Soundkeeper sued several municipalities and cities along the Connecticut and New York coastlines. On the Hudson, Kennedy sued municipalities and industries, including General Electric, to stop discharging pollution and clean up legacy contamination. His work at Riverkeeper set long-term environmental legal standards.

In 1995, Kennedy advocated for repeal of legislation that he considered unfriendly to the environment. In 1997, he worked with John Cronin to write The Riverkeepers, a history of the early Riverkeepers and a primer for the Waterkeeper movement.

In 2000, a majority of Riverkeeper's board sided with Kennedy when he insisted on rehiring William Wegner, a wildlife lecturer and falcon trainer whom the organization's founder and president, Robert H. Boyle, had fired six months earlier after learning that Wegner had been convicted in 1995 for tax fraud, perjury, and conspiracy to violate wildlife protection laws. Wegner had recruited and led a team of at least 10 who smuggled cockatoo eggs, including species considered endangered by Australia, from Australia to the U.S. over a period of eight years. He served 3.5 years of a five-year sentence and was hired by Kennedy a few months after his release. After the board's decision, Boyle, eight of the 22 members of the board, and Riverkeeper's treasurer resigned, saying it was not right for an environmental organization to hire someone convicted of environmental crimes and that it would hurt the organization's fundraising.

While working with Riverkeeper, Kennedy spearheaded a 34-year battle to close the Indian Point nuclear-power plant. Kennedy was featured in a 2004 documentary about the plant, Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable, directed by his sister, the documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy. In 2017, Kennedy argued that the electricity Indian Point provided could be fully replaced by renewable energy. In 2022, after the plant's closure, carbon emissions from electricity generation in New York State increased by 37%, compared to 2019, before the start of the closure.

Kennedy resigned from Riverkeeper in 2017.

Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic

In 1987, Kennedy founded the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University School of Law, where for three decades he was the clinic's supervising attorney and co-director and Clinical Professor of Law. Kennedy obtained a special order from the New York State Court of Appeals that permitted his 10 clinic students to practice law and try cases against Hudson River polluters in state and federal court, under the supervision of Kennedy and his co-director, Professor Karl Coplan. The clinic's full-time clients are Riverkeeper and Long Island Soundkeeper.

The clinic has sued governments and companies for polluting Long Island Sound and the Hudson River and its tributaries. It argued cases to expand citizen access to the shoreline and won hundreds of settlements for the Hudson Riverkeeper. Kennedy and his students also sued dozens of municipal wastewater treatment plants to force compliance with the Clean Water Act. In 2010, a Pace lawsuit forced ExxonMobil to clean up tens of millions of gallons of oil from legacy refinery spills in Newtown Creek in Brooklyn.

On April 11, 2001, Men's Journal gave Kennedy its "Heroes" Award for creating the Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic. Kennedy and the clinic received other awards for successful legal work cleaning up the environment. The Pace Clinic became a model for similar environmental law clinics throughout the country.

Waterkeeper Alliance

In June 1999, as Riverkeeper's success on the Hudson began inspiring the creation of Waterkeepers across North America, Kennedy and a few dozen Riverkeepers gathered in Southampton, Long Island, to found the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is now the umbrella group for the 344 licensed Waterkeeper programs in 44 countries. As president, Kennedy oversaw its legal, membership, policy and fundraising programs. The Alliance is dedicated to promoting "swimmable, fishable, drinkable waterways, worldwide".

Under Kennedy's leadership, Waterkeeper launched its "Clean Coal is a Deadly Lie" campaign in 2001, bringing dozens of lawsuits targeting mining practices, including mountaintop removal and slurry pond construction, as well as coal-burning utilities' mercury emissions and coal ash piles. Kennedy's Waterkeeper alliance has also been fighting coal export, including from terminals in the Pacific Northwest.

