TOLEDO, Ohio — The little boy, wearing a Toy Story sweatshirt, wrapped himself across the nation’s well being secretary.
“What do you guys want to be when you grow up?” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. requested a carpet stuffed with preschoolers.
“A dinosaur!” the boy replied, squeezing tighter.
Just weeks in the past, Kennedy sat earlier than lawmakers on Capitol Hill and faced intense questions a couple of harmful uptick in infectious ailments amongst American youngsters.
Now, with midterm primaries underway, Kennedy was seated in a toddler-sized chair in Ohio, on a mission to alter the topic.
Advised to avoid the anti-vaccine rhetoric that rocketed him to political stardom, Kennedy has been dispatched by the White House to evangelize in regards to the least controversial — and hottest — components of his agenda. Republicans hope Kennedy’s “Take Back Your Health” tour will assist them dangle on to voters, a lot of whom are deeply unhappy with President Donald Trump.
So there Kennedy was in early May, crisscrossing a strip of northern Ohio that features one of many few congressional districts that Republicans are assured they will flip in November, rotating by means of a wardrobe of blue fits and blue denims.
He inspected the kitchen of a Toledo daycare heart, the place a whole lot of the town’s tiniest residents study and play by means of the federally funded Head Start program. Under the cautious watch of a surgeon, he briefly operated the famend Cleveland Clinic’s robotic fingers on a reside affected person splayed open for coronary heart surgical procedure. And he munched on pesticide-free squash blossoms from a 400-acre farm.
Kennedy samples microgreens at a Huron, Ohio, farm that rejects chemical use in rising its produce. Reducing using chemical compounds in meals manufacturing is a aim of many supporters of the Make America Healthy Again motion. (Amanda Seitz/KFF Health News)
“I am dismantling a corrupt system and replacing it with something better, replacing it with something that actually addresses the declining healthy American population,” Kennedy stated from the eating room desk of a farmhouse throughout an unique interview with KFF Health News. He pointed to what he views as his greatest accomplishments over the previous yr: pressuring some corporations to take away dyes from sure meals, updating dietary steering, and defining ultraprocessed meals.
“People are paying attention to what they eat, and the industry is listening; the industry is changing.”
But a whole lot of miles from Washington’s partisan interrogations, Kennedy couldn’t escape the uncomfortable contradictions and penalties of the Trump administration’s insurance policies.
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Taboo Budget Cuts
The lecture rooms of the Clever Bee Academy displayed freshly printed posters that includes Kennedy’s “Eat Real Food” slogan and the redesigned meals pyramid.
Kennedy got here with an providing, a $30,000 federal grant to assist the middle improve its kitchen and group backyard.
Perched in entrance of workers and fogeys, he distanced himself from a White House push final yr that might have been devastating to a lot of Clever Bee’s younger college students, most of whom reside in poverty: the proposal to eradicate the $12 billion Head Start program.
Most of the scholars on the Toledo childcare heart Kennedy visited reside in poverty and depend on the federally funded Head Start program, which the Trump administration proposed eliminating final yr. (Amanda Seitz/KFF Health News)
Classrooms on the childcare heart displayed posters that includes the “Eat Real Food” slogan and the redesigned meals pyramid. (Amanda Seitz/KFF Health News)
“We were asked to cut our agencies substantially,” Kennedy stated. “The two programs that I went to the wall to protect, and find the money somewhere else, was the Indian Health Services, which is always starved for funding, and Head Start.”
The subsequent day, Kennedy stood earlier than goats on a farm in Medina, Ohio, cared for by individuals sobering up from drug or alcohol misuse on the Hope Recovery Community.
He was there to vow extra investments from an administration that has steeply minimize workers and budgets over the previous yr.
Kennedy, who nonetheless attends each day Alcoholics Anonymous conferences to deal with a heroin dependancy that gripped him for 14 years, stated he hopes to duplicate the restoration heart’s mannequin nationwide, describing it as an “essential role of government to make sure those services are there.”
