RFK Jr. & HHS: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
What this video covers
This is the full main segment from HBO’s Last Week Tonight (season 12, episode 9), in which host John Oliver takes aim at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services during the first months of the second Trump administration. The segment aired in late April 2025, weeks after Kennedy announced a sweeping HHS restructuring.
Oliver’s central argument is that the restructuring — which shrank HHS from roughly 82,000 employees to 62,000 through about 10,000 layoffs plus attrition that would not be backfilled — was carried out recklessly, without a clear understanding of which functions were being cut. He walks through HHS’s sprawling remit — the NIH, FDA, CDC, CMS, and two dozen other divisions covering roughly 28% of federal spending — and argues the cuts will degrade disease surveillance, food safety, research funding, and care programs in ways the public will feel for years.
The segment also folds in criticism of Kennedy’s rhetoric on vaccines and autism. Oliver plays Kennedy’s widely covered April 2025 remarks describing autistic children in stark terms and calls the framing dehumanizing. He further disputes Kennedy’s public statistics — including a claim that half of China’s population has diabetes — and criticizes the appointment of figures like David Geier to roles in autism research. The piece closes, as the show typically does, with an extended comedic set piece.
Key points
- Oliver argues Kennedy announced the HHS downsizing — from about 82,000 staff to 62,000 — without knowing which programs the cuts would hit, likening restructuring rules to “the rules for a bris: it is crucially important to know exactly what you are cutting.”
- As evidence, Oliver plays Kennedy being confronted with a $750,000 University of Michigan adolescent-diabetes grant that was cut — “I didn’t know that,” Kennedy admits — and promising to look into reinstating it.
- The segment features fired HHS workers, including one who oversaw child welfare and assistance programs, warning that eliminated services will lead to needless deaths — testimony Oliver presents as the human cost of the cuts.
- Oliver claims the cuts followed the pattern of the administration’s broader DOGE-led downsizing: fast, indiscriminate, and later partially reversed when critical functions were found to have been eliminated.
- He criticizes Kennedy’s April 2025 autism remarks — in which Kennedy said autistic children would “never pay taxes” or “never play baseball” — as dehumanizing, and argues the administration’s autism research push is compromised by personnel choices.
- Oliver disputes Kennedy’s statistics, including the claim that half of China’s population has diabetes, presenting it as evidence Kennedy is, in his words, “in way over his worm-riddled head.”
- The segment argues every dollar of NIH research returns about $2.56 in economic activity, framing research cuts as fiscally self-defeating as well as medically dangerous.
- Oliver closes by saying “RFK needs to go… and by impeachment if necessary,” arguing Kennedy is unfit to lead the department.