Waterkeeper waged a legal and public relations battle against pollution from factory farms. In the 1990s, Kennedy rallied opposition to factory farms among small independent farmers, convened a series of "National Summits" on factory meat products, and conducted press conference whistle-stop tours across North Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, and in Washington, D.C. Beginning in 2000, Kennedy sued factory farms in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Maryland, and Iowa. In a 2003 article, he argued factory farms produce lower-quality, less healthy food, and harm independent family farmers by poisoning their air and water, reducing their property values, and using extensive state and federal subsidies to impose unfair competition against them.

Kennedy and his environmental work have been the focus of several films, including The Waterkeepers (2000), directed by Les Guthman. In 2008, he appeared in the IMAX documentary film Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk, riding the Grand Canyon in a wooden dory with his daughter Kick and anthropologist Wade Davis.

Kennedy resigned the Waterkeeper Alliance presidency in November 2020.

New York City Watershed Agreement

Beginning in 1991, Kennedy represented environmentalists and New York City watershed consumers in a series of lawsuits against New York City and upstate watershed polluters. Kennedy authored a series of articles and reports alleging that New York State was abdicating its responsibility to protect the water repository and supply. In 1996, he helped orchestrate the $1.2 billion New York City Watershed Agreement, which New York magazine recognized in its cover story, "The Kennedy Who Matters". This agreement, which Kennedy negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and New York City watershed consumers, is regarded as an international model in stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development.

Kennedy & Madonna LLP

In 2000, Kennedy and the environmental lawyer Kevin Madonna founded the environmental law firm Kennedy & Madonna, LLP, to represent private plaintiffs against polluters. The firm litigates environmental contamination cases on behalf of individuals, non-profit organizations, school districts, public water suppliers, Indian tribes, municipalities and states. In 2001, Kennedy & Madonna organized a team of prestigious plaintiff law firms to challenge pollution from industrial pork and poultry production. In 2004, the firm was part of a legal team that secured a $70 million settlement for property owners in Pensacola, Florida whose properties were contaminated by chemicals from an adjacent Superfund site.

Kennedy & Madonna was profiled in the 2010 HBO documentary Mann v. Ford, which chronicles four years of litigation by the firm on behalf of the Ramapough Mountain Indians against the Ford Motor Company for dumping toxic waste on tribal lands in northern New Jersey. In addition to a monetary settlement for the tribe, the lawsuit contributed to the community's land being relisted on the federal Superfund list, the first time that a delisted site was relisted.

In 2007, Kennedy was one of three finalists nominated by Public Justice as "Trial Lawyer of the Year" for his role in the $396 million jury verdict against DuPont for contamination from its Spelter, West Virginia, and zinc plant. In 2017, the firm was part of the trial team that secured a $670 million settlement on behalf of over 3,000 residents from Ohio and West Virginia whose drinking water was contaminated by the toxic chemical perfluorooctanoic acid, which DuPont released into the environment in Parkersburg, West Virginia.

Morgan & Morgan

In 2016, Kennedy became counsel to the Morgan & Morgan law firm. The partnership arose from the two firms' successful collaboration on the case against SoCalGas Company following the Aliso Canyon gas leak in California. In 2017, Kennedy and his partners sued Monsanto in federal court in San Francisco, on behalf of plaintiffs seeking to recover damages for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cases that, the plaintiffs allege, were a result of exposure to Monsanto's glyphosate-based herbicide, Roundup. Kennedy and his team also filed a class action lawsuit against Monsanto for failing to warn consumers about the dangers allegedly posed by exposure to Roundup.

In September 2018, Kennedy and his partners filed a class-action lawsuit against Columbia Gas of Massachusetts alleging negligence following gas explosions in three towns north of Boston. Of Columbia Gas, Kennedy said "as they build new miles of pipe, the same company is ignoring its existing infrastructure, which we now know is eroding and is dilapidated".

Cape Wind

In 2005, Kennedy clashed with national environmental groups over his opposition to the Cape Wind Project, a proposed offshore wind farm in Cape Cod, Massachusetts (in Nantucket Sound). Taking the side of Cape Cod's commercial fishing industry, Kennedy argued that the project was a costly boondoggle. This position angered some environmentalists, and Kennedy was criticized by commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and John Stossel, the latter of who called him a hypocrite. In The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy wrote, "Vermont wants to take its nuclear plant off line and replace it with clean, green power from Hydro-Québec—power available to Massachusetts utilities—at a cost of six cents per kilowatt hour (kwh). Cape Wind electricity, by a conservative estimate and based on figures they filed with the state, comes in at 25 cents per kwh."

