Washington Week with The Atlantic

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Even in an administration filled with unorthodox characters, think Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services stands out.

He's more famous, more popular, and more influential than any of his cabinet peers.

He is also the most important figure in American health and science today.

Tonight, a close look at Kennedy's battles with the medical establishment and the agencies he himself oversees, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

When the Atlantic staff writer, Michael Scherer, asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

to sit for a series of interviews about his life, his views, and his many, many controversies, the secretary staff warned him against it.

The so-called establishment press, they said, would never allow itself to be impressed with Kennedy's revolutionary ideas about American health and science.

But Kennedy, to his credit, let Scherer ask him anything.

The result is this month's Atlantic cover story, which provides what I think is the most revealing look at Kennedy's robust effort to undermine an even overthrow whatever is left of the American medical consensus.

Michael Scherer joins me tonight, as do two other reporters who know more about Kennedy and about the American government's enormous health infrastructure than almost anyone else, Dan Diamond, a White House reporter at The Washington Post, and Julie Rovner, the chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News.

Thank you all for being here.

Michael, thank you for writing this story.

It's a very long story.

Boil it down in 30 seconds, if you could.

Tell us, you know, after spending months with RFK Jr., multiple interviews, a lot of travel, what did you learn about this person who was very famous already?

What did you learn about him that you didn't know before?

MICHAEL SCHERER, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: I think, you know, what I realized was, what we do know about RFK is really the caricature.

He's caught in daily battle between people who think he's destroying science or people who think he's taking on the establishment.

He's anti-vax.

He's crazy, has a brain worm, you know, he put a bear in the back of his car at one point.

But no one, at least I had read, had tried to really explain how he got from being the guy who said that George W. Bush was a fascist, who was a Kennedy-FDR liberal to being someone who now considers President Trump a sort of hero of his and how he got from being at the edge of the Democratic Party sort of kicked out almost to being HHS secretary.

I think the answer is he's a fiercely determined person who is on a quest.

He's on a real mission.

And he has been able to sort of plow through enormous obstacles and enormous detractors and really not lose faith in his own vision of what he's doing despite, you know, his family, his friends most of the people who work for, or many of the people who work for him or worked for him saying he's wrong.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You know, you wrote, the whole medical establishment has huge stakes and equities that I'm now threatening and I'm shocked President Trump lets me do it.

Why does President Trump let him do it?

MICHAEL SCHERER: The president sees real value in Kennedy.

There's a political value.

They're going to try and put MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement, front and center next year for the midterm elections.

They think they can peel off Democratic voters with it.

For Trump, a Kennedy -- I mean, you know, a Kennedy for Trump is like a magazine cover.

I mean, it's a big deal for him.

And -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I had to think that one through, but, okay, I get your point.

DAN DIAMOND, White House Reporter, The Washington Post: He's bragged about it.

He's bragging about Kennedy in his cabinet.

MICHAEL SCHERER: And also -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, the outsider has the ultimate insider that's working for him.

DIAMOND: Right.

MICHAEL SCHERER: That's right.

And they both have this sort of populist, we're going to burn it down, burn down the establishment approach.

You know, the other thing is that Trump, even before Kennedy kind of came into his life, did have a sort of vaccine skepticism thread to his thinking.

He was concerned about autism and can you try to answer those questions for me.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Let me come to that as a White House correspondent, I mean, we don't think of Donald Trump -- I don't think Donald Trump would argue at this point as the paragon of healthy living and healthy eating and healthy exercise.

I don't think he actually believes ideologically in exercise.

Talk about the attraction between the two men.

Was it simply that Trump saw, I could pick off a very prominent Kennedy and put him in, or does Trump have developed ideas about the health infrastructure of our country that I'm not fully aware of?

DIAMOND: Well, Michael's right that there was a political appeal, especially in an election that was thought to be close.

But the two men in some ways are kindred spirits, where Donald Trump, Robert F. Kenny Jr., they're of similar age, they have been in the public profile and they have believed similar things.

Donald Trump, in his first term, wanted to do a study of autism and vaccines.

He was talked out of it by Bill Gates, by his senior health officials.

In this administration, he's got RFK Jr.

in his ear letting him pursue these things.

There's also an aspect too of RFK Jr.

has his own political base.

He is not one of these anonymous cabinet secretaries.

He's someone who does have movement behind him.

And that movement, people in the White House think, helped bring them the election last year think it'll bring the midterms next year.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Julie, talk about that movement a little bit.

