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

In 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.