CPAC 2026: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Talks the MAHA Agenda One Year In
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. was greeted by
cheers and ovations as he closed out CPAC 2026. As one of the most
popular Cabinet officials, he offered insight into what a year of
initiatives and programs geared to Make America Great Again and Make
America Healthy Again looked like under Health and Human Services (HHS).
In a very personal reflection, Kennedy spoke about his time in the
Cabinet, particularly in his relationship with President Donald Trump.
Kennedy said:
"Well,
let me just say this: President Trump is exactly the opposite of
everything that I believed him to be. And, you know, I meant, you know, I
basically drank the Kool-Aid that he was this, you know, malignant
narcissist, who didn't read books, and was ill-informed. And then, you
know, now I know exactly the opposite. He's the opposite of a
narcissist. He's an empath."
President Trump is an empath? Mind officially blown.
Kennedy continued:
"You
will see that every time he talks about the Ukraine war, he talks about
the casualties on both sides. You will not hear any Democrat ever talk
about that. And he talks about the Russian kids who are dying. He gets
the reports every week, and they make a huge impression on him about the
death rate of 1,000 kids a day who are dying. But my son, my son fought
in Ukraine. He's the only member of his military unit who survived.
"And
[Trump] understands that these are people's children. And he talks
about that. And then also, he has an encyclopedic, molecular knowledge
on these, very, very eclectic interests: Music, Broadway shows, pro
wrestling, golf, and business. Wall Street knows how everybody made
their money and what deals they made. And he tells stories all the time
about it, and just one after the other. And one time I was, during the
campaign, I was on the airplane with him, and we were sitting across the
table from each other eating McDonald's. We started talking about
Syria. And he got a placemat, and he turned it on its back, and then he
took a Sharpie, and he drew a perfect map of the Middle East. And then
he put the troop strength of every country on every border on that map.
"And
it just, it challenged a lot of the assumptions that I had been told
about. He has, you know, he has this extraordinary depth of knowledge
about what's happening in each one of the agencies. My agency and others
and that he has an instinct for making good choices."
Kennedy then placed Trump in the consequential presidents league, along with his uncle, John F. Kennedy, and Franklin Roosevelt.
"I
think my uncle John Kennedy understood the use of power better than any
president who's seen it. I think Donald Trump understands the use of
power better than probably any president that we've had since Roosevelt,
and maybe in American history."
Those are high compliments from a scion of a family that used to be Democrat royalty.
Then
Special Fellow Mercedes Schlapp asked the Secretary to outline the
successes over the past year at HHS. Here's what Kennedy detailed:
The Food Pyramid
"I
think the food pyramid was really important because for 50 years the
government has been lying to us about food, what food we should be
eating. When I got into office, a week after I got into office, and
Brooke Rollins and I were sworn in on the same day. And it's our
responsibility for our agencies to sign off on that. The dietary
guidelines we got from the Biden administration that they'd been working
on for four years, were 453 pages long.
"And they were written by
industry lobbyists. And they reflected the mercantile impulses that had
put Froot Loops at the top of the food pyramid. Which is not even a
food. And so we flipped the food pyramid. We brought in the best
nutritionists in the country from a dozen universities, medical schools.
And we gave a science-based food pyramid for the first time. We
restored protein."
Loud cheers from the CPAC audience over this.
"Those
dietary guidelines are going to change the dietary culture in this
country in a couple different ways: One is, particularly, USDA gives
huge food subsidies out: 405 million dollars a day: WIC, to Head Start,
to food stamps. and a lot of other programs, and now the food is going
to change here."
Make Military Food Healthy Again
"The
food is changing in our military. Pete Hegseth has brought in this
extraordinary Chef called Robert Irvine, and he's already changed the
food. I'll tell you something. He's changed the food on five of the
biggest bases. By the end of this month, it'll be in 20. So it's all
fresh. Really high quality food."
There were many military folks in the CPAC audience, and they approved of these changes with greater applause and cheers.
"He
brought in Robert Irvine. At the military bases, only a third of the
food was getting eaten because it was so appalling. And the troops were
going out and buying food at McDonald's or fast food places, which is
not cheap food. It was $12 bucks and $14 bucks for a Big Mac meal. He's
now changed diet completely. All the troops are now eating, there's
lines around the block to get into the cafeteria.
