Happening Now: RFK Jr. Testifies Before Senate On HHS Budget
What this video covers
The full Senate HELP Committee hearing of May 14, 2025 (streamed by The Hill), at which Kennedy presents the fiscal year 2026 HHS budget request to the committee chaired by Sen. Bill Cassidy. Kennedy lays out the budget and the MAHA agenda in an opening statement — briefly interrupted by protesters — then fields more than two hours of questioning that ranges well beyond the budget, into grant cancellations, HHS staff reductions, the measles outbreak and his vaccine statements.
Key points
- Kennedy presents a budget requesting $94 billion in discretionary funds, built around a new Administration for a Healthy America. He pledges to preserve Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start, to protect Indian Health Service funding, and to “shift funding away from bureaucracy and toward direct impact,” saying HHS intends to “do more, a lot more, with less.”
- Kennedy says the United States “remains the sickest developed nation in the world,” spending $4.5 trillion a year on health care — two to three times more per capita than comparable nations — and that 83 million Americans lack adequate access to primary care physicians. “An exploding debt,” he says, “is a social determinant of health.”
- His stated priorities include consolidating mental health and addiction programs and aggressively combating fentanyl; expanding FDA food safety work to remove harmful chemicals from food and packaging; funding “cutting-edge” NIH research while ending gain-of-function experiments and research based on what he calls radical gender ideologies; returning the CDC to core missions of tracking disease and investigating outbreaks; and eliminating DEI funding.
- Kennedy’s opening statement is interrupted by protesters; Chairman Cassidy orders Capitol Police to remove them and jokes it was a “made-for-C-SPAN moment” before Kennedy resumes.
- Sen. Bernie Sanders opens by quoting Kennedy’s own prepared line that “something is structurally wrong with our approach” — “You’re right” — and invites Kennedy and President Trump to work with him on legislation to cap U.S. drug prices at international levels. Kennedy notes a GLP-1 drug costs $88 in London versus $1,300 in the United States, by his figures, and says he looks forward to working with Sanders on it.
- Sanders charges that the administration has terminated at least $13.5 billion in health care funding, including more than 1,600 research grants; that NIH funding was effectively cut by $2.7 billion (35%) in the first three months of the year, with cancer research slashed 31%; and that Kennedy has undermined vaccines during the largest measles outbreak in 25 years, which Sanders says has passed 1,000 cases with over 125 hospitalizations and three deaths.
- The senator who authored the BOLD Act on Alzheimer’s warns that reductions of roughly 10,000 HHS staff have wiped out the CDC’s healthy aging branch that administers the law’s programs. Kennedy replies that he does not know enough about that program and that the division has been folded into the new department structure.
- Democratic senators press Kennedy on measles, arguing he claims to support the measles vaccine while publicly saying it wanes very quickly, was never fully tested for safety, and contains fetal debris — one senator compares it to urging someone to swim in a lake he has just described as toxic and full of snakes. Kennedy responds that his statements are “all true” and tells the senator, “You do not know what you’re talking about.”