Broader entry to dependancy remedy is a part of the Trump administration’s newly launched National Drug Control Strategy. But restoration advocates are skeptical extra individuals will get assist, with tens of millions anticipated to lose medical health insurance underneath Trump’s watch due to rising Affordable Care Act premiums and the practically $900 billion in Medicaid cuts underneath the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Kennedy dismissed these challenges, pointing to a $100 million funding in dependancy remedy companies, together with sober housing, introduced this yr.
“We’re trying to make it more accessible,” Kennedy informed KFF Health News.
Trouble in MAHA Paradise
Rows of beds that includes inexperienced and purple microgreens awaited Kennedy at The Chef’s Garden, a Huron, Ohio, farm that rejects chemical use in rising its produce.
The well being secretary plucked handfuls and tossed them into his mouth, rapidly chewing earlier than a brand new pattern was introduced earlier than him.
“We are absolutely thrilled that someone at this level of government cares about how food is grown and where it is coming from,” stated Bob Jones Jr., a co-owner of The Chef’s Garden.
Seeing extra farmers produce chemical-free leafy greens has topped the want record of those that help Kennedy and the Make America Healthy Again motion, and lots of who backed Trump in 2024. But in a transfer that’s threatening to fracture that constituency, Trump has pushed to guard the manufacturing of glyphosate, a weed-killing, doubtlessly cancer-causing chemical generally sprayed on crops and lawns.
Kennedy along with his principal deputy chief of workers, Stefanie Spear, as he munches on pesticide-free produce at The Chef’s Garden in Huron, Ohio. (Amanda Seitz/KFF Health News)
Though the group MAHA Ohio extols Kennedy’s agenda and endorses candidates aligned along with his motion, director Elizabeth Frost acknowledged tensions between MAHA and conservative insurance policies.
The glyphosate challenge is an instance “where you have the conservative interests to look out for the interests of the industry, and you have your MAHA interest to be cognizant of the downstream health impacts,” stated Frost, who volunteered on Kennedy’s presidential marketing campaign.
Some distinguished MAHA influencers have instructed that Trump’s White House staffers are stopping Kennedy from implementing extra aggressive insurance policies on sure points, together with additional limiting vaccine use, a notion he dismissed.
“To say the White House has tied my hands — the only people who could say that are people who haven’t been paying attention for a year,” Kennedy stated. “President Trump has let me do more than any HHS secretary in history.”
He added: “The only thing that people in the MAHA movement complain about is the president’s glyphosate order.”
Staying on Message
Republicans think about Kennedy an asset within the just lately redrawn northern Ohio congressional district that Democrat Marcy Kaptur has represented for greater than 40 years, and which is viewed as one of the vital aggressive within the nation.
Fresh off profitable the Republican main for the district final week, Derek Merrin smiled as he shook fingers with Kennedy.
“We discussed protecting Lake Erie, strengthening rural hospitals, and our shared vision to improve food quality,” Merrin later posted on Facebook. “Let’s Make America Healthy Again!”
Still, even with Kennedy underneath advisement to keep away from anti-vaccine rhetoric, the difficulty discovered him in Ohio. At a discussion board in Cleveland, household physician Patricia Kellner stated the easiest way to forestall hepatitis B is by vaccinating newborns — a advice that was dropped underneath Kennedy. She informed Kennedy about treating sufferers with the illness.
“Some of them didn’t know because it can be asymptomatic. Some of them found out when they got liver cancer,” Kellner stated. “So why are you opposed to a birth dose of hepatitis B?”
Kennedy responded by suggesting that the hepatitis B vaccine was not secure for infants and was essential just for sure individuals.
“Hepatitis B is for high-risk groups like drug addicts or prostitutes, or for promiscuous homosexuals,” he added, eliciting gasps from the group.
While the danger of contracting hepatitis B is larger for many who inject medicine or males who’ve intercourse with males, the illness will be transmitted in different methods, together with by means of contact with contaminated surfaces or childbirth.
Public well being researchers have warned that dropping the common hepatitis B advice will end in a whole lot of latest infections in youngsters, costing tens of millions of {dollars} in extra well being care prices.
