Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fielded questions from both sides of the aisle during a marathon session of back-to-back hearings before the House of Representatives on Thursday.
It was Kennedy’s first appearance before Congress since last September, making it a rare opportunity for representatives on the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Appropriations Committee to grill the secretary on a variety of healthcare issues.
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Kennedy came to defend President Donald Trump’s 2027 budget proposal, which would cut funding for HHS by roughly 12.5%, or nearly $16 billion.
There were several high-intensity moments between Kennedy and Democrats touching on a range of issues, including Medicaid fraud, measles outbreaks, and funding for the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy navigated the criticism carefully, defending Trump’s healthcare agenda and saying that Congress has not done enough to prevent rising rates of chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes that are increasing the costs of healthcare.
“This president has done more to protect public health than any president in history,” Kennedy said. “You guys are the ones that gave us the chronic disease epidemic. We’re the unhealthiest population on the face of the earth.”
Despite clashes over the issues, multiple Democrats praised the Kennedy family legacy in government services, citing the leadership of the secretary’s uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and his father, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
Republicans also praised Kennedy’s leadership at HHS at the helm of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX) heralded Kennedy as a “breath of fresh air” amid a sea of corporate influence in Congress from the healthcare industry.
Here are some highlights from the hearings.
Measles outbreaks
Kennedy defended his department’s response to the soaring number of measles cases last year by noting that several other countries have higher measles infection rates per capita than the United States.
The secretary said the line of questioning about measles from Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) was full of “a lot of misinformation,” saying that the U.S. is not worse off than other countries combating what he called “a global measles epidemic.”
“Mexico has three times our measles, and they have one-eighth our population. Canada has double the measles, and they have one-third, they have one-eighth of our population,” Kennedy said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded a total of 2,287 measles cases in 2025, including three child deaths.
So far this year, there have been 1,714 cases. Sanchez said that, if the trend continues, there will be roughly 6,400 cases nationwide by the end of 2026.
Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC), co-chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, connected the measles outbreaks to the influx of illegal immigrants from developing countries who are not vaccinated against diseases that have been eradicated in the U.S.
Murphy, who practiced urology in North Carolina and did medical missionary work in developing countries, claimed that the Biden administration “led the greatest invasion in this country of 13 to 20 million illegal people coming into this country who were not vaccinated and brought in disease into this country.”
Bipartisan support for the National Institutes of Health
Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) said during his opening testimony for the appropriations hearing that he disagreed with cuts to NIH research in Trump’s 2027 budget proposal.
Republicans and Democrats alike have traditionally supported the NIH, the agency that funds basic medical science research projects at universities across the country. NIH investments are distributed widely and touch the vast majority of congressional districts.
The White House’s 2026 budget request asked for a 40% reduction in the NIH’s research budget, but Congress instead increased it by $415 million over the 2025 spending level.
The 2027 budget proposed a $5 billion cut to NIH research, which Aderholt said he is not likely to support.
“I doubt that we will be able to agree on areas for reduction,” Aderholt said. “I’m a strong supporter of investments for NIH and believe extreme swings in funding supporting biomedical research are counterproductive.”
“Reparenting” black children
Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL) highlighted an explosive quote from Kennedy’s 2024 independent presidential campaign regarding the mental health of black children.
Kennedy, multiple times on the 2024 campaign trail, pledged to create “wellness farms” for youth to detox from harmful environmental factors, ranging from illicit drugs to unhealthy foods and too much exposure to screens.
During a June 2024 appearance on the 19Keys podcast, Kennedy made the remark that black children on mental health medication may need to be “reparented” at federal “wellness farms.”
“Every black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence,” Kennedy said on the podcast. “And those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get reparented — to live in a community where there’ll be no cellphones, no screens. You’ll actually have to talk to people.”
Kennedy denied ever using the phrase “reparented,” saying that he did not “even know what that phrase means.”
But Sewell chided Kennedy for the remark, saying that the U.S. “has a long and painful history of separating black children from their families” and continues to do so with the foster care system.
An HHS spokesperson told the Washington Examiner after the exchange that “re-parenting” is a form of psychotherapy in which therapists treat psychological disturbances as a result of abusive or neglectful treatment from parents.
“Reparenting is the practice of meeting your own emotional, physical, and psychological needs in adulthood — needs that may not have been adequately met when you were a child.”
Microplastics in the water
Kennedy received praise from Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the leading Democrat on the health subcommittee on appropriations, for the department’s recent work on improving the understanding of the negative health consequences of microplastics.
“Microplastics have been shown to cause damage to our respiratory system, increase our risk of heart attack and stroke, potentially lead to colon and lung cancer, along with a slew of other negative health effects,” DeLauro said.
Kennedy, alongside Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, announced last month a joint effort to reduce the amount of forever chemicals, microplastics, and certain pharmaceuticals in the water supply.
During the Ways and Means hearing, Kennedy cited a widely publicized study that the average American has roughly a teaspoonful of microplastics in their brains. Microplastics have also been found in both male and female reproductive systems and other parts of the body.
The secretary highlighted that the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, is spending $144 million to better understand what toxic effects microplastics have on different types of cells and organs.
Waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid
Multiple times during the hearings, Kennedy blamed rampant abuse and fraud in federal entitlement programs on the Biden administration’s decimation of anti-fraud units within HHS.
He estimated that across all of HHS’s entitlement programs, there is “about $100 billion a year” in fraud, which he said would be able to cover the cost of the Medicare program for seniors for the next five years.
Kennedy also defended the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s changes to the Medicaid program, which provides health insurance for low-income Americans and children. He said that Republicans did not cut Medicaid, but rather reduced the rate of increase in spending over the next 10 years.
Several program integrity measures for Medicaid were included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including restricting certain immigrant designations from the program and implementing community engagement requirements. Both of these changes take effect next year.
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“What we did with Medicaid is we’re kicking people off it who were illegally taking it,” Kennedy said. “There were almost 3 million people who were registered for Medicaid in two states, or registered for Medicaid and Obamacare. That’s illegal. There were a million illegal aliens who were on it.”
Several Democrats, including ranking member Richard Neal (D-MA) and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), chided Kennedy for focusing on low-level fraud while not enforcing anti-fraud initiatives for major corporate healthcare providers.