"The military budget for food is $18.50 a day per soldier, that's for three meals. He's feeding them all for $10 a day."
Make Home Meals Great Again
"Good
food is actually cheaper if you cook at home. The problem is Americans
need to cook at home, and we have a program now that is teaching this,
because people have forgotten. And that's important not only because
it's important to get food, but also gives you time with your family.
It's a sacred ritual that's been around forever, and we've lost that.
And we have now raised a spiritual malaise in our country. It's a crisis
of loneliness, atomization, of fragmentation. And one of the ways that
we need to bring people back together is for having this day, by
encouraging people to have this daily meal ritual."
Removing Toxins From Baby Food
Kennedy announced the start of testing to remove harmful chemicals, sugars, and preservatives from baby formulas. Kennedy said:
"We've
done a first test in Operation Stork Speed on the baby formula. So
we're gonna have the best information now about baby formula by the end
of this month. For the first time in 30 years, we're revising the
nutrition standards so that we're going to have good nutrition in baby
formula, as close to breast milk as we can get."
Kennedy added, "We've gotten rid of the nine synthetic-based food dyes."
Training Practitioners in Nutrition
You
would think this should be a no-brainer, but the current medical
training standards offer little to no nutrition education to medical
school interns and residents. Kennedy announced that this will change.
"We've
gotten the medical, 54 of the medical schools have now agreed, and many
more are coming on every day, to give 40 hours of nutrition training in
medical school. The testing companies, the MCAT testing companies are
gonna put nutrition on the MCAT for the first time, so the students will
actually want to do it.
"And we have 20 states that have now passed legislation that require nutrition training in continuing medical education."
Making Pharmaceuticals Cheap Again
As
RedState reported on Day 1 of CPAC, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, along with his top team, outlined
how they were working to reduce fraud, transform medicine, and mitigate
costs. Kennedy dovetailed nicely into this.
"We've
done a lot of things, you know, I think one of the most impressive
things that we've done, thanks to Chris Klomp, who is now running the
agency with operations for me. We got through the MFN, the most
favored-nation status, so that we have been paying the highest price for
medicine in the world in this country. We make all the medicine, we pay
for the innovation, and we pay in some cases 10, 13, 15 times what they
pay for the same medication in Europe. It's made in a factory in New
Jersey. And now we're going to pay the lowest prices in the world. And
you can already get those."
"This
week we passed new regulations that require hospitals to post their
pricing. So, we're going to have price transparency, and the insurance
companies. So, we're going to have price transparency. If you go to a
restaurant, you can see what the price is before you order a meal. If
you go to a car dealer and he tells you, you can buy this car, but I'm
not going to tell you what the price is until after you bought it, you
would not buy that car. But that's how every hospital in this country
works. If you're a pregnant woman, you could go nine months making phone
calls every day and not be able to figure out how much they are
charging you, that a hospital is charging your insurance company for
childbirth.
"We're going to have a website now that has the price
of everything on it. So, if you want to get an MRI, it will tell you on
one page what the cost is of that MRI at all of the different concierge
services and medical centers around you.
"I looked at pregnancy
in New York. A mile around Manhattan, there's 30 hospitals. The lowest
cost one was $1,350 for childbirth. The highest cost was $22,000. In
Detroit, the lowest cost was $6,000. The highest was $60,000 for the
same service, the same quality service. The only way you get that price
chaos is if you don't tell people — if there's no market, and you don't
give consumers the ability to shop. This is also going to dramatically
lower the cost of medicine."
Prior Medical Authorization Eliminated
"We've
gotten 80 percent of the insurance companies now to agree to eliminate a
prior authorization in most of their, almost all of their procedures.
Oh, you know, and this is one of the most frustrating things. If you're a
patient, you go to the hospital and the doctor tells you you need a
knee surgery. It takes you six months to find out whether your insurance
company is going to authorize it. Now you will know at the
point-of-care, before you leave that doctor's office, whether or not the
procedure is going to happen."
"Well, the [Great American Recovery Initiative] executive
order basically requires us to revamp the recovery programs in this
country, the federal investment of recovery in this country to make sure
that it works. And, you know, one of the things that I learned from my
own experience with addiction recovery, is addiction is a disease of
isolation. People who have this disease end up in either bathrooms or
jails, institutions, death... alone. They cut off their relationships
with their families, their friends, their community, and isolation
drives addiction. And we have an epidemic of isolation now in our
country. The way, the ultimate way to deal with that is to reconnect
people with community and reconnect them with some kind of spiritual
motivation."
