Live updates: RFK Jr. testifies on HHS budget as White House proposes funding cuts

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is likely to receive pushback from both sides of the aisle during congressional hearings scheduled for the coming days on President Donald Trump’s 2027 budget request. 

The secretary’s main objective will be to defend Trump’s 2027 budget request to cut HHS discretionary spending by roughly $16 billion compared to last year’s allotment from Congress. 

But the hearings also will serve as a check-up on the slightly more than one year of Kennedy’s leadership of HHS, which has been fraught with several controversies, including the turnover in leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, infectious disease outbreaks, and rising healthcare costs.

Troubles at the CDC will likely be a central feature of Democrats’ questions during the upcoming hearings. Kennedy will also likely advocate Trump’s agenda to lower healthcare costs, a leading domestic policy concern for voters heading to the polls in November’s midterm elections. 

A Gallup poll last month found that healthcare affordability and access are the No. 1 issue for voters heading into this year’s elections, outpacing more traditional top-of-mind troubles such as the economy and inflation. 

Socially conservative Republicans will likely ask Kennedy this week about the status of an ongoing safety review of the abortion drug mifepristone.

Click here to read more about what to expect at today’s hearing.

Kennedy sparred with Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV) over the congressman’s question on the Trump administration’s rollback of Environmental Protection Agency protections.

“You don’t coordinate with the EPA, Mr. Secretary,” Horsford said. “Your department is not involved with rolling back protections that would increase exposure to heavy metals materials, even though it affects people’s health. Is that what you’re telling me you don’t coordinate?”

“I’d say, calm down, congressman,” Kennedy responded. Horsford replied, telling the witness not to tell him to “calm down.”

After a brief back-and-forth, Horsford accused the HHS secretary of being unable to answer basic questions during the hearing.

“If you can’t answer basic questions, then maybe come prepared next time,” Horsford said.

The Department of Health and Human Services is using artificial intelligence to root out widespread healthcare fraud, Kennedy said during his latest congressional hearing.

Much of this AI-streamlined work is being carried out at the Food and Drug Administration.

“We now have over 90% of reviewers at FDA using AI,” Kennedy testified. “We’re using it to detect fraud. We’ve changed the system under the Biden administration, and we were paying claims that we knew were fraudulent before we paid them. It was called the pay-and-chase system, and we’ve ended that now.”

The White Coat Waste Project is driving around a truck emblazoned with the words “WTF RFK?” and “End Fauci’s labs” to pressure Kennedy to end animal testing using taxpayer dollars.

The truck was seen driving around Washington, D.C., on Thursday, as Kennedy faced questioning by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX) hailed Kennedy on Thursday, issuing praise for the secretary after he faced intense questioning from a series of Democrats on the panel.

“You are a breath of fresh air,” the Texas Republican told Kennedy. “We may have disagreements on how to attack some of these problems, but you have a rare curiosity and objectivity and independence that you bring to this leadership.”

Arrington suggested Kennedy is getting flak because of corruption in the government and the health industry.

“We have too much special interest, too much incumbent resistance, too much parochial politics, and everyone in this town seems to be captured by it, to one extent or another,” he said. “You just seem to have been able to, through the fiery furnace of public scrutiny over the years, I don’t know what it is, but I love that you can come to this. I believe, with all my heart, that you just want to do the right thing for the country.”

The secretary thanked Arrington, saying he provided some “very kind and undeserved words.”

Kennedy detailed sweeping fraud under investigation in California, as state and federal authorities warn that bad actors have hijacked the state’s Medicaid program.

“We’ve already shut down 500 hospices in Los Angeles, and incidentally, we haven’t had one call from Congress or anybody else about complaining, because clearly these were fraudulent,” Kennedy told Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-TX). “[Fraudsters] were making hundreds of millions of dollars out of fraud and just stealing money from us. I think the cost has been about $5 billion.”

Kennedy said fraudulent operations would obtain patient identification, “or they would pay people,” to steal public dollars.

“They were going and giving people in poor neighborhoods flat screen televisions, 600 bucks, and they would enroll in the hospice, and we were paying them $6,000,” Kennedy said. “And the interesting thing is, almost none of them ever died. Typically, they stay in a hospice about 18 days. These people stayed forever. Nothing ever happened, because they weren’t actually there. They were just invented.”

Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-CA) laid into Kennedy about the Trump administration’s inability to fill key public health positions, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the surgeon general.

Kennedy fired the Senate-confirmed CDC director, Susan Monarez, in August. Monarez told the Senate in an oversight hearing after her firing that she was terminated after refusing to rubber-stamp Kennedy’s requested changes to the childhood vaccination schedule.

The Trump administration was required by statute to fill the CDC director position 210 days after Monarez’s firing. The administration’s failure to do so means Kennedy has the ultimate authority over the agency until a new director is confirmed.

“Without an acting permanent chief, tasks that congressional statutes explicitly reserve for the CDC director can only be performed by you, the HHS secretary, that includes policy decisions like adopting vaccine recommendations for the CDC immunization advisory committee,” Panetta said during the hearing.

Panetta also slammed the Trump administration for failing to get the president’s surgeon general nominee, MAHA acolyte Dr. Casey Means, through the Senate confirmation process.

Panetta said Means “had her confirmation hearing two months ago, but she performed so poorly, including her unwillingness to commit to recommending vaccines, that the Senate has not scheduled a vote.”