Other ventures

In 1999, Kennedy, Chris Bartle and John Hoving created a bottled water company, Keeper Springs, which donated all of its profits to Waterkeeper Alliance.

Kennedy was a venture partner and senior advisor at VantagePoint Capital Partners, one of the world's largest cleantech venture capital firms. Among other activities, VantagePoint was the original and largest pre-IPO institutional investor in Tesla, Inc. VantagePoint also backed BrightSource Energy and Solazyme, amongst others. Kennedy is a board member and counselor to several of Vantage Point's portfolio companies in the water and energy space, including Ostara, a Vancouver-based company that markets the technology to remove phosphorus and other excessive nutrients from wastewater, transforming otherwise pollution directly into high-grade fertilizer. He is also a senior advisor to Starwood Energy Group and has played a key role in a number of the firm's investments.

He is on the board of Vionx, a Massachusetts-based utility-scale vanadium flow battery systems manufacturer. On October 5, 2017, Vionx, National Grid and the U.S. Department of Energy completed the installation of advanced flow batteries at Holy Name High School in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts. The collaboration also includes Siemens and the United Technologies Research Center and constitutes one of the largest energy storage facilities in Massachusetts.

Kennedy served on the board of the New York League of Conservation Voters.

Kennedy is a partner in ColorZen, which offers a turnkey-cotton-fiber pre-treatment solution that reduces water usage and toxic discharges in the cotton-dyeing process.

Kennedy was a co-owner and director of the smart-grid company Utility Integration Solutions (UISol), which was acquired by Alstom. He is presently a co-owner and director of GridBright, the market-leading grid management specialist.

In October 2011, Kennedy co-founded EcoWatch, an environmental news site. He resigned from its board of directors in January 2018.

Minority and poor communities

In his first case as an environmental attorney, Kennedy represented the NAACP in a lawsuit against a proposal to build a garbage transfer station in a minority neighborhood in Ossining, New York. In 1987, he successfully sued Westchester County to reopen the Croton Point Park, which was primarily used by poor and minority communities from the Bronx. He then forced the reopening of the Pelham Bay Park, which New York City had closed to the public and converted to a police firing range.

International and indigenous rights

Starting in 1985, Kennedy helped develop the international program for environmental, energy, and human rights of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), traveling to Canada and Latin America to assist indigenous tribes in protecting their homelands and opposing large-scale energy and extractive projects in remote wilderness areas.

In 1990, Kennedy assisted indigenous Pehuenches in Chile in a partially successful campaign to stop the construction of a series of dams on Chile's iconic Biobío River. That campaign derailed all but one of the proposed dams. Beginning in 1992, he assisted the Cree Indians of northern Quebec in their campaign against Hydro-Québec to halt construction of some 600 proposed dams on eleven rivers in James Bay.

In 1993, Kennedy and NRDC, working with the indigenous rights organization Cultural Survival, clashed with other American environmental groups in a dispute about the rights of Indians to govern their own lands in the Oriente region of Ecuador. Kennedy represented the CONFENIAE, a confederation of Indian peoples, in negotiation with the American oil company Conoco to limit oil development in Ecuadorian Amazon and, at the same time, obtain benefits from resource extraction for Amazonian tribes. Kennedy was a vocal critic of Texaco for its previous record for polluting the Ecuadoran Amazon.

From 1993 to 1999, Kennedy worked with five Vancouver Island Indian tribes in their campaign to end industrial logging by MacMillan Bloedel in Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia. In 1996, he met with Cuban president Fidel Castro to persuade him to halt his plans to construct a nuclear power plant at Juraguá. During the meeting, Castro reminisced about Kennedy's father and uncle, speculating that U.S. relations with Cuba would have been far better had President Kennedy not been assassinated?

