RFK Jr. defends steep budget cuts

In back-to-back hearings on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insisted his agency could do more with less. President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal asks Congress to slash nondefense spending by a whopping 22%, including a 26% funding cut to the Department of Health and Human Services. The budget would trim the agency’s $122.8 billion in discretionary funding down to $94 billion, eliminating $17 billion from the National Institutes of Health and $3 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I’d rather have as much money as I could,” Kennedy said Wednesday. “But President Trump has a larger duty. We’re spending $2 trillion a year that we don’t have. That’s a moral deficiency.”

Despite the looming cuts, Kennedy insisted that he can effectively manage and reform the nation’s top healthcare regulatory agency. Most senators agreed that the healthcare system needs reform, but many raised issues with how Kennedy is going about it.

The mission of HHS is to enforce the nation’s public health policy, service government health insurance programs, and research diseases. It has the largest budget of any federal agency. In 2024, it spent $1.72 trillion, roughly a quarter of the nation’s entire federal spending for the year.

“My agency is the biggest agency in government,” Kennedy said. “It’s twice the size of the Pentagon. It represents about 20% of the US economy. You have hundreds of institutes and some agencies. We tried to be as careful as we can about what we cut and what we didn’t.”

Kennedy has already laid off 20,000 employees. About 10,000 took an administration buyout offer, and 10,000 were part of a reduction in force at the behest of the Department of Government Efficiency. Kennedy said layoffs and buyouts will save $1.8 billion per year. He accused past administrations of allowing HHS to grow too large.

“This agency has grown so big so fast, and everybody who comes in says they’ll cut it down and nobody has,” Kennedy said. “We operate on the understanding that the longer you wait, the more the inertia kicks in. We understood that there would be some mistakes made that we’d go back to fix. We took decisive action quickly to eliminate metastasizing of this agency.”

In April, the agency began to consolidate 28 institutes and centers into 15 divisions. The only addition the White House is seeking for HHS is $500 million to be put toward the Make America Healthy Again initiative. Kennedy said the program would promote more nutritious food in schools and fund new medical studies on food and drug safety.

Senators had questions about how the cuts would affect federally funded research and public health programs.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, asked Kennedy how American scientists could compete with China if so many are being fired or having their budgets slashed. Kennedy described the cuts as more ideological than scientific.

“The Chinese are not spending a lot of money on DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion],” he answered. “As far as I know, we have not fired any working scientists.”

Kennedy admitted that HHS fired 328 scientists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). In Thursday’s hearing, Kennedy said he had reinstated the scientists but would still trim the majority of the institute’s 1,300 employees. The institute studies and works on preventing work-related illnesses. One sub-group tracks diseases related to the 9/11 response. Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., asked Kennedy why they were cut to begin with.

“We were asked to make very serious budget cuts that were going to be painful, and some of them should not have been made,” Kennedy answered. “That was one that should not have been made, and I reversed it.”

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., said the entire CDC lead poisoning prevention program has closed even though Congress already appropriated funds for it.

“You cannot tell us that you want to make America healthy again when you are willfully destroying programs that keep children safe from lead poisoning,” Baldwin said. “Congress set aside $15 million. No one is there to pick up the phone, not because the program isn’t effective, [but] because you fired the entire team.”

The CDC Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice was cut on April 1. It housed the team that investigates lead poisoning outbreaks, along with identifying, treating, and preventing other environmental hazards. In December, a team worked with the Food and Drug Administration to identify and recall an imported applesauce product that contained high lead and chromium levels. On April 3, Kennedy said that the program was mistakenly included in the cuts and would be reinstated. This week, an HHS spokeswoman said lead poison prevention and surveillance will continue but did not say whether the division would reopen. This month, Milwaukee closed several schools due to a lead poisoning outbreak and was denied CDC aid.

“As part of your drastic and haphazard purge of CDC, you and Elon Musk eliminated entire divisions without consideration of what is being lost,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said during the House Appropriations hearing. “More than 70% of CDC’s funding is provided to state and local jurisdictions. These cuts affect families and communities in every one of our districts.”

Most Republicans praised the budget cuts.

“I have listened to a lot of the conversation today where somehow we think that spending more is somehow compassionate … even though every single person in this Congress knows that they are spending borrowed money that our children will have to repay,” Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, said during the committee. “Everything you can do to increase savings and improve quality of services, I commend you on it and urge you to continue to do so.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., read from a list of what he called frivolous public health grants, which included funds for LGBT-related studies. In March, DOGE cut more than $620,000 for a pregnancy prevention program for girls who identified as boys.

“I want to commend Secretary Kennedy and the administration for putting forward less spending,” he said. “One of the reasons I think we need to look at NIH and other grant-making organizations is if you keep giving them the same amount, you’ll keep getting the same frivolous grants.”