RFK Jr. Could Be Useful — but Not atop Health and Human Services

I n summer 2012, I liked to spit on the Department of Health and Human Services building. In D.C. for my first internship, I spent a lot of time running on the National Mall, just off which the department looms. The form of that ugly, blocky, brutalist building perversely unites with the insidious functions of what often goes on inside, at least when Democrats control the federal government.

At that time, it was where bureaucrats, newly empowered by Obamacare, were coercing employers — including such organizations as the Little Sisters of the Poor — to cover contraceptives, including abortifacients, in their health-care plans. The Obama administration ended up suing those nuns, a morally suspect endeavor taken up by California attorney general Xavier Becerra, who would become Joe Biden’s HHS secretary, during Donald Trump’s first presidential term.

As a Catholic, I found it both enraging and, yes, a little exhilarating that the government was persecuting my religion. My on-run saliva was the best weapon I could wield to fight back. It’s possible my meager protests were hopelessly outmatched: D.C.-area conservative lore I have been unable to verify holds that employees who worked at HHS in Donald Trump’s first administration brought a priest in to drive demons out of it. If this did happen, I hope it worked.

So let no one gainsay my distaste for this monstrous bureaucracy. It is not out of some sacrosanct respect for HHS that Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead it gives me pause. It is, rather, out of concern that his priorities do not align with what must be done to HHS specifically, and that he would better achieve them elsewhere in the government’s massive health apparatus.

HHS is an enormous ministry. As Phil Klein laid out in his case against RFK Jr.’s appointment, it is the federal government’s largest department, consuming more than a quarter of total spending. Thanks to Obamacare, it affects the American health-care sector even more than it once did. Under Democrats, its incredible power is put in service of left-wing ideology and expanding government influence over health care. Antagonizing nuns would alone be enough to stain it morally forever. But under Obama and Biden, it has also become a promoter of abortion and transgenderism — and with the latter, quite literally, in the case of non-woman Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine, assistant secretary of health.

The next head of HHS should have two priorities for the department as a whole: to figuratively drive out its demons, and to restrain government meddling in health care. That would require someone who understands its intricacies, and who would have the requisite principles to apply to them. Phil makes a persuasive case that Kennedy, who until recently supported full-term abortion and is on record supporting socialized medicine, is not the person to fulfill these priorities. To Phil’s case, one could add Kennedy’s desire to declare a Covid-style “national emergency” for the sake of dealing with chronic disease. Preference for emergency government is worryingly indicative of an overall comfort with a statism fit for the Democratic Party (in whose presidential primary Kennedy ran last year).

Kennedy’s appointment did not come out of nowhere, however. And there’s a case for him not to be atop HHS that doesn’t entail dismissing his potential for what his family likes to call “public service.” For Trump, it is probably straightforward: Kennedy endorsed him, and so he deserves a political reward.

But there’s a bit more to it than that. By Kennedy’s account, he and Trump became connected through health advocates. Kennedy’s views on a variety of subjects have entailed controversy, particularly on vaccines. Yet as Michael Brendan Dougherty notes, his opposition to processed foods (in contrast to the man who would appoint him) and dubious chemical additives in them is far sounder. The same goes for his objection to government nutrition advice, and other unsavory aspects of the linkages between corporations and government in this area. He also understandably emerged as an early symbol of resistance to Covid-19–justified government excesses (though this makes his apparent fondness for the Covid emergency model perplexing). He is not the reason why public-health institutions have lost the public’s trust; they themselves are.

But these sentiments do not add up to a case for putting him in charge of HHS. Indeed, Michael himself does not make that case. A different role, one that would make him an intentional interdepartmental irritant, constantly and rightfully harassing institutions under the remit of HHS and forcing transparency, would be a better fit. As would charging him with the redesign of the notoriously defective Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which is to happen next year regardless. If Trump does feel the need to put Kennedy in charge of an institution, the Food and Drug Administration would align more closely with his stated aspirations and known capabilities.

In charge of the Department of Health and Human Services behemoth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would probably try to do everything yet accomplish nothing, while failing either from lack of commitment or lack of principle to dislodge the leftism that Democratic administrations have infected it with. While other jobs could be a good fit for him, this one would not. Observing the growing influence of neoconservatives, who until recently had been on the left, on the right in the 1980s, conservative historian Stephen Tonsor welcomed them — to a point. “It is splendid when the town whore gets religion and joins the church,” Tonsor said in 1986. “Now and then she makes a good choir director, but when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday sermons, matters have been carried too far.” HHS needs a minister, not a choir director.