WASHINGTON — In one important sense, President-elect Donald Trump’s provocative decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his health secretary has been unifying: a broad collection of people and interests have found at least one reason to lose sleep over the prospect of Kennedy becoming the nation’s top health official.
That’s because of Kennedy’s eccentric and contrarian worldview, which mixes deep distrust in the regulations and practices of government, science, and big business with a desire to enforce his crusading views with stringent new rules.
The former Democrat and environmental activist might have attracted Democrats with his criticism of corporate conglomerates that push unhealthy processed foods and contribute to chronic diseases — if they weren’t so turned off by his long record of antivaccine stances and embrace of conspiracy theories, such as when he suggested in 2023 that the COVID virus was designed to spare Chinese and Jewish people.
“Trump should find someone to give kids better food who doesn’t give them polio at the same time,” quipped Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat from Newton.
For Republicans, it may be the reverse: Kennedy is a hero to many on the right for rejecting COVID vaccine mandates, but there’s wariness of his hostility toward major businesses. That’s particularly the case with agriculture and food products that are at the heart of the economy in many red states. He has attacked the use of pesticides and industrial meatpacking, and has called for limiting processed food and food dyes. He has accused the American food industry of “mass poisoning” the population.
Senator John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota and a senior agriculture policy maker, said he looks forward to discussing those issues privately with Kennedy.
“I want to talk to him because our farmers and ranchers produce the highest-quality, lowest-cost food supply in the world, and that benefits every single American,” Hoeven said. “He needs to understand the practical realities of making that happen.”
As the top official at HHS, Kennedy would have jurisdiction over a massive bureaucracy with a $2.8 trillion budget for the fiscal year 2024, most of which goes toward funding Medicare and Medicaid. On Tuesday, Trump announced he would nominate Mehmet Oz, who shares Kennedy’s openness to alternative, unproven health treatments, such as the plant-based supplements that the TV doctor has endorsed, to the agency within HHS that administers Medicare and Medicaid.
Kennedy’s focus, however, has largely been on two agencies under the HHS purview: the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.
While the Department of Agriculture has jurisdiction over many of Kennedy’s areas of concern, he could use the FDA for a number of purposes, such as changing nutritional guidelines, proposing new warning labels for consumers, or overhauling the process by which food additives and supplements are deemed safe.
Kennedy’s potential approach reflects both the unusual coalition coming together to support him, as well as the breadth of the one emerging to oppose him.
No matter how they are approaching Kennedy’s views, watchdogs, lawmakers, and the many interests that stand to be affected by his policies are scrambling to unpack the tangled paradox of views embodied in this unlikely Trump lieutenant. Their views on what could result from Kennedy’s tenure will determine how much resistance he faces in a Senate confirmation fight.
“It’s such a grab bag of internally inconsistent ideas,” said Peter Lurie, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit food and drug industry watchdog group that criticizes big food business companies. “To me they seem mutually contradictory, scientifically incoherent, and I don’t have any way to rationalize it, quite honestly.”
Kennedy, for instance, wants to crack down on a number of food additives he argues are dangerous but also end what he calls the FDA’s “suppression” of raw milk, which many health experts say can contain harmful bacteria and is of dubious benefit.
Jeff Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, distilled the clash of ideologies that Kennedy presents.
“On the one hand, he wants to loosen it up and give people more control over health care; on the other hand, he has these more authoritarian ideas that restrict freedom,” Singer said. “So, which is it?”
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
Finding a consistent answer to that question may be elusive, given Kennedy’s track record. An equally important factor is how much latitude he would have to execute his agenda — however uneven — within an administration that could be inclined toward a much different approach on key issues.
On the campaign trail, Trump embraced Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” slogan — reflecting parts of a MAGA movement that increasingly embraces social media-driven wellness trends — and said he’d let Kennedy “go wild” on health care as well as food and drug regulations.
But the president-elect spent his first term implementing policies that are antithetical to Kennedy’s worldview. Featuring a policy team stocked with allies of big food and agriculture companies, the first Trump administration changed a program designed by the Obama administration to get more fruits and vegetables into school lunches , in favor of allowing more pizza, french fries, and pastries.
The FDA under Trump, meanwhile, rejected requests to ban a potentially dangerous chemical in food packaging and said it was “not concerned” about the prevalence of toxic chemicals known as PFAS in the food supply.
Observers question whether Kennedy could even get a team in place aligned with his views, much less overcome what could be stiff opposition to new regulations from both within the agencies and from industries with connections in Trump’s orbit. Kennedy’s past support for access to abortions may also become an issue for social conservatives, who have already launched efforts to roll back the FDA’s rules making abortion medication more available in the wake of the Supreme Court repeal of Roe v Wade.
Some leaders in the pro-Trump health space want to see Kennedy enact aggressive regulations. Representative Anna Paulina Luna, of Florida, posted to X recently a tacit list of possible bans for him, from fluoridated water to food dyes to high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile, liberals such as Colorado Governor Jared Polis hailed Kennedy, saying he will improve Americans’ health by “shaking up HHS and FDA.”
But Kennedy has alienated a broad swath of people, including those who are sympathetic to some of his views. Lurie, a former FDA top official himself, believes in a stricter regulatory process over food additives, which Kennedy says he supports.
“But there’s just so much else in there that is based in conspiratorial thinking, anti-scientific thinking, and just being erratic,” Lurie said. “You can’t entrust the reins of the health care system to someone like that.”
Among boosters of the agriculture industry, meanwhile, there’s equally deep doubt of Kennedy, but for different reasons. Amanda Zaluckyj, an attorney who helps run her family’s soybean and corn farm in Michigan, raised the alarm about what Kennedy’s nomination could mean for farmers in an op-ed in the trade publication AgDaily.
With Kennedy in charge, Zaluckyj wrote, there could be “substantial regulatory disruptions for American agriculture, particularly concerning pesticide use, [genetically modified organisms], and labeling — key areas where Kennedy has voiced strong opposition to the scientific consensus.”
In an interview, Zaluckyj expressed concern about Kennedy’s ability to convince people that his view of “healthy food” is the right one. “He’s a master of using words and phrases to get people to believe where he’s coming from,” she said. “It is scary. I don’t know how much power he will have.”
Among some Trump-supporting GOP lawmakers who might be sympathetic to those arguments, however, there has been a great deal of deference to the president-elect’s preferences.
Representative Kevin Hern, an Oklahoma Republican, operated a number of McDonald’s franchises before coming to Congress. Asked about Kennedy, who recently called McDonald’s food “poison” and criticized Trump’s fondness for fast food, Hern started by saying Trump believes Kennedy will “do a great job in that world.”
“I mean, I spent 35 years with McDonald’s,” Hern said. “Obviously, people are a little nervous everywhere. But I think when you have transparency, the American people want to know what they’re eating, so I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
A recent photo may have best captured the contradictions — and limitations — of a Kennedy reign as health secretary: the health crusader, sitting on Trump’s private plane, smiling as he posed for a photo with his new boss at a table laden with McDonald’s burgers.
Sam Brodey can be reached at sam.brodey@globe.com. Follow him @sambrodey.