RFK Is One of the Greatest Weirdos to Ever Occupy a Position of Power—and His Policy Choices Prove It (2025)

The Department of Health and Human Services, headed incomprehensibly by one of the greatest weirdos ever to occupy a position of power in this country, has surrendered to patent medicines, hot and cold running PFAS, and various strains of hemorrhagic fever. From CNN:

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that 10,000 full-time employees would be cut on top of thousands who had already left and probationary employees currently on leave. He said the changes would make fighting chronic disease the priority and reduce “bureaucratic sprawl.” Kennedy promised that the department would do more with less.

Kennedy said in a social media post that the agency is being “recalibrated to emphasize prevention, not just sick care. ... This is a difficult moment for all of us at HHS. Our hearts go out to those who have lost their jobs,” he wrote. “But the reality is clear: what we’ve been doing isn’t working.”

The entire public health infrastructure is stripped for parts, and all its institutional memory has gone up the spout, and this guy sounds like the assistant manager of a convenience store firing the employee who never got the hang of the Slurpee machine. We are truly in the hands of the madmen now.

“It’s a bloodbath,” one US Food and Drug Administration employee said. “These cuts to agency experts and programs leave our country less safe, less prepared and without the necessary talent and resources to respond to health threats,” Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Biden administration, said Tuesday.

In a post on LinkedIn, former US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said, “The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed. ... If we let down our guard and don’t do a good job reviewing, we’re going to unleash some things that are really dangerous into the population. Unless there’s some super plan, there’s going to be an effect on safety, because it takes whole teams of people to monitor safety of products, and the timetables for product review will probably be delayed.”

I’m not sure what Mr. Secretary would consider a “super plan.” I am very sure that I don’t want to know.

The totality of the cuts was not clear Tuesday, with many workers waiting for emails—or waiting to get into buildings, uncertain whether their badges would work. Even supervisors weren’t sure who was being eliminated, one senior official at the CDC said. Cuts at the CDC slashed divisions that work on workplace health and safety, HIV, injury prevention, reproductive health, smoking and violence prevention, among others. Despite Kennedy’s focus on chronic diseases, CDC employees described broad cuts at the agency’s National Center for Chronic Disease and Health Promotion.

I thought Mr. Secretary’s main target was chronic disease.

The offices at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health that handle Freedom of Information Act requests were also cut. The FDA lost many of its FOIA officers, but a few remained, including some who were working on litigation, according to a source familiar with the circumstances who spoke on the condition that they not be named for fear of reprisal.

Several senior leaders at the CDC were reassigned to other roles, and some were told they would have to relocate. At NIH, Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was also offered reassignment to the Indian Health Service and would have to move to an area such as Alaska, New Mexico, or Minnesota.

Internal exile. Who knew East Germany had so many lessons to teach us?

Of course, as USA Today reports, the reservoir of sympathy from our national legislature remains fathomless.

The former Health and Human Services employee was among a small group of other fired federal workers protesting Tuesday, when he recorded an interaction with Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., telling him “Hi, I was a worker at HHS. I was fired illegally on February 14th. There are many people who are not getting social service programs, especially people with disabilities. Are you going to do anything to stop what’s happening?”

Banks replied, “Uh, you probably deserved it.” Schroeder asked him why, and the lawmaker replied “Because you seem like a clown.”

After the incident, Schroeder told USA TODAY that he found Banks’ comments shocking. “It felt very childish to hear someone in a leadership position whose constituents rely on these programs to say that,” Schroeder said. “I hope a lot of people in his state see the callousness that he demonstrated.”

I just hope they don’t applaud.