Kennedy said he would “absolutely” work with Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) on the congressman’s request that childhood cancer be declared a national emergency, and invited the lawmaker to give him a call about concerns the Trump administration has made cuts to cancer research.

“We’re absolutely committed to cancer research, and particularly pediatric cancer research,” Kennedy said, after Boyle shared a story about a constituent who died from brain cancer.

“Some of our [cancer research programs] were duplicates, so we’ve moved them around, and it looks like there was a cut, but I don’t know of any major cancer cuts,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy highlighted that the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday rolled back Biden-era regulations on peptides as part of the Make America Healthy Again movement’s support of wellness supplements.

Peptides are short chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, that function as essential signals in processes such as weight loss, muscle growth, and tissue healing.

In 2023, the Biden FDA pushed multiple peptides into a tougher safety category, for which Kennedy said there was no safety evidence.

“The Biden administration improperly moved them to Category 3 without any evidence of safety. The only justification they have is if there’s a safety concern, and there was no science that indicated a safety concern, so it was improper,” Kennedy said during the hearing.

Kennedy posted on X on Wednesday that the rollback was a “long-overdue action to restore science, accountability, and the rule of law.”

Kennedy said the Trump administration is putting $140 million into efforts to minimize the amount of microplastics the public consumes.

Trump administration officials outlined a plan earlier this month to list microplastics and certain pharmaceuticals as contaminants in drinking water, a step toward new regulations that fulfill a goal of the Make America Healthy Again movement.

The Contaminant Candidate List is a list of contaminants known or anticipated in public water systems. It does not subject the contaminants to any regulations, but it could be used to set rules down the line.

“For too long, Americans have vocalized concerns about plastics and pharmaceuticals in their drinking water,” Environmental Protection Agency’s 17th Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a press release. ”That ends today.”

Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC) rose to Kennedy’s defense on vaccine policy, arguing that the Biden administration laid the groundwork for the rise of disease.

Murphy 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.”

“Let’s actually bring facts into that conversation,” Murphy said, adding in an attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top health official in the Biden administration who has faced sweeping scrutiny for how he handled the COVID-19 crisis.

“We’re talking a little bit about vaccination,” Murphy said. “I think we ought to talk a little bit about the arrogance of a fellow named Anthony Fauci who came and lied to Congress, lied to the American people, and, in my opinion, destroyed the confidence of the American public in the healthcare system.”

Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL), during her time, highlighted an explosive quote from Kennedy during his 2024 independent presidential campaign that black children on mental health medication may need to be “reparented.”

Kennedy, in June 2024, said on the 19Keys podcast that, as president, he would create “wellness farms” for youth to detox from illicit drugs, psychiatric medication, and ultraprocessed foods.

“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, “I don’t even know what that phrase means.”

Sewell lambasted Kennedy, saying that the United States “has a long and painful history of separating black children from their families.”

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.”

Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) engaged in a heated line of questioning on vaccines with Kennedy, suggesting that his questioning of them has done little to help a spike in measles and other illnesses.

Sanchez said that the United States has had the biggest percentage increase in measles cases of any country in the world.

Kennedy responded, “That’s not true. 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.

“There’s a global measles epidemic. We’ve done better at preventing measles than any other country in the world,” he continued. “You’ve got a lot of misinformation there.”

Canada lost its measles elimination status in 2025 after vaccination rates dropped. The U.S., meanwhile, has seen the number of measles cases reach the highest level since the virus was eliminated in 2000.

The secretary clapped back at Rep. Darin Lahood (R-IL) after the lawmaker suggested that bad management at the Food and Drug Administration is stalling approvals of key drugs.

“We have broken every record for drug approvals. We approved 67 drugs this year, new drugs we approved — that was a record. We approved 39 new devices, which is a record. We approved 91 new generic drugs, which is a record,” Kennedy said. “We have dramatically shortened the period of time from approval, from conception to commerce.”

Kennedy defended FDA commissioner Marty Makary’s recent decision not to approve a melanoma immunotherapy by the biotech firm Replimune. He suggested Makary is being criticized because lobbyists and the health industry “own Congress.”

“You hear these stories about a drug that’s been refused. You read about them in the Wall Street Journal this week, they were talking about a melanoma drug — every panel within FDA, all the career panels, the career scientists who looked at that drug said it was not effective. … Marty made the correct decision to not approve that drug,” Kennedy said. “But everybody goes after them because the industry is so powerful. They own Congress, they own the media, and they can beat up Marty Makary because he’s trying to do change over there?”

Kennedy highlighted the work of HHS to undo Biden-era regulations that effectively excluded Christians from foster parenting if they refused to affirm transgender foster youth.

Last month, HHS issued a proposed rule to undo a Biden administration regulation that required foster families to commit to affirming what it described as the “LGBTQI+” identities of foster children.

Kennedy said that the Biden-era rule “dramatically constricted the pool of available parents,” largely because conservative Christians are the most likely to volunteer for foster parenting.

“The Biden administration was excluding an entire class of people because of their religious beliefs, we are and told the states to actually pass laws, instructed them to pass laws, refusing families who had religious, certain religious beliefs, mainly Christian religious beliefs, to not be allowed to have children,” Kennedy said during the hearing.

For every 100 children in foster care, only 57 licensed foster homes are available nationwide, according to HHS’s Administration for Children and Families.