RFK Jr. answers questions from Congress about mass layoffs, measles response

WASHINGTON (TNND) — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before two congressional committees on Wednesday about the mass layoffs in the department since he was sworn in on Feb. 13 and his response to the measles outbreak affecting thousands of people.

He appeared before the House Appropriations Committee in the morning and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee in the afternoon.

HHS said in a statement to The Associated Press before the hearing that Kennedy would "share his vision on how HHS’ transformation will improve health outcomes, eliminate redundancies to save the American taxpayer, and streamline operations to improve efficiency and service."

HHS began laying off 10,000 full-time workers in April and consolidated 28 institutes and centers into 15 new divisions.

"We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA," Kennedy said in a video announcing the cuts. "This overhaul will improve the health of the entire nation — to Make America Healthy Again."

The layoffs are in addition to the roughly 10,000 employees who opted to leave once Kennedy took over the agency, bringing the department from 82,000 employees down to about 62,000.

Kennedy criticized the department as an inefficient “sprawling bureaucracy” in the video, adding the department’s $1.7 trillion yearly budget, "has failed to improve the health of Americans."

“I want to promise you now that we’re going to do more with less,” he said.

This was the first time Kennedy testified before Congress since his confirmation hearings in January.

“There’s so much chaos and disorganization in this department,” Kennedy said on Wednesday during the Senate hearing. “What we’re saying is let’s organize in a way that we can quickly adopt and deploy all these opportunities we have to really deliver high-quality health care to the American people.”

He told lawmakers several times that he supports vaccines, but refused to firmly state that vaccines don’t cause autism.

Speaking at a televised cabinet meeting at the White House in April, Kennedy said, "By September we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we'll be able to eliminate those exposures."

His bizarre claims drew backlash after he stated autistic children are severely limited in their capabilities and cannot perform basic tasks.

During the hearing, many eyes and ears were on Kennedy's dialogue with Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, who extracted a number of guarantees from Kennedy about his approach to vaccines. Those included promises to keep the current childhood vaccination schedule, use the current vaccine monitoring system and not remove statements that say vaccines do not cause autism on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.

“I will watch carefully for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of coincidences and anecdote,” Cassidy said earlier this year, after voting in favor of Kennedy's nomination.

Kennedy has since delivered a mixed message on vaccines that public health experts have said are hampering efforts to contain the measles outbreak. He's offered endorsements of vaccinations but continued to raise questions about their efficacy or safety.

Exchanges between Kennedy and lawmakers were tense throughout the hearings. At one point, protesters interrupted shouting "RFK kills people with AIDS," before being escorted out by Capitol police.

Among the protestors was ice cream company Ben & Jerry's co-founder, Ben Cohen. He was one of seven people arrested by Capitol Police after disrupting the Senate hearing.

Cohen was arrested on charges of obstruction.

Editor’s note: The Associated Press contributed to this article.