Between 1996 and 2000, Kennedy and the NRDC helped Mexican commercial fishermen halt Mitsubishi's proposal to build a salt facility in the Laguna San Ignacio, an area in Baja where gray whales breed and nurse their calves. Kennedy wrote in opposition to the project, and took the campaign to Japan, meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi. In 2000, he assisted local environmental activists to stop Chaffin Light, a real estate developer, and U.S. engineering giant Bechtel from building a large hotel and resort development that, Kennedy argued, threatened coral reefs and public beaches used by local Bahamians, at Clifton Bay, New Providence Island.

Kennedy was one of the early editors of Indian Country Today, North America's largest Native American newspaper. He helped lead the opposition to the damming of the Futaleufú River in the Southern Zone of Chile. In 2016, due to the pressure precipitated by the Futaleufú Riverkeepers campaign against the dams, the Spanish power company Endesa, which owned the right to dam the river, reversed its decision and relinquished all claims to the Futaleufú.

Military and Vieques

Kennedy has been a critic of environmental damage by the U.S. military.

In a 2001 article, Kennedy described how he sued the U.S. Navy on behalf of fishermen and residents of Vieques, an island of Puerto Rico, to stop weapons testing, bombing, and other military exercises. Kennedy argued that the activities were unnecessary and that the Navy had illegally destroyed several endangered species, polluted the island's waters, harmed the residents' health, and damaged its economy. He was arrested for trespassing at Camp Garcia Vieques, the U.S. Navy training facility, where he and others were protesting the use of a section of the island for training. Kennedy served 30 days in a maximum security prison in Puerto Rico.

The trespassing incident forced the suspension of live-fire exercises for almost three hours. The lawsuits and protests by Kennedy, and hundreds of Puerto Ricans who were also imprisoned, eventually forced the termination of naval bombing in Vieques by the Bush administration.

In a 2003 article for the Chicago Tribune, Kennedy called the U.S. federal government "America's biggest polluter" and the U.S. Department of Defense the worst offender. Citing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he wrote, "unexploded ordnance waste can be found on 16,000 military ranges ... and more than half may contain biological or chemical weapons."

Political aspirations

Candidacy aspirations

Kennedy considered running for political office in 2000 when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a U.S. senator from New York, did not seek reelection to the seat formerly held by Kennedy's father.

In 2005, Kennedy considered running for New York attorney general in the 2006 election, which would have put him up against his then-brother-in-law Andrew Cuomo, but he ultimately chose not to, despite being considered the front-runner.

On December 2, 2008, Kennedy said he did not want New York Governor David Paterson to nominate him to the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated by Hillary Clinton, Obama's nominee for Secretary of State. Some outlets indicated that Kennedy was a possible candidate for the position. He said that Senate service would leave him too little time with his family.

2000s consideration for top environmental jobs

As a "well-respected climate lawyer" in the 2000s, Kennedy was "often linked to top environmental jobs in Democratic administrations", including in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections. He was considered as a potential chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality for Al Gore in 2000 and considered for the role of EPA administrator under John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008.

According to Politico, the Obama transition team decided not to nominate Kennedy due to his past heroin conviction and opposition from Senate Republicans. Then United States Chamber of Commerce lobbyist William Kovacs said that Kennedy's nomination "would speak volumes as to where Obama is going with his appointments ... A Kennedy appointment is as liberal as you can possibly get ... There is no one [candidate] based firmer in extremes." Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma also criticized the proposal, saying Kennedy was too radical and would further a left-wing agenda if appointed.

2024 presidential campaign

In a speech in New Hampshire on March 3, 2023, Kennedy said he was considering a run for president in 2024: "I am thinking about it. I've passed the biggest hurdle, which is that my wife has greenlighted it."

Kennedy filed his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination on April 5, 2023. He formally declared his candidacy at a campaign launch event at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston on April 19. On October 9, he became an independent candidate in the election. He is the fifth member of his family to seek the presidency.

Listing many false conspiracy theories that Kennedy used during campaign appearances, PolitiFact named his presidential campaign its 2023 "lie of the year".

