Robert Kennedy Jr.

Ronald Bailey | 11.15.2024 5:25 PM

President-elect Donald Trump's nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head up the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Atlanta and suburban Maryland. Why? Because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health are headquartered in those places. As HHS secretary, RFK Jr. would be able to shape the priorities of these agencies.

In fact, the CDC, the FDA, and the NIH have long needed drastic reform. But is putting RFK Jr. in charge of HHS the right way to fix these dysfunctional public health agencies?

First, let's take a quick look at what's wrong with each agency. The timid bureaucrats at the FDA stifle medical innovation to the detriment of patient health. These regulatory shortcomings have prompted calls for abolishing the agency and adopting competitive systems for assuring the safety and efficacy of medical treatments and diagnostics.

The NIH is the world's largest public funder of biomedical and public health research with a budget of $47 billion, most of which is used to support research at universities and academic medical centers. The agency has long been criticized for being way too risk-averse when it comes to choosing which research projects to fund. "The NIH's extramural research is systematically biased in favor of conservative research," concluded a 2022 Emergent Ventures analysis of the agency's research grant process. "The NIH may be hamstringing bioscience progress, despite the huge amount of funds it distributes, because its sheer hegemony steers the entire industry by setting standards for scientific work and priorities."

The CDC, as the federal agency whose main charge is to detect and manage public health responses to infectious diseases, utterly failed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Distracted by fighting "epidemics" of obesity, smoking, and violence, it massively botched its response to an actual epidemic when it struck.

So what does RFK Jr. plan to do with each agency? Like all politicians, RFK Jr. tailors his remarks to his audiences, but here are some of his statements with respect to how he plans to handle these three........

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