JULIE ROVNER, Chief Washington Correspondent, KFF Health News: Yes.

I've been covering particularly the anti-vaccine movement since the 1990s, and what I think people have not appreciated is both the far right and the far left on the anti-vax movement, it's been sort of the far right, libertarians, if you will, who don't believe in expertise, and then sort of the far left, what I call the crunchy granola eaters.

So, MAHA is -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And there's this crunchy con over that they meet somewhere.

JULIE ROVNER: That's right.

Well, it's a circle that just goes all the way around and meets at the other end.

And they've become a more powerful force, really, I think over the last ten years or so.

And I think Donald Trump and his adviser saw a chance to help grab that force that Kennedy has helped put together.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How big a movement is it?

JULIE ROVNER: It's still a minority.

It's, and in fact it's still a very small minority.

It's just a very loud minority.

And one of the things we know from, you know, the rise of social media is that they can get their message out much more effectively than they ever could before.

And so more people are seeing it and it's so in confusion.

We saw it obviously during the pandemic when nobody knew who to trust on anything.

And this, you know, sinking trust in anyone who's an elite or an intellectual or professes to know more than anybody else.

It's like we all have access to the same megaphones now, therefore, all of our knowledge must be equal.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And a lot of people believe we have access to the same information, although the quality of information is obviously what we're going to be talking about.

But let me just stay with you for one minute because I want to talk about Kennedy's actual impact in the world, because I think it is huge.

I mean, he's making changes across the health infrastructure of our country.

Julie, what are you seeing at agencies, like CDC and NIH, and what are the consequences of the things that they are doing under Kennedy's leadership right now?

JULIE ROVNER: They've been hollowed out.

I mean, there's just no other way to put it.

Between the people who took the early retirement, people who sort of saw the handwriting on the wall and just took retirement in general, people -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Wait, tell me, what did the handwriting say?

JULIE ROVNER: The handwriting said that science is no longer going to be our leading force, that politics is, that, basically, you know, for a long time, HHS has had this sort of level of political, you know, overreach, but most of the scientists have been left to do their scientific work.

And there's been a history under Democrats and under Republicans, I've been covering HHS since the 1980s, to basically let the scientists do their thing and let the politicians worry about what impact that might have.

And, clearly, this was an administration that came in that wanted to clean house and people, I have friends, you know, live in this area who said, I'm getting out while they're getting is good.

So, they took these early retirements or they got laid off, which also happened.

So, we're seeing about a reduction of a quarter in the number of people who actually work for the Department of Health and Human Services.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

DAN DIAMOND: And one interesting point is that President Trump, in his first term, didn't care about these issues the same way he kept the same NIH director, Francis Collins, who'd served Barack Obama.

That's impossible to think about now in this much more politicized environment.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, right.

Come back to the CDC.

I'll ask Dan in a second about the FDA, but talk about the CDC, obviously a crucially important agency.

It's a national security agency in a lot of ways.

It tells us when diseases are erupting and it gives us early warning, among other things.

How have they been affected by Kennedy's thinking?

JULIE ROVNER: Basically, all of the scientific leadership has been wiped out at the CDC.

They're all political people now who are running the CDC and determining what the public health message is going to be.

And that's a big difference.

And Dan wrote about this a lot during the pandemic, the first Trump administration.

But it's a factor that's so much bigger now that there's basically the CDC is kind of a shadow of its former self.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Michael, why?

Why?

MICHAEL SCHERER: So, Kennedy's view is that the health establishment that he's dismantling is responsible for our current health situation, which is not great, a rise in chronic disease, concerns he believes that are valid about vaccine illness, neurodevelopment problems.

He has significant concerns about the role of industry in the government administration.

And he has basically decided -- I mean, he -- when I spoke with him, he talked about the CDC as a snake pit.

That's how he described his own employees there.

He talks about biostitutes working for him, like a -- because they're selling themselves to the highest bidder as they do their medicine.

And he also said to me at one point that they left because they can't defend the ground they're standing on.

It is a full-on war inside that agency.

And I think he is convinced that there are still parts of the bureaucracy that are actively working against him, that he wants to root out.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Who then, Julie, is going to tell us when there is an Ebola outbreak and what the course of that Ebola outbreak might look like if the CDC has been hollowed out?

JULIE ROVNER: That's the big question.

And, obviously, you know, the Trump administration has also taken down all of its participation in some of these international health organizations.