In May 2024, Kennedy was considered for the Libertarian Party's nomination for president, but lost to Chase Oliver. In Colorado, the state Libertarian Party selected Kennedy, but Oliver appeared on the ballot as the Libertarian nominee.

Kennedy's campaign was noted for receiving significant support from Republican donors and Trump allies who believed he would serve as a "spoiler", taking the votes of those who would have otherwise voted for the Democratic nominee. In August 2023, it was revealed that Timothy Mellon, who gave $15 million to Donald Trump's super PAC MAGA Inc., also donated $5 million to Kennedy's super PAC, making him Kennedy's largest single donor. Mellon donated another $5 million to Kennedy's super PAC in April and another $50 million to MAGA Inc. in May. In July 2024, Forbes reported that Mellon had donated $25 million to Kennedy and Kennedy-affiliated groups.

In August, facing declining poll numbers, limited campaign funds, and increasing challenges to ballot access, the Kennedy campaign began appealing to the Harris and Trump campaigns, seeking a cabinet post in exchange for an endorsement. Harris reportedly rebuffed Kennedy, but Trump said he "probably would [consider the offer], if something like that would happen". On August 22, the Kennedy campaign filed to be removed from the Arizona ballot amid reports he would drop out to endorse Trump.

On August 23, Kennedy dropped out and endorsed Trump, saying he intended to maintain ballot placement in certain non-swing states. This was a reversal for Kennedy, who had previously said he would "under no circumstances" join Trump on a presidential ticket, that his and Trump's positions "could not be further apart", and that Trump was a "terrible human being", a "discredit to democracy", and "probably a sociopath". In his speech endorsing Trump, Kennedy described speaking with Trump and his advisers and said he discovered that he and Trump were "aligned on many key issues".

Secretary of Health and Human Services (2025–present)

Nomination and confirmation

Days before the 2024 United States presidential election, Donald Trump said that Kennedy would have "a big role in health care". According to The Washington Post, Kennedy's position was not originally meant to be one requiring Senate confirmation. On November 14, after winning the election, Trump announced his intention to nominate Kennedy for secretary of health and human services (HHS).

Criticism

In December 2024, more than 75 Nobel Laureates urged the U.S. Senate to oppose Kennedy's nomination, saying he would "put the public's health in jeopardy".

During the week of December 16, 2024, Kennedy began meeting with senators in advance of his confirmation hearings.

As of January 9, 2025, over 17,000 doctors who are members of Committee to Protect Health Care, had signed an open letter urging the Senate to oppose Kennedy's nomination, arguing that Kennedy had spent decades undermining public confidence in vaccines and spreading false claims and conspiracy theories, that he was a danger to national healthcare, and that he was unqualified to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, said putting Kennedy in charge of a health agency would be like "putting a flat earther in charge of NASA". As of January 24, 2025, more than 80 organizations had voiced opposition to Kennedy's nomination.

Senate nomination hearings

In January 2025, the Senate Committee on Finance and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) held hearings on Kennedy's nomination. Senator Bernie Sanders, the committee's ranking member, was critical of Kennedy during the hearing.

Conflicts of interest disclosure statement

Kennedy disclosed to an HHS ethics official his arrangement with a law firm specializing in pharmaceutical drug injury cases, Wisner Baum, whereby Kennedy earns 10% of fees awarded in contingency cases that he refers to the firm. If confirmed as HHS director, Kennedy would retain the arrangement only in cases that do not directly affect the federal government. He listed his income from Wisner Baum for this arrangement as $856,559. Before assuming the position of director of HHS, he will have from the law firm the complete and final payments for concluded cases against the U.S. government. He added that will assign his son his interests in litigation against the maker of Gardasil, a vaccine given to prevent cervical cancer caused by human papillomavirus (HPV).

