{"id":855369,"date":"2025-06-13T22:12:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-14T03:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/13\/kennedy-defending-downsizing-clashes-with-democrats-in-tense-hearings\/"},"modified":"2025-06-13T22:12:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-14T03:12:00","slug":"kennedy-defending-downsizing-clashes-with-democrats-in-tense-hearings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/13\/kennedy-defending-downsizing-clashes-with-democrats-in-tense-hearings\/","title":{"rendered":"Kennedy, defending downsizing, clashes with Democrats in tense hearings"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cI don\u2019t think people should be taking advice, medical advice from me,\u201d the health secretary said.<\/h2>\n
\n\"Secretary
\n\tSecretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears before a Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, May 14, 2025, in Washington. AP Photo\/John McDonnell<\/em>\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBy Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times Service\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

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WASHINGTON \u2014 Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered a defiant defense Wednesday of his drastic overhaul of federal health agencies, insisting to members of Congress that he had \u201cnot fired any working scientists\u201d and was \u201cnot withholding money for lifesaving research\u201d despite evidence to the contrary.<\/p>\n

In back-to-back appearances before House and Senate committees, Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccination, also made clear that he did not think the health secretary should be in the business of making vaccine recommendations. He ducked questions about whether, if he had young children today, they would be inoculated against measles, chickenpox or polio.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI don\u2019t think people should be taking advice, medical advice from me,\u201d the health secretary said.<\/p>\n

After weeks of controversy about his plans for autism research, Kennedy also testified that federally funded studies should focus solely on identifying \u201cenvironmental toxins\u201d \u2014 a term Kennedy\u2019s critics say is code for vaccines.<\/p>\n

Kennedy had come to Capitol Hill, his first appearance there since becoming health secretary, to promote President Donald Trump\u2019s budget for the next fiscal year. But his testimony devolved into a series of fiery exchanges with Democrats, who wanted to talk about the mass layoffs and cuts to research funding he has already imposed.<\/p>\n

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Engineered in part by Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency, the remake of the health department includes cutting 20,000 jobs \u2014 one-fourth of the health workforce. It also collapses entire agencies, including those devoted to mental health and addiction treatment, and emergency preparedness, into a new, ill-defined \u201cAdministration for a Healthy America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Democrats charged that in making the cuts, Kennedy had usurped the power of Congress.<\/p>\n

The health secretary testified that while Trump\u2019s budget cuts would be \u201cpainful,\u201d they were necessary to ease the federal government\u2019s $2 trillion deficit.<\/p>\n

Kennedy\u2019s assertion that he has \u201cnot fired any working scientists\u201d flies in the face of reality. Hundreds of scientists from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration have lost their jobs as part of his plan to overhaul the Department of Health and Human Services.<\/p>\n

Trump has published only the broad outlines of his budget plan, which calls for deep cuts to the NIH and the CDC. In written testimony<\/a> submitted to the committee, Kennedy said the cuts would save money \u201cwithout impacting critical services.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Skip to Main Content Health \u201cI don\u2019t think people should be taking advice, medical advice from me,\u201d the health secretary said. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears before a Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, May 14, 2025, in Washington. AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":855370,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25847,22303],"tags":[7163,10287],"class_list":{"0":"post-855369","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-defending","8":"category-kennedy","9":"tag-defending","10":"tag-kennedy"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/855370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}