That was the way we would get the early warnings about things like Ebola, about things like COVID and were no longer, part of those organizations.

States are trying to pick up some of the slack.

Universities are trying to pick up some of the slack.

We're seeing in public health some of these states banding together to make things like vaccine recommendations.

So, we've got this, you know, sort of patchwork of places, you know, a blue state coalition and a red state coalition.

But this is a big difference, you know, since the CDC sort of really came on the scene in the 1940s.

We've always had sort of a national public health understanding, and that is going away.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Dan, talk about the FDA, which is another crucial agency and has been the gold standard across the globe for many years, crucial agency in the HHS portfolio.

DAN DIAMOND: So, FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, oversee our food, our drugs, I mean, it's in the name, all of these things that touch our daily lives.

And it hasn't been in the spotlight the same way as the CDC, but you see similar dynamics.

Earlier this year, RFK Jr.

fired the CDC director that he had signed off on after about a month.

She said she didn't want to rubber stamp his vaccine policies.

That attracted a lot of attention.

I know you talked about it on the show, Jeff.

Lawmakers, even in the Republican Party were concerned.

There's a similar dynamic.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, not that concerned.

I mean, to be fair.

DAN DIAMOND: More -- well, in some ways, more concerned about this than we've seen them about other things with this administration.

There were several Republicans, John Barrasso, who is not someone that you normally see.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And there's certainly Republican doctors in the Senate who are concerned about what's going on.

That is true.

But, anyway, go on.

DAN DIAMOND: Well, and Republican staffers and senators who have said off the record they're deeply worried.

But point being, we've seen this dynamic at CDC.

FDA hasn't gotten as much attention, but there are very similar themes happening there too.

We reported at The Washington Post last week that the top drug regulator, someone that has been at FDA for years, was just tapped to be in this major role, he too is now worried about the pressures being put on FDA, worried that the political goals of RFK Jr.

are taking precedent over doing longer research, longer studies.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: What's the political pressure, specific Political pressure that this person is receiving?

DAN DIAMOND: There are a couple.

So, the Trump administration wants to lower the price of drugs, good goal, bipartisan goal.

And as part of that, they have offered essentially a lure to industry that if you sign on to cut your drug prices, we'll expedite your other drugs.

That has -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But the expedition process has been science-based, right, data-based?

DAN DIAMOND: It has been.

You mentioned earlier, Jeff, that this has been a model for the world.

It is a long process that can take months, a year.

The Trump administration has said they can cut that essentially to a month, and they make it a smaller panel of reviewers.

So -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But how would you do that safely?

JULIE ROVNER: That's the big question.

That's what the head of the drug center is worried about.

It's also -- the question is whether a lot of these things are even legal.

Congress generally makes the policy, these types of policies.

They go through to a debate process you hear from experts on both sides.

This is not something that's normally just done by a secretary or FDA commissioner.

This administration has just sort of blown through the guardrails and Congress has let them.

DAN DIAMOND: And just to pull it back to a second what Michael was saying, there are some things that RFK Jr.

has pushed his ideas that are bipartisan.

You can read the transcript of some of his remarks and it looks like what Bernie Sanders would say on taking on industry, on making drugs more available.

It's just the process by which this is happening, or actually the lack of process is what's causing concern.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to read something and get your comment, Michael.

This is from a piece written by Tatiana Schlossberg, who is the granddaughter of JFK, was suffering, unfortunately, from a terminal cancer.

And she wrote in The New Yorker this week, as I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to prove the lives of others, I watched as Bobby, her cousin, cut nearly a half billion dollars research into mRNA vaccines technology that could be used against certain cancers, slash billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world's largest sponsor of medical research, and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings.

Hundreds of NIH grants and clinical trials were canceled, affecting thousands of patients.

I want to talk about the specific charge that Schlossberg is making here, but, Michael, start with this what I think of as an incredibly obvious question.

Bobby Kennedy is protege of the country's most famous Democratic family.

His uncle, his father, the two most prominent Kennedys are both associated with good government, government as an ameliorating force in society, government doing the things that private industry can't or won't, obviously, his uncle, huge backer of science.

How did it come to pass that -- I mean, this is his cousin who's suffering right now.

She's not alone in that family, in saying that he is not just off the farm, he's completely off the rails.

What happened in his life that led to this situation in America's most famous family?

MICHAEL SCHERER: I'll start with what -- how he explains it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

MICHAEL SCHERER: He explains it by saying that the party left me, that what my uncle and my father stood for is what Donald Trump and Republicans stand for today, which is a remarkable statement.

