After becoming the Health and Human Services secretary, RFK Jr. sat down for an interview with CBS News’ chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook. This was also his first interview since starting to work with the Donald Trump administration.
When LaPook asked him “You proposed more than $11 billion to local and state programs addressing things like infectious disease, mental health, addiction, and childhood vaccination. Did you personally approve those cuts?” RFK Jr. shockingly responded, “No I’m not familiar with those cuts. We’d have to go … the cuts were mainly DEI cuts, which the president ordered.”
Given the stature of the cuts, it was somewhat surprising that RFK Jr. was not personally aware of them or did not approve them himself. LaPook then went ahead with providing a specific example, asking if he was aware of the elimination of a $750,000 University of Michigan grant that was focused on adolescent diabetes. To this, RFK Jr. said, “I didn’t know that, and that’s something that we’ll look at.”
He further added, “I just, I’m not familiar with that particular study. But there’s a number of studies that were cut that came to our attention and that did not deserve to be cut, and we reinstated them. Our purpose is not to reduce any level of scientific research that’s important.” However, he also mentioned that in case there were any DOGE cuts involved, he would not be able to talk about them.
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In an attempt to restructure the federal government departments, Elon Musk led DOGE and RFK Jr. caused the lay off of 10,000 HHS employees. Kennedy, however, did acknowledge that some cuts by DOGE might have to be reevaluated. He said HHS’s job is to make America healthy, and we’re spending $1.9 trillion a year, and people are not getting healthy. … What Elon said is that, when you do a disruption of this, a lot of times, 80% of the people that get cut … You may make mistakes, as much as 20[%], and then you go back and remedy that.”
It should be noted here that last week, over 7,000 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services received letters of termination. A number of the fired employees were researchers with years of experience who were concerned with pandemic research.
Q: Did you personally approve the over $11B in cuts to local and state programs?
RFK Jr.: I’m not familiar with those cuts, they were mainly DEI.
Q: Did you know that $750K of a grant studying adolescent diabetes was cut?
RFK Jr.: I didn’t know that pic.twitter.com/z77LyPuMP6
— FactPost (@factpostnews) April 9, 2025
Talking about the cuts and the cost of health care, Kennedy said, “People have a choice about how sick they are going to be, many people. If you don’t have any choice, then we should give you all the resources that you want, but I mean… it’s a moral question too, and it’s a philosophical question. If you’re smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, should you expect society to pay when you get sick?”
Kennedy also talked about vaccination in this interview and put forward what seemed to be his most pro-vaccine statement till now. Talking about the measles vaccine, he said, “The federal government’s position, my position, is that people should get the measles vaccine, but … the government should not be mandating those.” However, he also kept alive the doubts about vaccination that he previously stated, saying, “When I say they’re not safety tested, what I mean is they’re not adequately — many of the vaccines are tested for only three or four days with no placebo group.”
He further added: “I always said during my campaign and every part, every public statement I’ve made: I’m not gonna take people’s vaccines away from them. What I’m gonna do is make sure that we have good science so that people can make an informed choice.”
The most concerning aspect of the interview turned out to be the mass firings that Kennedy said he did not personally approve of or did not even have a clear idea of. It has already been speculated that these firings are probably not even done by humans and it is probably some AI system that is rampantly firing deserving and important people. It now remains to be seen if Kennedy addresses these cuts in the future and, indeed, brings back some of the grants that were abruptly cut but are extremely necessary.