Kennedy once again delved into his own personal and painful history of battling addiction to further elucidate this point.
"And
the 12-step movement, the 12-steps, are designed to induce a spiritual
awakening. It's a movement that's devoid of religion, but it is
intensely focused on spirituality to change who you are. I believe that I
was born an addict, that I'm hardwired to drink and drug myself to
death. And in order to overcome that kind of biological drive, you need a
spiritual fire. And one of the things, one of the unfortunate choices
they made during the Biden administration was to exclude faith-based
recovery programs from federal funding. I had a friend who wrote me this
week, who wrote me, a friend from California, who wrote me about her
son, and she said that he had been thrown out of a recovery program in
California for talking about God. So this is, this has countered
everything that we know about recovery, everything science will tell us
about recovery. And one of the things that we're doing, as a result of
President Trump's order, is we're bringing faith-based recovery back
into recovery."
Kennedy expanded on how the
initiative will also focus on setting up the addicted persons for
long-term gains, rather than short-term successes. He continued:
"The
other thing is that we are transitioning out of outcome-based care.
It's a very fragmented system. So, you go into a detox, you're arrested
on the street or brought in from the street. You go to detox, then you
go to rehab, and then you go to sober housing, and then you get a job.
None of those agencies are talking to each other. So, President Trump
asked us to bring in everybody: the Department of Labor, the Department
of, you know, our department at HHS, the Department of Housing, and to
coordinate so that we can follow the addict throughout this whole
process. So, nobody's responsible for that addict. Everybody's just
checking boxes. And like the rest of the medical system, everybody has
incentive to keep that addict sick. If you're a rehab, you get paid for
28 days. If that addict goes out and drinks drugs again, you get another
bite at the apple. So, every time he goes out and relapses, you make
more money. So, you have no incentive to make that guy healthy. And one
of the things that we're developing now is a way for that rehab to be
responsible for that addict for a long period of time. For example, two
years. So that any time that he relapses, they have to treat him the
next time for free.
"That will provide an incentive, then to maybe
keep him longer the first time, make sure he's in IOP, make sure he's
getting aftercare, and take responsibility for his recovery. Because
they're going to make more money if he recovers than if he doesn't."
Advice to MAHA Parents
There would be no
HHS Secretary Kennedy if not for the MAHA Moms and Dads. Schlapp asked
Kennedy what advice he could give to the MAHA parents who were trying to
raise healthy children. Kennedy gave general responses concerning the
raising of children, like limiting screen time, lots more outdoor time,
and encouraging physical activity.
"I would say, listen, I'm a parent, I have seven kids.
"But,
you know, for me, everybody has their own strategy and every child is
different. There is no cookie cutter for any child. It's one of the
things I've learned as a parent. Each child requires something
different. I think the biggest threats that we're facing now are cell
phones and social media."
Then Kennedy delved deeply
into the specific dangers parents should look out for, like smartphone
use and the radiation that cell phones emit. "Radiation is very, very
bad, and it's very troubling," Kennedy said. He urged parents to never
allow their child to sleep with their cell phone at or near their heads.
Kennedy
gave more insight into state legislation initiatives to limit cell
phone use in schools, and how that legislation was working in Virginia.
"And
we've now... now we have MAHA legislation that we're working to pass in
almost every state. I think probably about 18 states have already
passed it, bell to bell, restrictions on cell phones. And I was in
Loudoun County in Virginia the other day, where they have those
restrictions. Originally the children were up in arms about it. But I
went into the cafeteria and there are 600 kids in there, and they're all
talking to each other. Nobody is looking at their lap. The testing
scores have gone up, the disciplinary problems have gone down. Parents
were there the day that I met, and I pulled them, and they loved it.
They said their child, some of them said their children are no longer
using their cell phones in their car. And they come home and have dinner
with their families, and they're actually talking to them, because
they've learned that they can exist without them."
Kennedy
ended with, "I was not that focused on their food, but if I had to go
back and do it again, I would be laser-focused on what they're eating."
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