I mean, he's serving with a energy secretary who's from industry, and he is saying that this is very different from the Republican Party of the past.

Why does he feel that way?

He's on a mission.

And there is -- I mean, there was a point where I asked him how much of his own personal recovery journey.

He is recovering heroin addict, his other addiction issues, he goes to a meeting every single day somewhere.

He mentors other people had to do with the work he does now.

He said everything that he does is informed by his recovery.

There is a journey he is on.

You know, when I asked him how he explained going from being on the outside of the Democratic Party to HHS secretary, his answer was that it was providential.

So, he has caught onto this idea that he has an insight from his own reading of studies, from his own research into the way the medical establishment has missed something serious that is hurting American children, if you're talking about the vaccine issue, or hurting American health writ large, if you're talking about chronic disease issue.

And when he faced a choice in the summer of 2024 when his campaign was ending, he wasn't going to win, Trump came along and said, join my effort.

And what he was saying to people he was close to is, I have a chance to save a lot of children.

I'm going to make the switch.

He was doing it -- he was a mission-driven decision, and then he had to intellectually like flip this idea that the Republican Party is not a liberal party.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How do you save children by cutting the funding for vaccine and cancer research?

What would he say to that question?

MICHAEL SCHERER: He would say that the cuts that have happened at HHS are returning HHS's budget to, you know, back five to ten years.

It's not a decimation.

There was enormous increases in the budget on returning the budget down.

He would say that the bureaucracy was resistant to change and we had to clean out.

He talked about speaking with Elon Musk early on in the administration.

He bought into the idea of shock and awe.

You have to have momentum.

You have to disrupt the bureaucracy.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Elon Musk, whose DOGE was just closed by the federal government as a cost saving measure.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Correct.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Noting.

MICHAEL SCHERER: And then I think the other part that he, he doesn't say as loudly is some of these cuts are not his choice.

Some of these cuts are being imposed on him by the White House.

Some of the cuts, the firings happened before he was even confirmed as HHS secretary.

He wasn't responsible for them.

He said that the firing of probationary employees wasn't ideal.

He would rather have kept the probationary employees.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, Julie, he's pushing on an open door for a lot of people for a reason.

The health establishment, medical establishment is far from perfect.

Is that -- do you agree with -- and you've covered this for a long time.

Do you agree that they set themselves up to some degree?

JULIE ROVNER: I've certainly never seen a Republican administration go this hard after sort of the healthcare infrastructure, the industry, you know, for decades.

One of the reasons that the U.S.

couldn't get anywhere on health reform is that the Republicans were busy protecting the healthcare stakeholders, the hospitals and the drug companies and the insurers.

Obviously, Donald Trump, not a traditional Republican in that sense.

So, it does look very different than it used to.

And as I said, you know, Congress has mostly been quiet on all of these things.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Dan from like a pandemic perspective, would any of what we're seeing now, the distrust, the rise of Kennedy, would this have happened without the pandemic and a response that is going to be -- a response to the pandemic on the part of the federal government that's going to be argued about forever?

DAN DIAMOND: I think the pandemic supercharged, the Kennedy movement.

I mean, there were tensions that already existed.

People have questions about the bad things that happened to them.

They're looking for answers.

RFK Jr.

and his allies sometimes offer those answers.

Now, we know from whether him or ChatGPT, sometimes the answers you get and what you want to hear, they're not the right answer.

But Kennedy did identify, I think, some real problems in our healthcare system.

We know that there's too much money sometimes going to industry, too much influence on life expectancy.

He was one of the only politicians who talked to me several years ago during a big project about the trends in America.

He was willing to identify that.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Michael, last word to you.

Is he set up for success?

Do you think he's going to have a permanent influence on American health?

MICHAEL SCHERER: Well, permanent is a long time.

But, yes, he's going to have a lasting -- I mean, the changes that have already happened are having a lasting impact.

For a Democratic administration winning in 2029 to unwind all this will take years, if that's what they want.

And, you know, as Dan said, a lot of these initiatives are bipartisan.

You know, Democrats want to regulate drug advertising and things like that.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, thank you.

It's a fascinating conversation and it's not going to end anytime soon, but it's all the time we have tonight, unfortunately.

I want to thank our guests for joining me, and thank you at home for watching us.

You could read Michael's piece about RFK Jr.

by visiting theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goodnight from Washington.