At a sometimes-contentious U.S. Senate hearing, the Health and Human Services secretary was evasive on the rationale behind cuts being made to the department and his endorsement of the measles vaccine amid a rapidly growing outbreak.
In a hearing to discuss his agency’s 2026 budget before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended the Trump administration’s hefty budget cuts and mass layoffs—while also seemingly refusing to commit to his prior support for the measles vaccine.
“This agency has grown so big, so fast,” Kennedy said in response to questioning from Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ), who pressed the secretary about cuts at the HHS and the affected programs. It was important, Kennedy insisted, “to do decisive action quickly that could eliminate the metastasizing of this agency, which was growing, growing, growing as our health declined,” without offering specifics.
Nevertheless, Kennedy admitted that they went into the restructuring effort “knowing that there would be some mistakes made,” but said that the approach at the time was to “go back and reverse them when they are made.”
“We try to be as careful as we can about what we cut and what we didn’t; we made a couple of mistakes,” he added.
Meanwhile, when he was asked by Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) about the recent measles outbreak, Kennedy seemed to once again sow distrust against vaccination as a preventive practice.
Hassan directly asked Kennedy to “say clearly here today, to any parents who are watching, that the best way to protect their children from measles is to vaccinate them.” But the secretary sidestepped the question, instead saying that the U.S. gets “a measles outbreak every year” and that “we’ve handled this measles outbreak better than any other nation.”
Two children—both unvaccinated—have so far died because of the current measles outbreak in the U.S. These are the first deaths from the disease in more than 20 years, Hassan said during Wednesday’s hearing. Despite his documented history of vaccine skepticism, Kennedy wrote on X in April that “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” But earlier this month, Kennedy appeared to return to his usual rhetoric, asserting that the vaccines contain “fetal debris,” a claim that has been debunked by various experts. At Wednesday’s hearing, he appeared to distance himself from his prior statements, saying that “my opinions about vaccines are irrelevant.”
“I don’t want to make it seem like I’m being evasive,” Kennedy said, without directly answering Wisconsin representative Mark Pocan’s question on whether the secretary would give his child a measles vaccine. “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.”
Former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, speaking at an event by STAT News on Wednesday, took issue with that statement from Kennedy: “He is the leader of health and human services in the United States of America,” which Califf said is the “most powerful” institution in the world for health advocacy, as reported by Endpoints News.
Kennedy, according to Califf, is “flat out wrong” and is actively “doing harm to the American people with what he’s saying.”