Committee votes

On February 4, 2025, the Senate Committee on Finance voted 14–13 to forward Kennedy's nomination to a full Senate vote. The deciding vote was from Bill Cassidy, who was originally hesitant, but said he had received "serious commitments" from the Trump administration and "honest counsel" from Vice President JD Vance in exchange for his support of Kennedy's nomination. According to the Senate HELP Committee site, Cassidy said that he was a doctor who had practiced for 30 years before becoming a politician. He told the committee that he had a patient with acute hepatitis B who needed a liver transplant and had to be transported by Medi-vac. He called the transplant "an invasive, quarter-of-a-million-dollar surgery—in 2000—that, even if successful, would leave this young woman with a lifetime of $50,000 per year medical bills", adding, "As I saw her take off, I was so depressed. A $50 of vaccine could have prevented this all".

Of the two committees that Kennedy spoke before, only the Senate Finance was to vote on his nomination.

Confirmation vote

On February 13, 2025, the Senate confirmed Kennedy as Secretary of Health and Human Services by a vote of 52 to 48, with former Senate Republican Conference leader Mitch McConnell the sole Republican to vote against him. A polio survivor, McConnell was critical of efforts to revoke approval of the polio vaccine. He said, "Anyone seeking the Senate's consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts".

Tenure

On February 13, 2025, Kennedy was sworn in as the 26th secretary of health and human services in the Oval Office by Justice Neil Gorsuch. He is the first independent or third-party presidential candidate to become a cabinet member after running for president.

Minutes later, Trump signed Executive Order 14211, which ordered the creation of a "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) Commission to be chaired by Kennedy. Its objectives include investigating the incidence and causes of chronic childhood diseases and "assess[ing] the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs".

The next morning, agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were informed that approximately 5,200 newly hired federal health workers were to be fired that day.

On February 20, 2025, during an unusually severe influenza season, HHS instructed the CDC to suspend its ad campaign promoting flu vaccination. The advertising, in part a response to declining flu vaccination rates, promoted the message that vaccination would result in much milder symptoms and lower chances of becoming severely ill for those with the flu.

2025 Southwest United States measles outbreak

Kennedy's tenure began during a measles outbreak in the southwestern U.S., including the first measles death in a decade. The Texas Department of State Health Services reported 146 cases, 20 hospitalizations, and one death in late February. In his first public comments, on February 26, Kennedy said there had been two deaths and that "there have been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country last year there were 16. So it's not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year." Such outbreaks of the disease had been declared domestically eliminated. He also falsely claimed that the people hospitalized were done so "mainly for quarantine", claim healthcare professionals refuted. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden wrote: "Nothing about kids dying from measles is normal. Anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. and the Republicans who enable them are responsible for every single one of these deaths."

Days later, Kennedy called the outbreak a "top priority" for the department. His messaging regarding the outbreak cited fringe theories blaming poor diet and health. He promoted cod liver oil, steroid inhalation, an antibiotic, vitamin A, and other questionable treatments that he called "almost miraculous". While recommending vaccination against measles, he also overstated the vaccine's possible harms and suggested that acquiring immunity from catching the disease would be better. The CDC says that the MMR vaccine is "much safer than getting measles, mumps, or rubella". The antibiotic is not effective against a viral disease such as measles. Vitamin A is part of measles treatment primarily in areas where children may be deficient in the vitamin.

On February 28, HHS top spokesperson Thomas Corry abruptly resigned, two weeks after being sworn in as the assistant secretary of public affairs. He reportedly clashed with Kennedy over his management of the department during the measles outbreak.

On March 2, Kennedy was criticized for writing an op-ed for Fox News that called vaccines a "personal choice" and recommended vitamins and good nutrition to combat measles. But he also wrote in the piece: "Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons."

After Kennedy took to the media to falsely claim that vitamin A is a prophylactic and treatment for measles, doctors in Texas began to see children infected with measles also having symptoms of vitamin A toxicity.

On March 28, Kennedy told Peter Marks, the head of FDA's vaccine program, that he should resign or be fired. Marks wrote a resignation letter that lamented Kennedy's attempts to erode trust in vaccines: "It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies." Days earlier, the CDC head of communications said after his own resignation, "Kennedy and his team are working to bend science to fit their own narratives, rather than allowing facts to guide policy."